[The following essay examines The Zoo Story and concludes that it "is not a homosexual play, not an Absurd play, and not a religious play, but it is a moral play. "]

Technically, The Zoo Story was the most audacious play to be successful since Waiting for Godot. Though neither Beckett, at forty, nor Albee, at thirty, was making his first attempt at playwriting, in both cases the play was the first of their works to be produced. This probably helped them find the courage to take the risks they did.

Before I wrote The Zoo Story, I didn't know how one wrote a play; before I saw rehearsals of The Zoo Story, I didn't know how a play was rehearsed.

There was no question for Albee of making concessions to the medium, of doubting whether a narrative about off-stage action was too long to be wedged into the dialogue, or whether he had created sufficient theatrical tension to carry him through a passage where a protagonist was doing nothing more than speaking the thoughts in his mind. Albee was a natural playwright whose inherent confidence saved him from balking at formidable technical problems and whose instincts carried him—with a superb appearance of effortlessness—to perfectly viable solutions.

Like Beckett, Albee dispensed almost completely with action in the accepted theatrical sense. The Zoo Story culminates in an act which is as violent as the climax of any melo-drama, but there is scarcely any physical action in the conversation that leads up to it, and whereas the action of Waiting for Godot depends on relationships between Vladimir and Estragon, between Pozzo and Lucky, which are already in existence when the play begins, Jerry and Peter in The Zoo Story start off as strangers. But Albee's dialogue convinces us that within the short time (less than an hour) that the play runs, Jerry inflicts himself on Peter with such uncompromising determination that in spite of all Peter's efforts to fend him off, he gets to know Jerry better than he has ever known his wife or his daughters—and better than he will ever get to know anyone else. In fact Peter will be lonelier than before, because more aware of his aloneness.

The play starts unpromisingly—like so many drama school improvisations—with two men of contrasted types on a park bench. Peter, in his early forties, is obviously an Average Middle-Class Father. He wears a tweed jacket, smokes a pipe, reads a book through horn-rimmed glasses, and does not like conversations with strangers. He is careful, conservative, conventional, where Jerry, slightly younger and carelessly dressed, soon gives the impression of not wanting to hold on to things, of not having much that is worth holding on to. His opening gambit—"I've been to the zoo"—is a curious one, and what immediately makes the conversation theatrically interesting is a slight feeling of danger in the air. Jerry is ironic and capable of using his irony as a weapon, though Peter at first receives only a pinprick.

Jerry (watches as Peter, anxious to dismiss him, prepares his pipe): Well, boy; you're not going to get lung cancer, are you?

Peter (looks up, a little annoyed, then smiles): No, sir. Not from this.

Jerry: No, sir. What you'll probably get is cancer of the mouth, and then you'll have to wear one of those things Freud wore after they took one whole side of his jaw away. What do they call those things?

Peter (uncomfortable): A prosthesis?

Jerry: The very thing! A prosthesis. You're an educated man, aren't you?

After this Jerry gets the conversation going properly by asking Peter outright whether he minds if they talk. Peter obviously does mind but faced with the direct challenge he does not have the courage to be rude and say he would rather read his book. Then, after slackening the theatrical tension by talking about the weather, Jerry screws it up again. After another reference to the zoo, he adds:

You'll read about it in the papers tomorrow, if you don't see it on your TV tonight.

Which must mean either that he is mad or that something sensational has happened or is going to happen. Our curiosity is whetted and the conversation can afford to return to the casual chat in which the basic facts about Peter are established. That he has two daughters; that he had wanted a son. And in a reluctant reply to a less casual question, Peter admits that he and his wife are not going to have any more children. Several times the pattern is repeated: a casual sequence of question and answer, a deliberate provocation from Jerry (the pinprick going slightly deeper each time) a protest from Peter, an easy piece of soothing from Jerry, a resumption of the catechism. We learn that Peter has a home on 74th Street, with cats and two parakeets, and that he is an executive in a company which publishes textbooks. He earns around 18,000 dollars a year.

He is at a big disadvantage in the conversation because of his basic insecurity, which Jerry, superficially more self-confident, takes pleasure in exposing. Each time Peter rises to the bait of Jerry's provocation, it is easy for Jerry to make him feel guilty for having become angry or patronizing. The more uncertain Peter is of the extent to which he is being mocked, the more confused he becomes in trying to cope with the situation. Even when Jerry asks an absurd question like "What's the dividing line between upper-middle class and lower-upper-middle class?" or a loaded one like "Who are your favorite writers? Baudelaire and J. P. Marquand?" Peter is trapped by his ingrained habit of politeness. His instinct is always to play safe and he has been conditioned to believe there is always safety in politeness.

