Jungle love
Rep to premiere romantic comedy ‘Primating’ at LR zoo.
The Arkansas Repertory Theatre is offering a zoo story, but it’s not Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story.”
It’s the world premiere of “Primating,” a romantic comedy by Jennifer Vanderbes centering on a primatologist whose supposed alpha-male worldview could take a drastic hit as he rubs against a former colleague and two young visitors to his East African research camp.
To help make sure the message — “When it comes to love, the curious behavior of humans can only be matched by the chimpanzees in the surrounding forest” — gets across, the theater is staging the show at the Civitan Pavilion at the Little Rock Zoo. It opens today for the first of three preview performances, and runs, rain or shine, Tuesday-Sunday through Aug. 29.
The production is the result of fortuitous connections between director Ari Edelson and the playwright, also a screenwriter and novelist who often explores stories of women in science, and between Edelson and Will Trice, the Rep’s producing artistic director, who in his former career was a Broadway producer.
“I’ve known Will for years,” Edelson says. “He produced a show I directed — ‘Building the Wall’ [for New World Stages].
“He had been working on this production for a while. Meanwhile, I know the writer, who had contacted me about doing some script work on this.
“I’m always extremely inspired
when someone takes a scientific idea and gives it warmth and humanity,” he adds. “As the child of a scientist, I looked at this and said, ‘Oh, wow, she did it.’”
Vanderbes’ script includes debates over nature vs. nurture, Darwinism and evolution and how they apply to human behavior and relationships — and whether they have parallels to the behavior of apes in the wild.
Douglas Rees says his character, primatologist Desmond Hawkes, “needs a lesson to be taught. He’s a walking ego and id; he has all the bright shiny things. He’s accomplished, learned; his books fly off the shelves at the airport kiosk, and yet he’s a child in many ways — he’s used to getting his own way.
“The plot points conspire to give him a big ol’ slap in the face.” Who provides the slap? “The [other] three of them take turns,” he says.
Kate Goehring plays Eve Goodwin, whose twofold connection to Hawkes goes back for a quarter of a century. “We’re peers,” she explains, “colleagues. But 25 years ago we were also a ‘thing.’”
She describes the professional relationship as they’re being passionately on opposite sides of a central issue, but the play explores the question of whether it’s possible for people and relationships to change and evolve.
The set, the director and the play’s four actors acknowledge, does not have monkey bars. And the play itself involves no monkey business — well, perhaps a little bit of monkey business.
“There’s a little bit of smooching, but it’s not hyper,” explains Talley Gale, who plays Time magazine reporter Jenna Barash.
“There’s an old flame, and maybe a new flame,” adds Joseph Scott Ford, who plays Dana DaForest, a young postdoc who has come to assist Hawkes. (“He’s just as versed in the theory but with an updated perspective on the implication,” Ford explains.)
“In theater, the reporter character is often a bit of a device, the audience’s window” into what’s taking place, Gale says. “She has made her own series of life choices. She’s looking maybe to undermine these evolutionary theories; she’s the odd one out, a super overachiever who’s meant to be in Manhattan — the concrete jungle — not the [actual] jungle.”
The two younger actors have Arkansas backgrounds, though they both headed off to New York to make their stage careers.
Ford is a Little Rock native and a graduate of Little Rock Christian Academy who did not, at least at first, have a goal to become a professional actor.
“I saw shows at the Rep but did not participate,” he says. “I was terrified at the thought of performing.” A high school athlete who, when he got hurt, suddenly had time and a chance for introspection.
“I saw an improv show, and thought, ‘I could do that,’” he recalls.
And Gale, who grew up in Russellville, credits a performing arts scholarship from the North Little Rock-based Thea Foundation for helping launch her career. “It did so much for me,” she says. She’s paying it back — since she got here she has met with foundation founder Paul Leopoulos, who has been recruiting Thea alumni for booster and fundraising efforts.
Edelson agrees that structurally and in some other ways, “Primating” also has parallels to another Albee play — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which he has also directed. In fact, says Goehring, the actors had been discussing those parallels, as well.
For example, both plays involve two couples, one older, one younger, struggling to discover what love means, over the course of a day and an evening, with what Edelson says are “real-world stakes.”
“Primating,” all agree, uses less “ferocious cynicism” than Albee’s classic. It’s undoubtedly a comedy, says Rees, “a war of ideas with words as swords.”
And as rehearsals proceed, the production is developing more of a physical comedy aspect, Edelson says. “It’s going to be a very animated universe to enjoy this play in.
“The comedy and physicality allow what normally might be lofty ideas to become visceral and enjoyable — and bubbly. If this were a cocktail, it would definitely be carbonated.”