Playreaders – Two by Two: Mamet and Albee | St. Paul’s Anglican Church

TWO BY TWO: MAMET AND ALBEE AT PLAYREADERS

November 28 & 29
Tickets go on sale at 6:45,
doors open at 7 p.m. and play starts at 7:30 or when the house is filled.

St. Paul’s Church

Wednesday and Thursday, November 28 and 29, two early two-character plays by David Mamet and Edward Albee will be presented at St Paul’s Church on Calle Cardo. The plays are Mamet´s “Duck Variations” and Albee´s “Zoo Story”.  Both are brief tour de forces, and both, coincidentally, take place on (perhaps the same?) park bench in New York´s Central Park.

The plays feature conversations between two men.  In “The Duck Variations” the men are old.  In “Zoo Story”,  they are around forty, and there—except for some wonderful language– the similarity ends.

Mamet perhaps wins the language nod. Long known as having the most acute ear of all American playwrights, Mamet’s two geezers pass their time in a series of conversations about life, death, the growing pollution of the air and water, and whatever they think of, in profoundly hilarious and misinformed talk: “Nowadays, when the airplanes land, they have to wash off all the gook from the air!”. And no matter what the topic, the ducks they see on the lake somehow enter the conversation, in apt or totally irrelevant ways.

With Albee´s “Zoo Story”, the atmosphere is quite different.  A conventional business type´s reading of his newspaper in the park is interrupted by Jerry, a transient who announces “I’ve just been to the zoo!”, and after that, won´t stop talking and asking questions.  He asks about the conventional man´s life, his family, his goals; he tries desperately to make a connection of some sort.  This was Albee´s first play, and at its first U.S. performance in 1958, it was paired off-Broadway with “Krapp´s Last Tape” by Beckett, and Albee was hailed as the coming new American theater hope.

Fil Farmicola directs, and with Howard Bach, plays in each show.