The American Dream and The Zoo Story

Written by Edward Albee

Directed by Laurence Thomsen

At the Loeb Experimental Theater

Through July 9

BEFORE Edward Albee wrote that famous sexual shouting match, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, before he was too old to be an Angry Young Play-wright, he wrote two one-act attacks on convention, complacency and middle-class values. Thirty years later, The American Dream and The Zoo Story have lost some of their relevance--and thus some of their power to disturb the complacent viewer. But Albee's disarming absurdity and brutal frankness remain, and thanks to a talented Harvard/Radcliffe Summer Theater company, those qualities can still make audiences squirm in their seats.

The American Dream seems especially dated. It's the story of what is supposed to be a parody of an ideal American couple, circa 1960. Mommy (Holly Cate) spends her days shopping or meeting with her women's auxilliary club, while Daddy (Donal Logue) spends his reading the paper in his easy chair. Mommy wears a bright pink party dress, the kind that domestic ex-prom queens like June Cleaver and Donna Reed wore on TV sitcoms in the 1950s and early 1960s. In fact, TV-sitcom theme songs play in the background to drive home the point of Mommy and Daddy's TV-perfect lifestyle.

It soon becomes clear that this is not the perfect family it appears to be. Mommy and Daddy are upset that they have no children, but they are given to occasional moments of cruelty that would render them unfit to be parents anyway. They also have TV-sized attention spans and short memories. Mommy is catty and shrewish. Daddy is timorous and impotent.

The biggest problem is cantankerous Grandma (Ellen Bledsoe), who resents her infirmity and unwantedness and never misses an opportunity to say so. Even though she is half senile, Grandma is still the most astute character in the play, spouting angry aphorisms like, "We live in the age of deformity."

Because of the anachronisms, Dream's satire hasn't aged well. Mommy and her women's club friend, Mrs. Barker (Caroline Bicks) bear little resemblance to career-minded 1980s women. It's also hard to laugh at a feeble man who calls his dominating wife "Mommy," since President Reagan is still in office.

What does still work is Albee's sense of throwaway absurdity. A good deal of this absurdity appears in the dialogue's intentional inanities, cliches and fragmentary conversations. Some comes from the situation: when Mrs. Barker visits Mommy and Daddy, she removes her dress, as if it were a coat or a hat, and spends the rest of the play in her slip. Why not?

The actors do well with this deadpan satire. Standouts are Cate, whose Mommy is both childishly petulant and sexually aggressive, and Bledsoe, whose delivery punctures Albee's pretensions as well as those of the other characters.

THE Zoo Story is the more accessible play. Its plot is less confusing (though only slighty less so--in both plays, important questions are left unanswered until the final moments). It also has only two characters. Peter (Eric Oleson), a bland, upper middle-class man much like Daddy, reads and smokes a pipe on a park bench. Jerry (Daniel O'Keefe), an alienated, upset man, confronts Peter and tries to communicate with him and draw forth any sign of life from Jerry's passionless existence.

Despite his mental instability, Jerry, like Grandma, seems to speak with Albee's voice, attacking Peter's satisfied docility, moral cowardice and lack of conviction. The passage of time, however, has made Peter (and Daddy) into easy and common targets. It's not surprising these days to see a condemnation of Yuppies, which is what Peter is, 1950s-style. Also outdated are Jerry's use of the word "colored" instead of "Black" and his attempt to shock Peter with a brief and sketchy account of the single homosexual experience of his youth. If Peter stood for the values of the play's original audiences, he does no longer, and the things Jerry says that make him fidget in his seat do not necessarily make us do the same.

Still, Jerry's outbursts are often funny, particularly his 20-minute monologue about his efforts to kill--and later to befriend--his landlady's vicious dog. O'Keefe gives Jerry violent mood swings that make him both scary and funny, perhaps too funny, since Oleson's Peter tends to look more bemused than horrified.

Albee's games with language are his strength, not only because they provide the most laughs, but also because they make a point of the inability of isolated, urban man to touch or communicate with another human being. This point is still relevant, and it is the reason that The American Dream and The Zoo Story are still chilling--and still worth seeing.