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WHAT: Squirrels
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, May 28-29; 6 p.m. Sunday, May 30
WHERE: True Brew Cafe, 200 Julia St., 835-6002

WHAT: The Zoo Story
WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, May 27-29; 5 p.m. Sunday, May 30
WHERE: Cowpokes Theatre Space, 1030 Marigny St., 984-9924

Menacing drifter Jerry (Blake Balu, right) tires to reach flustered book editor Peter (Michael P. Cahill) in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story at Cowpokes.

In David Mamet’s Squirrels, a writer uses overblown prose to obsess repeatedly, with minor variations, about squirrels in a park. In Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, the conversation of two men in a park is laced with cats, parakeets and a dog before landing in the zoo of the title. Both are one-acts. Both are very early works by men who became towering figures in American theater. And although the tone and cadence of the dialogue in each play are markedly different — Mamet’s catapults forward at a fever pitch, while Albee’s remains more halting and subtle — both might be deemed absurdist. So are the current New Orleans productions of these dramas by two independent theater groups a mere coincidence?

  In fact, yes. Evolving Door Productions is presenting the Mamet play, which dates to around the time of Sexual Perversity in Chicago and precedes American Buffalo (making it one of his earliest efforts), at True Brew Cafe. Drama! is actually putting on an evening of three one-act plays, all set in Central Park, which has been competently recreated at Cowpokes Theater Space by set designer John Grimsley. Accompanying The Zoo Story is Park Stories, a pair of short dramas by new local playwright Ross Gray. As Albee did with The Zoo Story in 1958, and Mamet nearly did in 1974 when Squirrels was written, Gray makes his playwriting debut here.

  In Squirrels, an older writer (Paul Atredies) inhabits a professorial office. On his desk sits a squirrel that holds pencils in its bushy ceramic tail (a perfect touch by scenic designer Joel Davis). He has a bright-eyed, young male assistant (Nicholas Brown) to help him tease out and record the scenarios he invents, all of which boil down to this: There’s a squirrel in a park. A man arrives at the park; the squirrel bites him, and he strangles it.

  As might be expected, the young writer is frustrated with the older writer’s fixation on squirrels, and he tries intermittently to inject fresh material into their oeuvre. They banter away in characteristic Mamet fashion — the sharp, driving rhythms of which are well-executed by the actors — and seemingly accomplish nothing. These two-person scenes are periodically broken up by the entrance of a cleaning lady (Robyn Nolting). In perhaps another jab at male writers, himself included, Mamet seems to have put her in the play mostly to serve as a foil for the men and to add sex; it’s implied that she had an affair with the older writer, and she embarks on one with the younger writer during the course of the play. She also works as a sort of muse; a more inventive scribe than either of the men, they plagiarize some of her ideas.

  We have little clue what drives the cleaning lady, but none of the three characters are really flesh and blood. Mamet, like the writers in his play (but unlike them, very consciously, even in this early phase), is mostly “jerking himself off artistically,” as the cleaning lady comments about the older writer. Mamet pokes fun at writers telling the same story again and again, striving for new ways to express the same old stuff, narrating their lives instead of living them, “rushing to your logical conclusion, searching to be free,” as he says in the play’s closing. The young cast does a credible job with what amounts to little more than a clever exercise from one of the best American playwrights.

  Conversely, The Zoo Story, Albee’s brilliant debut that brought him instant fame, remains a fascinating, and moving, work of art. This successful production, well directed by Luis Q. Barroso (Something Cloudy, Something Clear), stars Michael P. Cahill as the flustered, often indignant book editor Peter, and Blake Balu as the sensitive and menacing drifter, Jerry. Balu convincingly portrays Jerry’s effort to commune with his landlady’s dog because, as his character says, “If you can’t deal with people, you have to deal with something.” Jerry elicits a keen sense of loss when his relationship with the dog dissolves into “feigned indifference”: “We do not love or hurt,” Jerry says, “because we do not try to reach each other.” Jerry does reach Peter, and while the play’s fateful climax is one of the production’s weaker moments — in all fairness, it is very hard to pull off — this is still a fine rendering of a canonical American play. If you haven’t seen it before, consider it part of your theater education, and go.

  Rounding out the evening at Cowpokes are the admirable efforts of first-time dramatist Ross Gray. Duet, with Marinda Woodruff as Sanndi and Veronica Russell as Katherine, is a melodrama about a lesbian couple raising a child. The stronger of the two is Deal, about a hustler and a client navigating a “date” in the park, with Lucas Harms as Kevin, the gigolo, and Luis Q. Barroso as Phil, his elegant, old-money-European john. This piece demonstrates some literary flair. What really turns this client on, we gradually discover, is words and the idea that through them he can re-imagine himself and his lover in any guise he desires. “In beautiful language,” the character sighs, “everything is possible.”

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