It was early October when I saw Peter and Jerry at the Second Stage Theater, and it closes tomorrow. But since the closing itself warranted mention in The New York Times weekend preview e-newsletter Urban Eye, it must not be too late to talk about it.
In 1958, Edward Albee wrote one act about two characters and called it The Zoo Story. Peter is a meekly stuffy upper-crust textbook editor from the Upper East Side. Jerry is a gregariously unsettled urban meanderer. He dwells in one room in a pitiful boarding house on the other side of town.
In 2004, Albee revisited Peter and Jerry. He put his characters, his script and his story into a time machine called Poetic License and went back to write a first scene. It serves as sort of an extended prologue to The Zoo Story. Peter and his wife tiptoe toward each other until they pounce violently on one horrific tidbit from Peter’s past, and then tiptoe away again. Peter retreats to the park to take a bit of buttoned-up refuge in his tightly-wound solitude. And there, he encounters Jerry, who unwinds the stagnant routine on which Peter depends.
I’ve read far more plays than I’ve watched and I think that has lead me to look at theater productions through a watching-from-the-wings sort of lens. I struggle to divorce the delivered dialogue from lines that were first printed in a script. I associate the performance with the writing process before considering the on-stage delivery. Sometimes it’s a challenge just to watch actors act without thinking of them as third-party messengers passing along the playwright’s text.
For this reason, Peter and Jerry was endlessly fascinating to me. There’s nothing I like better than a gimmick of artistic process.
I spent most of Homelife (Act I) either trying to put my finger on Bill Pullman as Peter (he played Lone Star in Space Balls!) or ‘reading’ the lines in my head as they were spoken on stage. Albee wrote a lot of ellipses for Peter’s wife, Ann. She might say something like (I’m making this up): “I’m not drowsy . . . tired . . . but not drowsy.” That sort of line needs punctuation in its delivery, and the actress kept breezing over it. It would become “I’m not drowsy-tired, but not . . . drowsy,” and only when I ran the text across the scrolling marquee in my brain could I work out what that really meant.
Diagramming sentences made the show all the more interesting. That’s how I invest in a performance.
And I was completely committed to Dallas Roberts‘ performance. As Jerry, he pulled off acrobatic stunts, both in his reading and his delivery of Albee’s lines. It takes a lot to distract me, the constant reader, from the text itself, but I’d say he managed.
Peter and Jerry’s conversation in Central Park translates to the twenty-first century; residential trends in Manhattan haven’t changed so much since the 1950s. (Still, Jerry’s living arrangement is a telling reminder that such housing situations still exist, no matter how they’ve been concealed from the modern day eyes of Peter’s set.)
Of course, the structure and Albee’s unconventional composition of the pair of scenes invokes curiosities about what one would be without the other. I felt about Homelife the way Peter seems to feel about life in general. The Zoo Story left me trembling in a cold sweat. My lips fell open, but I couldn’t actually gasp—I was holding my breath.
And now I just wish I could get my hands on a hard copy of the scripts.