A point is soon reached where Jerry, bored with interviewing Peter, starts to use him as an audience.

Jerry: Do you know what I did before I went to the zoo today? I walked all the way up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square; all the way.

Peter: Oh; you live in the Village! (This seems to enlighten Peter.)

Jerry: NO, I don't. I took the subway down to the Village so I could walk all the way up Fifth Avenue to the zoo. It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

It is as if Jerry has been going a long distance out of his way in questioning Peter as he has. No meaningful contact could possibly have been established through a tired exchange of the conventional questions and answers of casual conversation. This can provide, at most, the illusion of contact, and Jerry is after the real thing. He is going to have to inflict himself totally on Peter, as now, again going a long distance out of his way, he inflicts the basic facts of his existence.

Ostensibly the motive is to prevent Peter from pigeonholing him as a Greenwich Village type by providing an alternative pigeonhole. He lives in a small room on the rear side of the top floor of a brownstone rooming house on the upper West Side. Jerry talks about the other roomers, whose lives all sound miserable. None of them has any contact with him. There is a black homosexual with rotten teeth who plucks his eyebrows with Buddhist concentration and goes to the john a lot. There is a Puerto Rican family all living together in one of the front rooms, and there is someone else living in the other, whom Jerry has never seen. In the front room on the third floor there is a woman who can be heard crying whenever Jerry passes her door.

Jerry also lists his possessions for Peter—toilet articles, a few clothes, a hotplate, a can opener, a knife, two forks and two spoons, three plates, a cup and saucer, a glass, two empty photograph frames, eight or nine books, a pack of pornographic playing cards, an old typewriter, and a small strongbox of pebbles collected when he was a child.

Under which … weighed down … are some letters … "please " letters… "please why don't you do this, and please why do you do that" letters. And "when " letters, too. "When will you write? When will you come?"

The assortment is well chosen to give an impression of a lonely, penurious, frustrated life. Peter's questions about the empty photograph frames cue Jerry's explanation about his parents' broken marriage and their deaths, the deaths of his dour aunt, and the brevity of his relationships with women.

I never see the pretty little ladies more than once, and most of them wouldn't be caught in the same room with a camera.

His longest-lived sexual relationship was when he was fifteen—an eleven-day homosexual affair with a sixteen-year-old Greek, son of a park superintendent.

For a moment it looks as though by telling Peter about himself, Jerry is inviting advice, but he is not.

Peter: Well, it seems perfectly simple to me. You just haven't…

Jerry (angry. Moves away): Look! Are you going to tell me to get married and have parakeets?

From Jerry's point of view, and perhaps from Albee's, marriage is no cure for loneliness. The pornographic playing cards are used to make the point that

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

It is after this that Jerry starts on the long narrative about the landlady and the dog, whom he jointly describes as "the gatekeepers of my dwelling," which makes us think of the rooming house as Hades, though later, if we are thinking in symbolic terms at all, the sexual imagery makes the entrance hall into a symbolic orifice of the body. The landlady is described as "a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage." The dog is black, with an oversized head, tiny ears, bloodshot eyes, a red open sore on one of its forepaws, and an almost permanent erection, which is also red. Both assault Jerry, the woman by pressing her body up against him in a corner, the dog by biting his ankles. The woman Jerry can keep at bay:

When she presses herself to my body and mumbles about her room and how I should come there, I merely say: but Love; wasn't yesterday enough for you, and the day before? Then she puzzles, she makes slits of her tiny eyes, she sways a little, and then, Peter, and it is at this moment that I think I might be doing some good in that tormented house, a tormented smile begins to form on her unthinkable face, and she giggles and groans as she thinks about yesterday and the day before; as she believes and relives what never happened.

He is giving her a fantasy as a substitute for real experience.

About the dog Jerry talks uninterruptedly for five and a half pages of the script. First he tried to make friends with it by buying hamburgers and giving it the meat from them. But after devouring the meat, the dog still tried to attack him. Still, he went on buying meat for it for five more days and after being attacked five more times, he mixed rat poison into the meat. Though his intention had been to kill the dog, he would have been disappointed if it had died. He wanted to see how his relationship with it would develop.

