THE ZOO STORY by EDWARD ALBEE
On Mondays and Tuesdays, from March 19, 2012, at Beton7

New York. Central Park. A bench.

Sunday afternoon.  An accidental meeting.

Peter: The successful model of the citizen-family man-working man.
Jerry: Lonely, on the fringe of the accepted notions of social structures.

Peter is sitting on a bench, absorbed in his book. Jerry appears. His need to communicate makes him intrude into Peter’s microcosm and later on pulls him deep down into his own occult, dark world.

Their communication swings between understanding and misunderstanding. When it is time for Peter to leave, this delicate balance collapses. So do the walls that divide these two worlds. What is left are two people, totally stripped out of their social faces.  Two animals ready to defend to death their existence.

The Zoo Story is the first play by the American playwright Edward Albee. It was written in 1958 and was completed in only three weeks. It was first played in the Schiller Theater Werkstatt of Western Berlin, in September 1959. In the United States it was presented in 1960, one year after its European debut, in the Provincetown Playhouse, at the same time as Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett.

It’s a one-act play looking into loneliness, social seclusion and the human need for communication, in a world that defines itself through its physical being. It was described as “a punch in the stomach” as it manages to scan the America of dreams and opportunities, human insecurity, the emptiness and despair that people keep behind locked doors, and societies keep behind the “magical image” of television and advertisement.
A “comical drama” with a black sense of humor and suspense, by the master of the contemporary American theatre, Edward Albee.

Direction: Nelly Carras
Translation: Ifigenia Ntoumi
Sound design: Henri Kergomard
Lights: Θωμάς Οικονομάκος
Kinesiology, Stage Wrestling: Θάνος Δερμάτης
Photography: Γιάννης Καλογρίδης

Cast:   
Jerry: George Kafetzopoulos
Peter: Manos Stefanakis
Dates:  19, 20, 26, 27 March & 2, 3, 9, 10 April, 2012
Time: 21.15   
Tickets: 10e