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Adapted
by Mattieu Galey
Directed
by Gérard Guillemin
With : Sébastien Boudrot & Jean-Baptiste
Lableigne
Sculpture by Sari Breitburd : during each performance, a work of art will be created directly
in the theatre and offered for sale afterwards.
 The
show was first produced in Paris by Laurent Terzieff and
Michel Lonsdale.
« Zoo Story » is a derisory indictment of a modern society
based on false values and a condemnation of the resulting
complacency, hypocrisy and mediocrity.
The character of Peter represents conformity. Everywhere,
everyone is trying to get hold of « whatever they want »
through cruelty, underhandedness or crime.
Stupidity and pusillanimity rule this small world dominated by
inhibition and repression.
Only the very few, the privileged, have the courage to look
their demons in the eye and fight back with the violence of
despair ; but they are beaten from the start and Jerry chooses
suicide as a form of radical submission.
Edward Albee, when accused of being nihilistic, defeatist and
immoral replies quite simply that his plays portray the world
as he himself sees it.
Albee tells an exemplary tale of hara-kiri and ritual crime in
compact, powerful language. The play makes us share in the
hero’s distress and, like him, see no alternative to desperate
suffering. Over and above the particular clinical case and the
New York hubbub, the audience experiences the futility of each
individually or socially perpetrated bastardised act flung at
the feet of those rooted in society with no motive or power
other than to shame. Jerry’s shocking transition from
cumbersomely polite wild boy to intimidation and mad rage is
taken out on Peter, the self-satisfied bourgeois who harbours
the fear and embarrassment of those born with everything,
giving the Beatnik’s suicide goodness knows what note of
Slavonic despair.
The director, Gérard Guillemin, uses the play to cast a
critical eye over today’s America.
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