I loved the dog now, and I wanted him to love me. I had tried to love, and I had tried to kill and both had been unsuccessful by themselves. I hoped … and I don't really know why I expected the dog to understand anything, much less my motivations … I hoped that the dog would understand. It's just… it's just that… (Jerry is abnormally tense, now.) … it's just that if you can't deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere. with animals! Don't you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with something.

But now there is no contact at all. Recovering from the poison, the dog no longer attacks Jerry. Allowed free passage, he feels more solitary than ever.

I have gained solitary free passage, if that much further loss can be said to be gain. I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss. And what has been the result: the dog and I have attained a compromise; more of a bargain, really. We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. And, was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog's attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?

The story of Jerry and the dog has become an analogue of Albee's view of human relationships. It foreshadows Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is very different as a story about human relationships but similar in its recognition that a combination of kindness and cruelty is more instructive than either separately. (The emphasis in it may be on cruelty, but George and Martha both teach each other something during the course of the action; to overlook the love between them is to miss the point of the play.)

Peter, of course, understands that in telling him the story, Jerry is trying to make contact with him, and he therefore pretends not to understand the story.

Peter (numb): I … I don't understand what … I don't think I… (Now, almost tearfully.) Why did you tell me all of this?

Jerry: Why not?

Peter: i don't understand.

Jerry (furious, but whispering): That's a lie.

Peter: NO. NO, it's not.

Jerry (quietly): I tried to explain it to you as I went along. I went slowly; it has all to do with …

Peter: i don't want to hear any more. I don't understand you, or your landlady, or her dog.

Jerry cannot be fended off so easily. Next he tries a physical approach, tickling Peter's ribs, which makes him giggle and joke childishly about his own animals.

I must go. I… hee, hee, hee. After all, stop, stop, hee, hee, hee, after all, the parakeets will be getting dinner ready soon. Hee, hee. And the cats are setting the table.

But Jerry detains him by saying he still hasn't heard what happened at the zoo.

I went to the zoo to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too. It probably wasn't a fair test, what with everyone separated by bars from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals. But if it's a zoo, that's the way it is.

In his rooming house, as he describes it, that is exactly the way it is. And that is the way it still is with Peter, despite the momentary contact Jerry has made by tickling him. As in Jerry's relationships with girls, and as in Peter's relationship with his wife, physical contact does not necessarily mean that the individuals are breaking through the bars to each other. But Jerry, who has decided to stop at nothing in his experiment in human contact, now tries to break through by playing an aggressive game of territorial acquisitiveness. The bench that Peter is sitting on is in his territory, and Jerry tries to dispossess him of it. At first when Jerry pokes him on the arm, telling him to move over, Peter complies amiably enough, but soon Jerry is punching him hard on the arm and ordering him off the bench. Jerry acknowledges that he is behaving irrationally ("I'm crazy, you bastard") but he also makes Peter behave crazily, first shouting for the police and then almost crying in his furious possessiveness about the bench.

I've come here for years; I have hours of great pleasure, great satisfaction, right here. And that's important to a man. I'm a responsible person, and I'm a grown-up. This is my bench, and you have no right to take it away from me.

It is at this point that Jerry tells him to fight for it. Peter is sufficiently provoked to be quite willing to fight but, saying that they are not evenly matched, Jerry produces a knife.

Terrified, Peter thinks Jerry is going to kill him, but Jerry tosses the knife to him telling him to use it. Peter tries to run away, but Jerry catches him and slaps him.

jerry (slaps Peter on each "fight"): You fight, you miserable bastard; fight for that bench; fight for your parakeets; fight for your cats; fight for your two daughters; fight for your life; fight for your manhood, you pathetic little vegetable. You couldn't even get your wife with a male child.

Infuriated, Peter picks up the knife and backs away, saying he'll give Jerry one last chance to go away and leave him alone. He holds out the knife as if it were a weapon of defense; with a resigned "So be it," Jerry rushes in to impale himself on it. Dying, he thanks Peter.

Oh, Peter, I was so afraid I'd drive you away. (He laughs as best he can.) You don't know how afraid I was you'd go away and leave me … Peter … thank you. I came unto you (He laughs, so faintly.) and you have comforted me. Dear Peter.

Contact has been made.

It is a play about contact but it has been much misunderstood. According to Richard Kostelanetz in On Contemporary Literature, it is a play about a failed homosexual pass, and the dogs and cats which are mentioned are symbolical.

