On October 22 and 23, the premiere of the production The Zoo Story (Edward Albee) will take place on the stone stage of the Ungelt Theater. David Švehlík and Ondřej Brousek will play the lead roles in the interpretatively challenging play about the isolation of modern man. The director of the production is Jiří Pokorný, for whom this will be his first collaboration with our theater. The artistic director and dramaturg of the production, Pavel Ondruch, elaborates on the choice of title:

“Edward Albee has special meaning for Ungelt. The production of his late text The Marriage Play is one of the most repeated titles in the history of our theatre. (388 reruns, director: L. Smoček, cast: Ch. Poullain and J. Schmitzer). When Albee died in 2016, we renewed our consideration of how to commemorate his work other than with the obligatory hit Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The opportunity arose at the moment when we started looking for text on the body of David Švehlík. We offered him Albee’s groundbreaking first work, Zoo Story. When the play was first performed as a stage reading in the late 1950s, writer Norman Mailer declared it the best briefcase he had ever seen. And history has proven him right. Today, Edward Albee is considered the most important playwright of the modern theater of the 20th century. The play Zoo Story has already been performed on Czech stages in the past, however, we decided to ask Pavel Dominik for a brand new translation.”

JK