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Is Edward Albee 'at home at the zoo'? You bet he is.

Was there ever a more terrifying opening line, in a play or in life, than “We should talk”?

They are the words with which Edward Albee greeted the world in his first play, “The Zoo Story,” back in 1959. Actually, the words were originally heard in translation, because “The Zoo Story” had its premiere in Berlin. When I once asked Albee whether he understood German, he said, “I understand that it is a language.”

He would. “The Zoo Story,” a one-act about a successful, domesticated man accosted in a park by a man who is neither, introduced not only Albee’s despairing vision of life as an unwinnable war for dominance but also the verbal exuberance that made that vision bearable. All of Albee’s subsequent plays — some three dozen over the course of 50 years, from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to “Three Tall Women” and beyond — proceed from those perpendicular impulses, creating a body of serio-comic emotional linguistic thrillers unmatched in modern theater.

Which brings us to “We should talk,” the first words of “Homelife,” a one-act Albee wrote as a companion and prequel to “The Zoo Story.” First performed on a double bill with the earlier play at Second Stage in 2007, “Homelife” now emerges, in a revival that opened Wednesday night at the Signature Theater, as more than just the other half of an eggshell, jaggedly interlocking. Lila Neugebauer’s terrific production proves it to be an indispensably excellent work in its own right, and a suitable tribute to the playwright, who died in 2016.

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Not that you will ever see “Homelife” by itself. Albee’s estate now requires theaters to perform both plays together, under the leaden portmanteau “Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story.” However monstrous that title may be, its phrasing produces a typically mordant Albee joke. The playwright was nothing if not “at home at the zoo.” Often, the zoo was marriage.

As Albee marriages go, the one in “Homelife,” which opens the bill, is actually rather placid. Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) thinks that he and Ann (Katie Finneran) are having a “smooth voyage on a safe ship,” with two daughters, two cats and two parakeets to distribute the weight evenly. He doesn’t even hear Ann’s gambit: that baleful “We should talk.” But Ann, sniffing her way toward danger, does not give up. Eventually, she tells Peter that their complacency, with its respectful distance and “quiet, orderly” lovemaking, is not all she wants.

“A little madness,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be good?”

Peter, eager to please but getting it all wrong, answers, “How would we go about it?”

Once Peter and Ann finally get talking, often about sex but also about the wider field of wildness they have avoided, disturbing ideas emerge. Ann has been “thinking about thinking about” elective mastectomy. Peter has noticed that his penis “seems to be retreating” in a kind of “reverse circumcision.” The knives are out, but only notionally; the play’s hysterical climax, in which they, their daughters, their cats and their parakeets feast on one another as food, is merely a mutual fantasy.

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The purely verbal danger of “Homelife” becomes real in “The Zoo Story,” whose action (after the intermission) follows almost continuously. Peter, having left his apartment on East 74th Street for an afternoon of reading in the park, is now confronted by a stranger named Jerry, who walks up to his bench and says, “I’ve been to the zoo.” Much of the play consists of Jerry’s vaguely threatening tales of his chaotic life, filled with hostile people, pathetic animals, decrepit rooms, evil thoughts. He is Peter’s fear for himself personified.

We only grasp this because of “Homelife”; when “The Zoo Story” was unmarried to it, Peter, even in Albee’s opinion, was undercharacterized. Now we know how much is at stake not only for Jerry (Paul Sparks) but also for his trapped listener, and we understand the combination of revulsion and envy with which Peter patiently hears Jerry out. Despite a dismissive Brooks Atkinson review in 1960, “The Zoo Story” became an instant classic; still, I would argue that it is deepened immeasurably by Albee’s surgery nearly 50 years later, so cleverly done that it seems to be a restoration rather than an addition. You could even call it a reverse circumcision.

Years of critical brickbats toughened Albee’s already tough hide and taught him to trust only himself. He was notorious for his iron hand with interpreters; his attitude, he often said, was, “Do whatever you want as long as you end up with exactly what I intended.” Perhaps that’s why the 2007 production, directed by Pam MacKinnon but with Albee hovering, felt anxious in all the wrong ways, despite a lovely performance by Bill Pullman as Peter.

The Signature staging by Neugebauer, who also directed the hilarious “Miles for Mary,” has only a ghost to appease; it is much freer and funnier and thus more powerful. Set in a white shoe box covered with scribbles in the style of Cy Twombly — the scenic design is by Andrew Lieberman — it breathes instead of hyperventilates, until its brutal conclusion.

The same is true of the actors: They do not approach the play as an awesome classic but as a living organism. Leonard, who often catches the sound of Albee’s voice, is very good in the difficult role of a man whose avoidance of trouble has left him without the bruises we call a personality. Sparks successfully solves the opposite problem in Jerry, a character with almost too many colors, often verging on purple. (For the 2007 production, Albee cut Jerry’s final aria “from a page to a paragraph.”)

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And Finneran, who appears only in “Homelife,” is spectacular. She has always been witty in quick characterizations; her lascivious barfly in “Promises, Promises” won her a Tony Award for just 10 minutes of stage time. Here she uses that wit, gently but insistently, like a hygienist with a curet, to scrape away the social surface of her marriage. Playing both sides of Ann’s contradictions fully, she produces a detailed portrait of a woman who loves her husband even though he cannot love her the way she thinks she wants.

Some people feel that way about Albee’s plays. It can take years for the noncanonical works, like “Homelife,” to feel lovable. But as happened in 2012 with the Signature’s superb revival of “The Lady From Dubuque,” a two-week flop from 1980, time often proves Albee’s terrors right, and also his small consolations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

JESSE GREEN © 2018 The New York Times

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