Walking into the Merrick Theater reveals a patch of grass and a park bench in the center of the stage. Connor Wahrman ’17 sits on the bench with his legs crossed reading a book and smoking a pipe. He is wearing a nice suit and looks calm. It’s a peaceful scene, but the play that follows is anything but.

“At Home/At the Zoo” was written by Edward Albee in 1959 and later updated in 2004. The original version of the play was performed from Thursday to Sunday at the Merrick Theater and was directed by Raphael Stigliano ’18. It’s a normal day for Peter (Wahrman), a middle-class executive with a family, a cat and two parakeets. Then Jerry (Dan Souza ’19), a poor and lonely stranger to Peter, walks up to him and announces that he’s been to the zoo and has a story to tell about it. Peter is uninterested but, not wanting to outwardly say so, he agrees to talk. Throughout the play, Jerry does most of the talking, going on seemingly unrelated rants while constantly announcing that he has a story to tell about the zoo.

Both Souza and Wahrman played their parts exceptionally well. Jerry’s aggression and intensity played extremely well against Peter’s quiet demeanor. This was evident not only in the tone of voice but down to the smallest things, such as Wahrman’s facial expressions and Souza’s fidgeting with the switches on the walls in the Merrick. In Stigliano’s director’s note, he discusses the idea of looking at the text as “two conflicting worlds, the moment when the outsider meets the interior.” This show plays with the idea of the falseness of theater. The blocking and set design (Riely Allen ’18) helped to characterize this contrast. The park bench, where Peter sits for most of the show, is set on a patch of fake grass. This is Peter’s area: serene and relaxed. This area is the stage and the whole set. For most of the show, Jerry paces around this patch of grass but, until the end of the show, never sets foot on it. While Peter is lost in his world, in the interior, the setting of the show, Jerry is the outsider. Jerry isn’t in the fantasy world. As he plays with the light switches and bangs against the walls, it’s almost as if he’s part of the real world rather than a character in the show. This makes it easy for the audience to see the difference between these two characters. Peter is a man who feels untroubled by his life, while Jerry is constantly wandering, unsure of who he is or where he belongs.

The moment Jerry finally walks onto the grass is when the tone of the show begins to shift. Up until then, I felt like Peter: unsure of why we are listening to Jerry’s ramblings. But as soon as Jerry sits on the park bench, the themes of the show become clearer. When Jerry sits down, the pair begins to fight over who gets to sit on the bench, ultimately ending with Jerry charging into a knife he gave to Peter. As Jerry is dying, he tells Peter that Peter’s an animal too and, while gasping, tells Peter to run away. As Peter tries to get out, desperately banging on the doors and walls in the theatre, it is clear that this is not simply a park. Stigliano ends his director’s note by telling us not to “forget where [we] really are.” Although the park is the meeting of Jerry’s world and Peter’s world, a place where men are animals and where a conversation between two strangers turns into something more, it’s still only a fake bench on a piece of astroturf.

Overall, this piece was put together extremely well. It was amazing how much was packed together in under an hour. Everything from the birds chirping in the background to the blood that splattered everywhere when Jerry was stabbed fit the mood of the play perfectly. “At Home/At the Zoo” managed to make the audience laugh but also proved that everything, even something as simple as a Sunday afternoon in a park, isn’t always as it seems.