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PETER AND JERRY. Act I: Homelife. Act II: The Zoo Story. By Edward Albee. Directed by Pam MacKinnon. Hartford Stage Company, Connecticut. 28 May 2004.
The world premiere of Homelife, a new one-act commissioned as a prequel to The Zoo Story, provided a gala event to close the fortieth season of the Hartford Stage Company, where Albee is the most frequently produced playwright after Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. In program notes, Albee revealed that he remains "quite happy" with The Zoo Story but welcomed this opportunity to flesh out the character of Peter, as a corrective to the "minor flaw" that, in the 1959 piece, Peter's character was rather "sketchily drawn" and the audience was limited to Jerry's view of him. While either act could be performed alone, the two together under the title Peter and Jerry created a full-length evening of theatre that was more subtle and provocative than either piece in isolation.
Two minor changes to the text of The Zoo Story allowed both plays to be set in the present. Peter reported his salary as around $200,000 (instead of $60,000) and Jerry referred to one of the residents of his boarding house as "black" rather than "colored." Otherwise, The Zoo Story remained unaltered.
Homelife takes place in the spacious, modernist living room of the upper West Side home Peter shares with his wife Ann, their two daughters, the cats, and the parakeets. As rendered by set designer Jeff Cowie, this was a tasteful but bland space in neutral...