[The following essay contends that in The Zoo Story, Albee is "attacking the fictions which North American society has developed to escape the alienation and discord which he views as modern urban realities. "]

In a Widely Published Article Entitled "What's the Matter with Edward Albee?" Thomas Driver attacks the basic situation of The Zoo Story maintaining that Peter's passive acceptance of Jerry's aggressive behavior is illogical and unrealistic. Driver states that no "sane, average-type person would be a passive spectator in the presence of behavior obviously headed towards destructive violence."¹ In the same article Driver makes a similar criticism of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? arguing the improbability of Nick and Honey's remaining at George and Martha's when the older couple obviously "want only to fight the whole night through."² Driver's criticism of both plays misses a fact which is central to their development and to an understanding of Albee's work in general. Peter remains on the park bench for the same reason that Nick and Honey remain at George and Martha's: he is entertained by story-telling, particularly when the story-teller is very obviously his opposite.

Simple in itself, this fact has complex ramifications when one understands Albee's purpose in writing: basically he is attacking the fictions which North American society has developed to escape the alienation and discord which he views as modern urban realities. In his preface to The American Dream, he states this purpose most succinctly:

The play is an attack against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.³

The use of "fiction" here is not an arbitrary one. What concerns Albee is the vicarious experiencing of life which prevents the individual's real and meaningful communication with others. Such vicarious experience is most often achieved through stories, either in print or on the stage. Driver asks: "Why doesn't Nick … take his young wife and go home?"⁴ The answer also applies to the audience: they would rather watch life than experience it.

Albee's attack on fiction as a substitute for life is developed throughout The Zoo Story in such a way that the audience will come to understand not only Peter's dependence on fiction but its own as well. Albee has acknowledged that it is "one of the responsibilities of playwrights to show people how they are and what their time is like in the hope that perhaps they'll change it."⁵ To achieve this end in The Zoo Story, Albee attempts simultaneously to involve the audience with the stage illusion and to alienate them from it. Regarding the dramatic effect of his plays, Albee has said:

You can teach at the same time as you are engaging. I think perhaps the entire theory of alienation is a little misunderstood by the majority of the people who use the term. Of course, it is not an attempt to alienate the audience but merely an attempt to keep the audience at a sufficient distance so that two things are happening simultaneously, that the audience is being objective about the experience it is having.'⁶

In The Zoo Story, this simultaneous reaction is developed by deliberately frustrating the audience's expectations and thus creating for them a discomfort which is akin to Peter's. This is appropriate in that Peter serves as audience to Jerry's "Zoo Story" on the stage just as the audience does in the theatre.

The discomfort Peter experiences during The Zoo Story results from Jerry's truthful description of his life and his attempts to communicate. Such a life is alien to him for he has escaped the loneliness Jerry describes by accepting the illusions of harmony and happiness that his lifestyle supports. After Jerry describes his landlady, Peter says, "It's so … unthinkable. I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are" (p. 28). Jerry replies, "It's for reading about, isn't it?" (p. 28); later he says "And fact is better left to fiction" (p. 29). This last line is a pithy summation of Jerry's position in the play as well as an ironical comment on Peter's attitude towards reality. The line reiterates Jerry's earlier speech about pornographic playing cards in which he says,

… when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

(p. 27)

Jerry realizes that facts are too often avoided by the use of fiction. His story about his landlady demonstrates his own use of fiction to escape the unpleasant fact of her sexual advances. He explains to Peter how he avoids these advances by convincing her of their contact the day before. The landlady retires giggling "as she believes and relives what never happened" (p. 28). Unfortunately Jerry is unable to employ such fiction to achieve the communication he desperately needs in other relationships. Having lived in "the sickening roominghouses on the West Side of New York" (p. 38), he is aware of the facts about which Peter has only read. When he tries to communicate these facts, however, Peter treats them as fiction, unable to understand or admit situations he has never before had to face. Ironically, Jerry finally communicates with Peter by making another fiction real—the fiction that something happened at the zoo. The something is, of course, Jerry's own death, the real experience substituting for the fantasy in the most painful sense.

