[The essay below presents the view that The Zoo Story is a "modern morality play" that places Christian symbolism in a context of "naturalistic dialogue, situation and setting. "]

The acclaim, both popular and critical, which has greeted Albee's The Zoo Story leads one to speculate upon the direction American drama is likely to take in the future. Concern with idea, rather than character or plot, is not new in the American theatre, nor is the use of symbolism for the realization of idea. There is, however, about American plays which employ symbolism—from O'Neill to Williams—a strong suggestion of the gimmick. Because American playwrights have been self-conscious in employing symbols, their symbolism is almost always embarrassingly obvious. It calls attention to itself and exists as a kind of scaffolding which the audience feels the playwright should either have built over or removed. For example, O'Neill's symbolistic drama, which has, of course, shaped all later American drama, directs attention toward the symbol as symbol rather than upon a whole dramatic structure within which symbolism operates. The audience must identify the symbols and their equivalents to work out the play's meaning. Symbol and meaning are, therefore, external to the play's design. Mourning Becomes Electra provides an excellent example.

What marks The Zoo Story as a new development of our drama is the way in which Albee blends symbolism with naturalism to realize his theme. Somewhat startling is the realization that Albee's are traditional Christian symbols which, despite their modern dress, retain their original significance—or, more precisely, express their original significance in modern terms. The relationship between traditional symbol and naturalistic dialogue, situation and setting is, however, never forced, as it so often is in, say, a Williams play. Rather symbolism is part of the very fabric of the play functioning within, as well as enlarging, its surface meaning.

On the simplest level The Zoo Story is concerned with human isolation. The world is a zoo "with everyone separated by bars from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals" (49); that is, men are not only separated from each other, but from their own basic animal natures (as Peter, one of "the people" is, until the end of the play, separated from his own animal nature).

The play opens upon Peter, who is seated on a bench in the park. As Albee tells us in his description of the dramatis personae, Peter is "neither fat nor gaunt, neither handsome nor homely." He is, in fact, in no way distinctive. Peter is the modern version, in middle-class stereotype, of Everyman. He reads the "right" books, lives on the "right" side of the park, has the average number of children, and the "right" Madison Avenue job. His is the New Yorker ad life to which most middle-class citizens, consciously or unconsciously, aspire. He blends perfectly into the brightly-packaged emptiness of the modern landscape. The "bars" which separate Peter from his own nature and from other people are the material goods and the prefabricated ideas with which he surrounds himself. He has himself carefully constructed his isolation.

Peter would prefer not to talk with Jerry but is too polite and too afraid of anyone's bad opinion, even Jerry's, to ignore him. Once engaged in conversation, he tries to avoid talking about any subject that has real relevance, anything that has roots penetrating the carefully prepared mask which he presents to the world, and even to himself. When Jerry, trying to establish some real contact with Peter, questions him about his having more children, he withdraws from the conversation, furious that Jerry might have spotted a chink in his armor.

Jerry: And you're not going to have any more kids, are you?

Peter: (a bit distantly) No. No more. (Then back and irksome) Why did you say that? How would you know that?

Jerry: The way you cross your legs perhaps; something in the voice. Or maybe I'm just guessing. Is it your wife?

Peter: (furious) That's none of your business. Do you understand?

(18)

Peter, who hardly acknowledges his own physicality, is furious and frightened that a stranger should try to expose it.

Although Peter, in spite of himself, becomes interested in Jerry's confessions, he is embarrassed by Jerry's candor. He would much prefer to steer the conversation to the safe, if shallow, waters of conventional small talk. He tries to restrict himself to talk about the weather or books. And the only time during the conversation that he feels comfortable, indeed expansive, is when he launches into a "canned" evaluation of the comparative merits of Marquand and Baudelaire, which Jerry, to his dismay, cuts short and dismisses as pretentious. Jerry disturbs Peter because he cannot easily be fit into any of Peter's neatly labelled pigeonholes.

Peter: Oh, you live in the Village (this seems to enlighten Peter)

Jerry: No, I don't…

Peter: (almost pouting) Oh, I thought you lived in the Village.

Jerry: What were you trying to do? Make sense out of things, bring order? The old pigeonhole bit?

(25)

Peter, then, is self-isolated. His life of things and prejudices protects him from himself and from the world. While it provides no gut-pleasures, neither does it allow for gut-pain. Peter's is a kind of middle-class stoicism. But while genuine stoicism raises a man above pleasure and pain, this middle-class variety protects by anaesthesizing him in the commonplace.

