The Hairy Ape is considered a key work in modernist drama, so it is only natural that alienation be its key theme. The alienation of the modern individual was a large concern of modernist art in general, which felt that industrialization and capitalist culture played big roles in cultivating such alienation.
The protagonist , Yank, is the ultimate alienated modern person. Firstly, he is regarded with the same value as a piston in a machine. He is rather unthinking and is only of value to the existing power structure as long as he can do his job. He is not considered lovable and of much worth for who he is. The rich young Mildred is the first to expose this reality to Yank when she calls him a "filthy beast" in fright and faints at the sight of him. The people who own the ship, therefore, do not see him...
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as integral to its running . . . in fact, they don't seem even aware people like him exist. This strikes a blow against his sense of meaning in life.
Much of the play has Yank trying to connect with other people in Manhattan and find a place where he feels he belongs, but to no avail. The rich do not accept him as one might expect with his low class and poor manners, but neither does the working class trying to organize itself through peaceful, civilized methods rather than violence and revolution. By the end, Yank assumes he must be no more than an animal, but even an ape in the zoo rejects him, killing him when he opens its cage.
This turn of events suggests much about modern man, too knowledgeable of his alienation to live as an animal does, yet treated as insignificant by the power structures of modern civilization. Yank has no chance of ever confronting Mildred or toppling the upper classes. He has been shown that he is a cog in a machine and a replaceable one at that. This makes him feel less like an individual whose life has meaning, and this is primarily what makes him feel so alienated.
Yank is the protagonist in the play who experiences alienation from the others in the stokehold and from the rejection of the upper class. Yank feels he is better than the other men who are stokers, and as such, he sets himself apart from them. When Mildred enters Yank's world, however, she shows Yank what he truly is, a lower-class unevolved individual who doesn't belong in his lower-class world or Mildred's world of wealth. The scene on Fifth Avenue shows how the upper class rejects Yank by ignoring him. He's not even important enough for them to even bother with him. Yank's alienation is reinforced at the IWW office and shows him he doesn't belong anywhere. Yank searches in vain for his identity and even looks for acceptance in the animal world, but even the animals won't accept him, and he's then killed by the gorilla. Yank's fate cannot be changed because he's a product of his environment. He has no identity and belongs to no group.