The discomfort Peter feels at the conclusion of The Zoo Story results from his realization that he too is an animal in the zoo which Jerry equates with life. Forced to face his complicity in Jerry's death, he must face the shallowness of his life as well. "Dispossessed" (p. 49) of his bench, he is also dispossessed of his illusions about life. Appropriately, the bench has been his reading-place: neither it nor fiction now remain as sanctuary. For the audience a similar discomfort is effected by the play, developed by different means but aiming at the same ends. Basically, it results from the audience's inability to pick a "winner" or "loser" in the play. Discussing the dramatic effect of The Zoo Story, Gerald Nelson echoes Albee's comment about audience alienation when he writes,

A viewer likes the safety of being once removed and yet, at the same time, wants to feel himself imaginatively a part of the action—simultaneously both involved and safe.⁷

Such simultaneous feelings are related to the involvement and objectivity that Albee desires of the audience. Both are achieved in the play by a merging of theatrical conventions and by a shifting of the audience's associations between Peter and Jerry.

Discussing this last point, Nelson suggests that the audience will most probably relate to Peter at the outset of the play, he being the respectable family man who is accosted by an unkempt bohemian. Inherent in Nelson's suggestion is the similarity of Peter's position with that of the audience. Like the audience, Peter desires a vicarious experiencing of life that offers no personal threat. Like the audience, he wants to remain simultaneously involved and safe, a position which he initially feels is possible with Jerry. As the play progresses, however, and Jerry's attacks on Peter become physical as well as verbal, Peter is forced to realize that involvement with Jerry is far from safe; Jerry will not allow him to remain merely a spectator like the audience—he must actively defend himself and the bench which has become a symbol of his world. The audience, of course, comes to realize this as well. Rather than continue to side with Peter, however, the audience will probably relate to Jerry instead, because, as Nelson points out, he is both more interesting than Peter and successful in exposing Peter's superficialities. Peter and the typically middle-class life-style he represents (a wife, two daughters, two parakeets and an apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street) can't compete with Jerry for either dramatic appeal or pathos, Jerry being the "permanent transient" (p. 37), who wants to pray for himself, "the colored queen, the Puerto Rican family, the person in the front room whom I've never seen, the woman who cries deliberately behind her closed door, and the rest of the people in all roominghouses, everywhere" (p. 33). This shift in allegiances between characters becomes important when Jerry dies at the end of the play; respectable Peter has become a murderer while bohemian Jerry has become a martyr to the cause of truth, a truth which reveals the violence submerged beneath Peter's ordered existence as well as the desperation inherent in Jerry's chaotic one. The confusion the audience now feels about the characters forces it to examine them in relation to its own values. The fact that neither Jerry nor Peter can be catagorized as villian or hero reflects the moral confusion which Albee feels is characteristic of twentieth century life. The fact that neither character "wins" or "loses" in the play frustrates the audience's desire for a presentation of a "right" and wrong" atitude towards life. Like The American Dream, The Zoo Story illustrates the fact that appearances are often deceptively fictitious; any initial expectations about the characters are definitely frustrated.

The frustration of expectations is crucial to the objectivity Albee desires of the audience. The set of The Zoo Story which is simply two park benches and "foliage, trees, sky" (p. 11) offers little clue to the dramatic effect desired; such an effect is almost totally dependent upon language. Although the language of The Zoo Story for the most part progresses naturalistically, it is sometimes exaggerated so that it has a distancing effect. "The language that the two characters engage in is… only realistic to the ears of those who are supercilious enough to think they could be so witty."⁸ The sarcasm of many of Jerry's remarks, the rapid banter between Jerry and Peter, Jerry's unnaturally long monologues—all work to remind the audience that it is watching an illusion of life by intermittently interrupting the naturalistic flow of the play. Peter, who describes himself as "normally … uh … reticent" (p. 19) and who says "I don't express myself too well sometimes" (p. 20), prefers superficial dialogue—marked by clichés like "every man wants a son" (p. 16)—to attempts at more penetrating conversation. Jerry's acknowledgement of this often results in the sarcastic mockery which gives the play much of its brittle wit: for example, he uses another cliché—"That's the way the cookie crumbles" (p. 19)—to ridicule Peter's earlier one. Similarly, many of the characters' quick verbal exchanges at the beginning of the play are exaggerated in their-pace and ironic significance to the degree that they become games of "one-upmanship." Both the characters acknowledge this themselves after Jerry asks Peter "Who are your favorite writers? Baudelaire and J. P. Marquand?" (p. 21). Jerry's interruption of Peter's empty reply demonstrates his frustration with this particular game at the same time as it forces Peter to recognize his own insincerity: Peter replies "I …sorry" (p. 21). The extent to which the audience finds the characters' verbal games, as well as Jerry's subsequent monologues, interruptive will naturally depend on its own sensibility as well as on the actors' performance. Hopefully both will facilitate the simultaneous involvement and objectivity that Albee feels is so important to his play.

