EASY READER<\/span>: I\u2019m pretty sure the Arena Stage production of At Home at the Zoo<\/span> is about as good as it could be. Not entirely\u2013the actress who plays Peter\u2019s wife can\u2019t quite get past how obtrusively written<\/span> her dialogue is\u2013but mostly this is as good a production as I can imagine.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also recognizably Albee. He wrote the second act as The Zoo Story<\/span>, his first play. Decades later he wrote the backstory, which serves as Act One. First act is marital overcommunication, which is the same as miscommunication and anticommunication, with lots of male sexual inadequacy and passive-aggressive insistence on precision, and an overall sense that love is committee meetings punctuated by emotional violence. <\/p>\n Second act is\u2026 well, put it this way: My mother got in trouble for reading The Catcher in the Rye<\/span> in school. I was assigned it. It\u2019s entirely possible that The Zoo Story<\/span> would work, emotionally, for someone in the got-in-trouble generation; I\u2019m not sure it can<\/span> work for someone in the assigned-it generation. Its specific forms of rebellion have become predictable. The Zoo Story<\/span> has been assimilated.<\/p>\n Edward Albee is ferocious, and he\u2019s been able to keep his edge\u2013The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy<\/span> is as fierce and challenging as anything I\u2019ve seen, and Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/span> (I\u2019ll see the Arena production next week) is still razor-sharp despite being one of his earlier plays. I\u2019m hugely grateful to Arena for doing an entire series of, I think, every Albee play there is. I\u2019m so excited for the rest of them! This particular play is just not the right place to start with him.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" EASY READER: I\u2019m pretty sure the Arena Stage production of At Home at the Zoo is about as good as it could be. Not entirely\u2013the actress who plays Peter\u2019s wife can\u2019t quite get past how obtrusively written her dialogue is\u2013but mostly this is as good a production as I can imagine. It\u2019s also recognizably Albee. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n