This new production of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo, directed by Drama Desk Award-winner Lila Neugebauer (Signature Plays, The Antipodes), honors Legacy Playwright Edward Albee, who passed away in 2016. In act one, Homelife, we see Peter and his wife Ann in their Upper East Side apartment; in the second act, the classic The Zoo Story, Peter is forever altered by an oddly persistent stranger in Central Park. With jolts of brutality and Albee’s signature dark humor, this seminal play explores both the love and the cruelty that we inflict on each other every day.

Edward Albee first wrote The Zoo Story in 1959, but feeling it could use a little more substance (particularly regarding one of the characters, Peter), decided to add on Homelife as the first act…about fifty years later. The “complete” play, Peter and Jerry, was first performed in 2004, with Homelife as the first act and The Zoo Story as the second. Now known as At Home at the Zoo: Homelife and The Zoo Story, the play is currently housed at Signature Theatre, directed by Lila Neugebauer. While At Home at the Zoo intends to add symmetry and depth to what Albee found previously lacking, the choices of this production make the venerable playwright’s intentions ultimately fall flat. The setting of Homelife — or more appropriately, its lack of setting — is detrimental to the territory that it navigates, that of a seemingly content marriage between Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Ann (Katie Finneran). Peter sits in a green velvet chair, a floor lamp beside him; these serve as the only markers of the home they share in assumed comfort as an upper-middle class, Manhattan family. The stage is white walled with strokes of black, like erratic charcoal sketches, and there are no physical o …Read more