Sydney Reviews

Circumcisional evidence doesn't get anyone off by the foreskin of their teeth in At Home at the Zoo, Edward Albee’s existential exploration expanded from his short play, The Zoo Story.

“We need to talk” says Ann, opening the first act set in the living room of the house she shares with her husband Peter, who holds an executive position with a publishing house that publishes text books, and their two daughters, a couple of cats and a pair of parakeets. Quite a menagerie.

What she wants to talk about is the complacency that has replaced passion. Her loins are that of the lioness, his of the bookworm.

He confides that he thinks his penis has receded, that his foreskin is reclaiming the glans. His lingam lament is self-centred, a soft cock denial of Ann’s desires.

Assault, aspersions and anxiety cause Peter to quit the conversation, retreating with his latest tome to read in peace on a park bench in Central Park East.

Act two of At Home at the Zoo is a straight rendition of the original The Zoo Story, where Peter encounters Jerry, a garrulous interlocutor, a ragamuffin raconteur, a grifter with the gift of the gab.

“I don’t talk to many people ... But every once in a while, I like to talk to somebody really talk, like to get to know somebody, know all about him.” says Jerry, and proceeds to interrogate, prod and wield his own West side stories.

In the lynch pin role, Will Johnston plays Peter across both acts, bookish, bespectacled and beige outfitted, a compartmentalised product of the bland and banal corporate animal, bemused, bothered and bewildered.

Helana Sawires plays Ann, tired of her tied and tethered captivity to conformity, eager to unleash her animal instincts, to regain passion placed on pause. It’s a nicely calibrated performance of loquacious nuance.

Evan Lever completes the triumphant triumvirate in the role of Jerry, powering a powder keg performance balancing sanity and sagacity with bombastic aplomb.

Production values are spare but certain with Thomas Rolls set depicting a domestic comfortability with fine upholstery, well stocked bar and bookshelves of dull and dusty volumes in the first act, transforming to bare basic park benches in the second.

Costumes by Olivia Simpson imbue character and lighting by Jasmin Borsovsky evoke mood and ambience.

Directed by James Litchfield, this production of At Home at the Zoo luxuriates in the intensity of Albee’s ferocious humour, mood and impulse, a plunge into loneliness and aloneness leavened by laughter.

It’s absurd, it is plain, able to leap two stories in a single bound.