The importance of language in the play both to involve and distance the audience is directly related to Albee's attack on fiction. Language is, of course, the chief means of story-telling. That Jerry attempts to communicate with Peter by telling stories is one of the reasons he fails. Although he states his purpose is to "really talk" (p. 17), Jerry confronts Peter with lengthy stories of his encounters, stories that hinder rather than help dialogue; the short personal questions he intersperses between these stories have the same effect, which Peter acknowledges when he says, "… you don't really carry on a conversation; you just ask questions" (p. 19). More important, however, Jerry's stories work to remind the audience of the stage illusion at the same time as they distance Peter. Thus the stories resemble the monologues of Brechtian Epic Theatre, providing the audience with the objectivity that allows it to criticize "from a social point of view."⁹ This is directly in keeping with the "teaching" purpose Albee has acknowledged in his writing. Unlike the audience, however, Peter is unable to learn from Jerry's words. At the end of Jerry's monologue about his landlady's dog, he says, "I …I don't understand what… I don't think I… Why did you tell me this?" (p. 36). His response is maddening to Jerry because it is exactly the opposite of what he desires. What Jerry has failed to realize is that his use of words has added to his isolation rather than alleviated it. Arthur Oberg points out that Jerry is similar to all of Albee's protagonists in his reliance on words: "… unable to 'relate' … (they) look to language to forge whatever identity and relationships their lives have lacked."¹⁰ "Dialogue, never adequate, attempts to surround what it would control, seeking victory in its copia and in an intensity which is related to this abundance."¹¹

Jerry's abundance of words in creating his stories has the ironic effect of adding to his isolation from others. It also has the effect of isolating the audience from the play. In both cases, the implication is that words—the chief mode of fiction—are inadequate in communicating real experience. Jerry finally communicates with Peter not through language and stories but through sheer physical contact. The devaluation of words inherent in this fact is one of the reasons that The Zoo Story is discussed as Theatre of the Absurd. Jerry's abundance of words can be considered an exaggeration or magnification of human folly similar to the over-and under-reactions of the characters in The American Dream or The Sandbox. That the play incorporates conventions of Absurd Theatre within a naturalistic framework has prompted critics such as Driver to accuse Albee of confused and self-conscious writing. The error here lies in the critics' failure to understand the play's attempt to expose the use of fiction as a substitute for real experience. Albee's combining of theatrical techniques deliberately emphasizes the dramatic illusion and forces the audience to realize its own vicarious use of fiction. In The Zoo Story, the integration of form and content cleverly makes the play a teaching experience.

Notes

¹In The Modern American Theatre, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, Englewood Cliffs, 1967, p. 81.

²Driver, p. 99.

³The American Dream and The Zoo Story, New York, no date, p. 54.

⁴Driver, p. 99.

⁵Edward Albee, "John Gielgud and Edward Albee talk About the Theatre," Atlantic, 215, April, 1965, p. 65.

⁶Edward Albee, "An Interview with Edward Albee," in The American Theatre Today, ed. Alan S. Driver, New York, 1967, p. 119.

⁷"Edward Albee and his well-made plays," Tri-Quarterly, V, Spring, 1967, p. 185.

⁸Thomas B. Markus, "Tiny Alice and Tragic Catharsis," ETJ 17, March, 1965, p. 226.

⁹Bertolt Brecht, "Street Scene," in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 91.

¹⁰"Edward Albee: His Language and Imagination," Prairie Schooner, Spring, 1966, p. 143.

¹¹Oberg, p. 143.