Dogs are surrogate-males, and cats become females. Thus, when Jerry says he wants companionship with a dog, he symbolically announces his homosexual designs.

The stiff arm holding the knife on which Jerry finally impales himself becomes a symbol of the erect phallus.

The religious interpretation strikes me as equally one-sided. In an article called "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story"¹ Ruth Zimbardo argues that Jerry's self-sacrifice is essentially Christian. Dr. C. W. E. Bigsby in his book, Albee, follows this interpretation:

Jerry is "crucified" so that Peter and his fellow men may be redeemed. When he accepts the need for sacrifice it is with the biblical expression of acceptance, "So be it."

He even sees significance in the fact that the bench, like the cross, is made of wood and iron. Jerry becomes Jesus, and Peter becomes the Apostle.

The man who had denied Jerry's message, as the biblical Peter had denied Christ, now recognizes him in the triple affirmation which had marked Peter's return to a real relationship with Christ and man. He replies to Jerry's cry of "Peter … Peter? Peter" with the exclamation, "Oh my God … Oh my God, oh my God."

It is also misleading to interpret The Zoo Story in terms of Theatre of the Absurd. For Martin Esslin, Albee "comes into the category of the Theatre of the Absurd precisely because his work attacks the very foundations of American optimism," 2 and he finds that it is "closely akin to the work of Harold Pinter" because of "the realism of its dialogue and its subject matter—an outsider's inability to establish genuine contact with a dog, let alone any human being." I would have said that the resemblance to Pinter (who also uses the animal analogy in writing about the human territorial imperative) is fairly superficial and that if the Theatre of the Absurd is a valid category—which I doubt—Albee's work certainly does not belong to it. Esslin, who coined the phrase, uses the word "absurd" in the same sense as Camus does when speaking in Le Mythe de Sysiphe of a divorce between man and his life, between the actor and his setting, and in the same sense as Ionesco in his essay on Kafka. 3

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

But without accepting the Christian interpretation of Jerry's sacrifice, it is easy to see that it should not be dismissed as useless. It is because he does not appreciate the relationship of Jerry's death to the rest of the play that Esslin attacks the ending as melodramatic:

When Jerry provokes Peter into drawing a knife and then impales himself on it, the plight of the schizophrenic outcast is turned into an act of sentimentality, especially as the victim expires in touching solicitude and fellow-feeling for his involuntary murderer.

It is important not to forget that Jerry is a character in a play. His death, like the death of many tragic heroes in earlier plays, is an illustration of the impossibility of living in accordance with the values that he represents. To make real contact with a fellow human being, he has to take his life in his hands just as Columbus did when he set out on a voyage from which there would have been no return if he had not found what he was looking for. Without killing his hero, Albee would not have been able to make the point that Jerry could not have got through to Peter in any other way, and the important question is not whether the action at the end looks melodramatic—if the actors are good enough it does not—but whether the dialogue that leads up to it has successfully established the encounter between two strangers on a park bench as a valid analogue of human relationships in contemporary society, and whether Peter is acceptable as a personification of contemporary conformism.

In a sense, the Everyman role is divided between the two protagonists. Jerry represents the questing, idealistic side of the personality, the element that used to be called the spirit, while Peter represents the side that wants to settle complacently for the middle-class comforts. In fact Jerry's calculated assault on Peter's lazy desire to be left in peace is a projection of the playwright's calculated assault on the audience's desire not to be disturbed.

In the first published version of the play, in the Evergreen Review, No. 12, Jerry's dying speech began:

You won't be coming back here any more, Peter; you've been dispossessed. You've lost your bench, but you've defended your honor.

These two sentences were subsequently cut, but as Lee Baxandall has pointed out (Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 9, No. 4) "an audience, should it include Peters, vicariously might be as shaken, as dispossessed." Jerry's attack on Peter is an attack on a society in which there are scarcely any real relationships. The audience, like Peter, settles for domesticity—a regular salary, children and pets. We never find out what, if anything, Jerry does to earn his living, but he is capable of greater honesty than Peter because he has invested less in the social structure. He is more of a man than Peter, and he is less like the average member of the audience. If his death is necessary, it is because we are being shown—violently—that most of us are most of the time settling for less than half. The Zoo Story is not a homosexual play, not an Absurd play, and not a religious play, but it is a moral play.

Notes

¹Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. VIII (1962).

²The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 230.

³Eugène Ionesco, "Dans les Armes de la Ville," Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault, Paris, No. 20, October, 1957.