Opinion, 'The Zoo Story': Two Men On A Bench

Once again there's theatrical life at Amagansett's Stephen Talkhouse. Since Glyde Hart's Dark Horse Productions moved to Guild Hall, and Ms. Hart herself departed for the Midwest, the little nightclub has been strictly for music.

Last weekend, however, the New York-based Silk Road Theatre Company opened its first local production on the Talkhouse's tiny stage. Felicitously, they chose a claustrophobic two-character play requiring a set no larger than a park bench: Edward Albee's "The Zoo Story."

The playwright's first dramatic work, produced in 1958 in Germany before making its Manhattan debut on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," it is a theatrical tour de force.

Beat Generation Stunner

One of the Beat Generation-style shockers designed, in part, to offend the middle class (‚pater la bourgeoisie, as Baudelaire might have put it). It did just that.

Albee's 1958 shocker, de signed to offend the middle class.

Actually, Baudelaire is mentioned in the play as a heroic iconoclast on the order of the late Allen Ginsberg, pitted against the conservative J.P. Marquand, novelist of the Old Guard.

Peter (Doug Mancheski) has gotten to the bench first, and thinks of it as his bench. A textbook publisher, he comes every Sunday to this remote part of Central Park to read and get away from the demands of his family: a wife, two little girls, two cats, and two parakeets.

Confrontation

He's a sitting duck for Jerry (Michael T. Ringer), a hot-dog-munching, disaffected youth with no regard for Peter's turf. Before he knows it, Jerry's moving in on his bench and telling him far more than is truly palatable about his deeply skewed life.

While Peter conducts a typical upper-middle-class existence on the Upper East Side, Jerry occupies a "laughably small room" in a West Side rooming house he shares with a "colored queen," a Puerto Rican family, a weeping old woman, and his nasty landlady and her snarling black dog with the bloodshot eyes.

Like a panhandler who plucks your sleeve and shouts obscenities as you flee down the subway stairs, Jerry won't leave Peter alone until he has engaged him in the kind of violent confrontation that allows him to feel like a member of the human race.

Comic Improbability

"Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of your way in order to come back correctly," he says, but his detour is so extreme it can only end in catastrophe.

"The Zoo Story" is very funny. The two men and the bench: it's a setup full of tension and comic improbability that builds to its climax as though a berserk mouse were toying with a stodgy, middle-aged cat.

Produced and directed by Laura Pierce, a founding member of City Theatre Festival, where she served in many capacities, the play, unfortunately, did not quite work on Saturday, opening night.

Though enlivened by many good comic bits and by Mr. Ringer's generally fine performance as Jerry, the production lacked the sense of deepening menace needed to draw us into the characters' fatally conflicting agendas.

As played by Mr. Mancheski in a flickering performance that went in and out of focus, Peter did not feel real enough for us to understand, or care about, his fight for the bench.

Amusing and appealing during his lighter moments, he seemed checked-out when it came to a confrontation. In the battle of the dharma bum versus the businessman, his businessman didn't land many punches.

Comedy? Not

Mr. Ringer's more flamboyant Jerry was more interesting. It's much the livelier role, but he, too, failed to inject a note of menace early enough in the evening to create the necessary tension between the two.

Perhaps Ms. Pierce's direction could have been tougher. This is a funny play, but a drawing-room comedy it's not.

At any rate, it's good to have theater back at the Talkhouse. Welcome, Silk Road Theatre Company, and please come again.