The Zoo Story | The Power of Albee's Dialogue
The following essay praises the power of Albee's dialogue and the class discord that it illustrates. Coy also addresses the religious imagery in Albee'splay.
There is very little action in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story: two men meet, they exchange information, and one dies at the hand of the other. But to a framework of action which any writer might have imagined, Albee brings a master's sense of the ways in which, psychologically, some people are able to dominate and manipulate others, and a frankness and grotesqueness of language which are startling even now, almost forty years after the play's premiere.
Albee opens with an impressive display. Peter, the quiet, insular, middle-class publisher, is reading a book on "his" bench...
[The entire page is 1990 words long]
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