Who's Afraid of the big bad wolves at the zoo

By Josh Malbin

LIZ OLINER/YH Zak Cushing, BK'00 and J.J. Lind, SM'98, cavort and converse in Albee's 'The Zoo Story.'

Animal-people greet the audience members as they enter the theater and cavort around the actors amalgamating bits of music and spoken quotes, most of which the audience should recognize. The backdrop to the set is a stylized skyline made of fake fur. These elements, according to Smart, are meant to convey the feeling of Central Park, the setting of the play. Ordinarily, The Zoo Story is presented very starkly with a set consisting of little more than two actors, a bench, and perhaps a backdrop representing a city skyline. But Smart and his cast wanted the viewers to feel as though they too were in Central Park, putatively a natural setting but surrounded by man-made artifacts.

The setting relates integrally to The Zoo Story's central theme: people trapped by convention, fearing the animal part of themselves. Peter (Cushing), a slightly deranged drifter, approaches Jerry (Lind), a textbook publisher, by a park bench and engages him in conversation for an hour and a half. It's kind of like My Dinner with André meets The Fly. Over the course of their conversation, Peter reveals to Jerry the beauty and horror of the everyday and the way in which conflicts between the animal and the artificial are played out constantly in everyday relations and activities.

To Cushing, the revolution in American theater that The Zoo Story represents is exactly what it achieves as a work of art--the embodiment of grand emotions and themes in an everyday context. But the director and cast are right; it is easy to be swept up in the emotion of the play and in the momentum of the story without reflecting on its implications. This is partially because so much of the storyline depends on carefully modulated tension between Jerry and Peter, tension which Cushing and Lind vary and manipulate with remarkable skill.

Smart revealed that his inspiration for doing the play came from a homeless woman whom he had worked with on another production. "I realized how much I was like Jerry," he said, "how much we are all, particularly at Yale, like Jerry." That is, we are able to absorb the message of The Zoo Story, even if it may not come from the production per se, and then say, "That's enough, that's very nice, but I have to be getting home now."

Especially with a play as famous as The Zoo Story, the director and cast have a right to worry. Smart and his actors try to break through the temptation to settle for superficial appreciation of the play by using direct confrontation to communicate with the audience. The space in the Silliman Dramatic Attic is small, and Cushing deliberately and repeatedly makes eye contact with audience members just a few feet away from him. The lighting often shifts during the play, highlighting only the actors' bodies or faces. If all this--the lighting, the music, the animals, the backdrop--seems a bit heavyhanded, it's meant to be. The audience is supposed to think, to wonder, about the interpretation of the play Smart and his cast offer, with the hope that by thinking about it, they may come to understand how it affects them and how it is manipulating them.

There are sacrifices made by this focus on thematics. The hyperdramatic lighting and the intrusion of animals serve to make the setting and the characters less particular and more representational than they might otherwise be. When the play is staged in a more interior, reflective space, some of the drama of the confrontation between Jerry and Peter is lost.

It must be emphasized once again, however, that this is a conscious risk the director and cast are taking to give fresh life to a piece which might otherwise be reduced to nothing more than a moribund set piece of the American dramatic canon.

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