It’s a big final day of theatre on the campus at Marquette today. One of two shows closing today is on a tiny stage in the engineering building. Matt Wickey and Harry Loeffler-Bell star in a production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story Visualization Lab (MARVL) in the Engineering Building.
The Visualization Lab is using three screens to create kind of a video diorama. The drama takes place in central park. A video background meant to resemble a secluded area of central park is projected onto the three screens that face the stage. I had the good fortune to find a seat right at the front of the tiny studio theatre-sized space that allowed all three of the screens to fill my complete field of vision. It’s a unique kind of immersion. Okay, the video backdrop isn’t exactly high resolution. I chuckled a bit realizing that the background reminded me a of a first-person-shooter cabinet arcade game from the late ‘90s. Waiting there for the show to start, I imagined low-res digital targets popping-up from behind some of the trees to shoot at me and a disembodied voice telling prompting me to reload in a very urgent tone. Once the drama filtered its way into the stage, the background faded into the back where it belonged.
Decisions had evidently been made to turn the background a bit surreal as things fall apart at the end of the drama. That detracted from the experience a little bit for me, but on the whole it was a very fun and novel experience with one of my favorite dramas. The drama continues to be one of my favorites as presented here. Director Grace DeWolffe directed the play, which features Matt Wickey as an upper middle-class gentleman who is reading a book on a park bench and Harry Loeffler-Bell as a man who has come to accost him.
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The script is tantalizingly ambiguous on a number of different details. Albee leaves quite a bit open to interpretation. Loeffler-Bell’s character can come across as being quite vicious and malevolent. DeWolffe and Loeffler-Bell have worked to give the character a deeply sympathetic treatment here. One or two of the previous stagings I’ve seen of this have played the character much more malevolently throughout the drama, which makes for an altogether less comfortable experience. Loeffler-Bell’s take on the character seems to be genuinely looking for a genuine interaction with someone--one that is completely honest and open. We sympathize with him because we’re all just trying to communicate with the rest of the world. That’s all any of us really want, right? More importantly than that, Loeffler-Bell shows remarkable talent for delivering stories onstage. So we feel for him. We readily identify with the guy who had been racing the book on the bench.
Matt Wickey puts in quite a sensitive performance as the upper-middle class guy who finds himself dealing with unwanted company. Albee doesn’t give the character much to do beyond acting as a reaction to the stories the other character tells him. Wickey breathes quite a bit of life into the character. Even the vaguest utterance of a couple of words here and there seem to have quite a bit of reality behind them. Wickey does a really good job of selling this character personal background without having a whole lot of time to render it.
There’s a kind of a slow and subtle transformation that goes on over the course of the play. It’s a hard floor beneath the park bench, so the visual of the park isn’t completely convincing. The atmospheric sound of a park breathes in through the sound system, adding to the lighting and the video suggestion of trees that wraps the background and it’s actually a pleasantly immersive experience. Kind of strange to find myself walking out into a cold and rainy spring Friday evening after being immersed in a pleasantly representational Sunday afternoon at the park in the engineering building.
I kind of wish I could got to the show on its final performance. The play happens to be set on a Sunday afternoon. The production’s brief, one-weekend manifestation ends on a Sunday afternoon. THIS afternoon to be precise.
Marquette’s production of Zoo Story has one more performance: today at 1:30 pm. The last performance also has the distinction of actually taking place on a Sunday afternoon, which is when the play is set. (Weird.) Sadly, however, the Sunday show is sold out. This is the big, final day for Marquette theatre as the school’s production of Hamlet also closes today.
