The Zoo Story (2016)

This one-act Edward Albee's first play concerns two characters, Peter and Jerry, who meet on a park bench in New York City's Central Park in 1958. Peter is a wealthy publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets. Jerry is an isolated and disheartened man, desperate to have a meaningful conversation with another human being. He intrudes on Peter's peaceful state by interrogating him and forcing him to listen to stories about his life, and the reason behind his visit to the zoo. As Edward Albee introduces elements of the European Theatre of the Absurd to the American dramaturgy through this play combined with existential drama due to the profoundness and sharpness of his unique writing, Jerry's lack of ability for any relationship with any human also expresses issues such as power games of the inhuman life he is experiencing in the zoo of the daily routine of his being. The film is a TV adaptation of the theatrical production of THEAMA (the first and internationally acclaimed Greek inclusive theatre company composed by both disabled and non-disabled actors) staged in 2014 in Athens with Michalis Tamboukas as Jerry. The park bench (where Peter meets Jerry) was theatrically 'transcribed' in the wheelchair used by Panos Zournatzidis, the excellent actor who played Peter, and the production was noted as a critically acclaimed performance, brilliantly adapted and directed by Vassilis Oikonomou. After the performances in Athens, the production continued on tour in other cities of Greece with a fine cast which also included Christina Toumba, Giorgos Iliakis, Maria Mourelatou, Efi Toumba, Aimiliani Avraam, Marina Besiri and himself in roles of persons that come from Jerry's narration, and in their way of existing in his state of being, they get life on stage, some of them in animal figures.