The captivating performances of the actors kept the audience fully engaged for around an hour as an Urdu adaptation of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story was staged at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) on Wednesday evening.
The play was part of offering of the Napa Repertory Festival that will end on May 22. An absurd play, The Zoo Story is based only on two characters and one scene, which starts with one of the characters, Peter, played by Zubair Baloch, reading a book on a bench at a lonely place when the other character, Jerry, played by Syed Arsalan, enters.
Whereas Peter belongs to a respectable class and has a wife, two daughters and some pets, Jerry is a destitute who lives in a one-room apartment with a eunuch as his neighbour. As the play begins, Jerry tries to spark a conversation with Peter who initially tries to ignore him but eventually gets lured by Jerry into his interesting takes on things and his tragic personal story.
The motif of zoo repeatedly appears throughout their conversation as Jerry tells Peter he has been to the zoo, which interests the latter in a strange manner as he is keen on knowing what happened to Jerry in the zoo.
Perhaps the zoo is an ironic symbol for human society and Peter, who has seemingly been brought up in a protected environment, is curious to know what the so-called human beings did to Jerry who was abandoned by his parents in the childhood.
A character that is repeatedly referred to by Jerry is the dog of his landlady. Jerry tells Peter he hated that dog but once he tried to befriend him and started giving him food. However, the dog did not become friendly to him, prompting him to try to kill him with poison. But as the attempt to befriend the canine failed, so did the attempt to kill him.
While describing the dog, Jerry impersonates the animal, running savagely around and howling. The actor pulled off the impersonation so well that at one point, the audience began clapping.
The play ended on an absurd note as the substance of the ending was tragic but its essence quite comic. Both the actors performed well but since the character of Jerry had more dialogues and movement than Peter who had to sit on the bench through most of the play, the audience was more impressed by Arsalan’s portrayal of Jerry.
The play was adapted for the Pakistani audience into Urdu by Babar Ali who also directed it. With just one scene and nothing on the stage except for a bench and a book, the direction must not have been challenging. However, if extracting good performances from the actors is any indicator of good direction, the play was directed well.
The Zoo Story will also be staged today (Thursday). On Friday and Saturday, the repertory festival at Napa will offer Dastangoi featuring some of its most prominent alumni, Meesam Naqvi, Nazrul Hasan and Fawad Khan.
