Last night, we had tickets for Edward Albee’s Peter and Jerry at ACT, which, by the time it went up, was called At Home at the Zoo. The Zoo Story is a two-hand one-act written in 1958. Albee just wrote a prequel (Homelife) about Peter’s time at home.
Homelife is completely new, but felt oddly dated. Ann is not a creature of the 1950s, but her relationship with Peter seems to be. I couldn’t quite follow Peter’s disengagement with the family, nor could I really believe that they had been married for over a decade.
The Zoo Story was slightly rewritten to move it from 1954 to the present, which mostly worked for me, but not for the person I was watching with. They changed a reference to J.P. Marquand to Stephen King, and Jerry’s salary to account for inflation. But some aspects of the script lend themselves less to quick superficial repair. I was very shocked both by the physical contact with a crazed stranger in the park and by the ending. Talking to a stranger in the park, sure, but any sort of touching I think would be a much bigger deal than it is presented as. (and Peter is not the kind of man who touches easily) I think they wouldn’t have been quite so shocking in 1958 for a generation that grew up in both a smaller America and fighting in (or influenced by) World War II (but I could be wrong on that).
As a playwright, I always wonder what to do about pieces that exist in multiple real versions, either because there have been significant revisions after a production, or because, for one of my plays, a short story evolved into a one-act, then a screenplay, then a play. Does the last one become the canonical version? What kind of loyalty is owed to the versions that came before? Albee notes that it’s his play to do with what he likes, which, of course, is true. But what does the 50 years of production history mean? When was this play written? 1958? 2003?
I think it has to be both, and this play will be eternally footnoted: even the rewriting and reframing doesn’t change the play’s roots.
“When playwrights get together we don’t talk about our
craft. We talk about food, and sex, and who is betraying us … and
who we can betray.” (at a talk in Boston in 2007)
“If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.”
(thanks to Michael Paller’s play notes from the ACT program)
Playwright in the Second Row 
I felt pretty jolted by the whole discontinuity: I left feeling that it would have been better to leave it as a period piece in the place and time it was written, rather than trying half-heartedly to update it. Sure, they kicked up Peter’s salary from $18k to $200k, but that only emphasizes how having Jerry live in a boarding house on the Upper West Side doesn’t work any more. It felt like one’s dad listening to rap music and trying to like it, asking “What’s this? It’s got a good beat!” in a desperately unhip way. There’s no shame in a piece being rooted in a particular place and time.
Alejandro Morales saw the production at Second Stage. He makes a similar point about the discontinuity at the geography of New York. That didn’t hit me as much; my New York landmarks aren’t nearly detailed enough.
On the other hand, he thought the gay subtext was missing in the new version, but I thought this production kept it firmly in place, though left it oddly unresolved.