Playwright: Edward Albee. At: Victory Gardens Theater at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-871-3000; $20-$50. Runs through: Oct. 31
Since its premiere in 1960, scholars, critics and student actors have delved the enigma of Edward Albee's brief, beguiling play describing a chance encounter between two strangers in a parkone, a "square," and the other, a "beat" ( in the parlance of that era ) who carry on a mostly one-sided conversation before one engineers his own death. Now, half a century later, the author presents us with a second piece in the puzzle, and in doing so, pulls the rug out from under decades of textual analysis to irrevocably alter its source for all posterity.
The first act of this revelation, subtitled "Homelife," locates us in the stylishly-drab living room of Peter and Ann on a Sunday afternoon when the serenity of their Noah's Ark lifestyle has finally become so manifest as to require confrontation. Ann laments the loss of passion and spontaneity in their lives, going so far as to conjure violent fantasies bespeaking a longing for extreme experiences reflecting "animal" savagery. Peter replies with an account of a youthful moment when he gave way to his libido, only to be horrified at the brutality engendered by such license. He then goes for a walk to contemplate this discussion, where he meets Jerry, whose squalid circumstances represent everything missing from his own.
What would spur Albee, 50 years after, to explore Peter's backstory? Has age made him more sympathetic of safe players than when he himself was a hungry, angry young artist? Whatever the motive, his "prequel" doesn't tell us much about paranoia-laced malaise in affluent mid-20th-century America that The American Dream or A Delicate Balance didn't, but what it does is to impose yet another subtext onto the subsequent events. The scruffy Jerry is still the aggressor, brandishing the minutiae of his lonely existence, but our empathies are rooted in Peter, whose emotional ambivalence we now recognize.
Director Dennis Zacek recognizes it, too. Though the second-act dialogue is the same as in our first few dozen viewings of The Zoo Story, Marc Grapey has been instructed to play Jerry as a vigorous, big-voiced, almost menacing raconteur, the better to contrast with Tom Amandes' puritanical Peter, whose bemused indifference ( like that of Annabel Armour's sleekly patrician Ann ) we now know to be a façadeinsight generating tension sufficient to certify Albee a playwright as ornery and provocative at age 82 as he was at 30.