Edward Albee’s Zoo is Still a Great Story.

By Patrick Hurley

Deaf West Theatre is presenting Edward Albee’s at Home at the Zoo at the Wallis Annenberg, now through March 26, and the amalgamation of Deaf West’s duality in casting combined with Albee’s masterful focus on language creates a disparity with more returns than diminishes. The play, which consists of two of Albee’s short plays, The Zoo Story, written in 1958, and Homelife, it’s prequel, written in 2004, deals with themes of isolation, dissatisfaction, and the essential loneliness of being human, a bittersweet and ultimately tragic journey, as seen through the eyes of an everyman who is being confronted by an unsatisfied wife and a volatile stranger, both of whom challenge his routine, thwart his sense of stasis, and alter his entire universe through Albee’s bleak, often hilarious, but always effective language.