While Peter is one of the "people" who is separated from the animal in himself and others, Jerry is an animal (he knows his own nature) who fights separation from the other animals. In part his isolation is forced upon him. But in large measure it grows out of his need for truth. He is determined to discover the essential nature of the human condition. Therefore, he strips himself of goods, things, obvious relationships. He has a strong box without a lock, picture frames without pictures, and pornographic playing cards that remind him of the difference between love and sexual need. Deprived of the usual family relationships, he refuses either to sentimentalize them or to console himself for what he is with comforting justifications built upon memories of an unhappy childhood.

The same urge for truth that enables Jerry to know himself makes communication between him and the other animals almost impossible, for the truth about human relationships that Jerry recognizes is that men are islands irrevocably cut off from one another. Contact is from time to time made, but always with great pain and difficulty and never with any assurance that it can be sustained. Jerry tells Peter what he has learned about human relations in his tale of Jerry and The Dog.

Being cut off from one another, we fear, and fearing, we hate with an unreasoning hatred any creature who threatens to invade that little area of the world that provides us with security. The dog attacks Jerry only when Jerry tries to enter the house, "whenever I came in; but never when I went out.… I could pack up and live in the street for all the dog cared." (37) The dog considers the house his domain just as Peter, later in the play, considers the park bench which he has appropriated his. Both Peter and the dog are willing to fight to the death any invader of their territories.

We cannot buy love or understanding, nor can we establish real contact by any easy means. Jerry bribes the dog with hamburgers but this gains him only the tactical advantage of a few extra minutes to race up the stairs before the dog attacks him.

Poor bastard, he never learned that the moment he took to smile before he went for me gave me time enough to get out of range. But there he was, malevolence with an erection waiting.

(39)

The dog reflects with deadly accuracy all of the qualities which Jerry finds in the animals of his own species (his parents, for instance, or the landlady): hatred, lust, smiling exploitation, and treachery. Jerry and the dog stand in antithetical relation to one another. They are a pair of armed enemies sizing each other up, waiting to spring or to outmaneuver one another. Theirs is a perfect model of most human relationships, as Jerry sees them. Any superficial attempt at conciliation merely lulls for a moment the enmity which is caused by their isolation and fear.

To establish contact one must reach below the surface to the level of pain and pleasure, to the animal core. "I have learned," Jerry says, "that neither kindness or cruelty, 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." One must reach into the realm where emotions themselves are not sharply differentiated. But, as Jerry explains, even the flash of understanding that can result from such a contact gives no assurance that the contact can endure for more than an instant. "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."

Jerry applies the knowledge he has gained from his contact with the dog in trying to establish contact with Peter. Realizing that Peter cannot be drawn out of his tough shell with talk, that words when they do penetrate Peter's surface, merely cause him to throw up further barriers to contact, Jerry tries to touch Peter beneath this consciously preserved surface. He begins by tickling Peter. Tickling, being a pleasure-pain experience, perfectly implements Jerry's theory that the teaching emotion involves cruelty and kindness combined. It must perforce elicit a primitive, animal response. The effect upon Peter of the tickling is startling and immediate. It enables him, for the first time, to relax his grip upon the shield that his "perfect" life provides.

Peter: Oh hee, hee, hee. I must go. I… hee, hee, hee. After all, stop, stop, hee, hee, hee, after all the parakeets will be getting dinner ready soon. And the cats are setting the table. Stop, stop … and we're having …

(Jerry stops tickling Peter but the combination of the tickling and his own mad whimsy has Peter laughing almost hysterically. As his laughter continues, then subsides, Jerry watches him with a curious, fixed smile.)

Peter goes on laughing and Jerry reminds him that something has happened at the zoo about which Peter is curious.

Peter: Ah ha, ha, the what? Oh, yes, the zoo. Well, I had my own zoo there for a moment with … hee, hee, the parakeets getting dinner ready.… Oh my, I don't know what happened to me.

(48)

The teaching, pleasure-pain emotion has enabled Peter to see clearly for a brief moment the emptiness of his life, a life in which cats, children, wife, and parakeets are interchangeable because they are all merely props whose function it is to disguise nothingness and isolation.

After he has established this first contact, which is comparable to the contact he had achieved with the dog in that its purpose was to enlighten, Jerry goads Peter into a fight. In forcing Peter to fight for the park bench, Jerry is once again challenging Peter's attachment to material things that are in themselves without value to him. Peter responds to the invasion of his "property" with the same ferocity that the dog has shown. Peter is again forced by Jerry to respond at the animal level, like a savage fighting for a bone. Finally, Jerry makes Peter kill him. Peter, we assume, can never again exist on the surface level, can never again avoid contact with himself. And Jerry has at last established a contact that must endure, for Peter will never be able to forget a man he has killed.

It is within the naturalism that we have been discussing that the play's symbolism operates. The symbols are large and are, as I said earlier, traditional Christian symbols. There is Jerry, or Jesus, a thirty-year-old outcast whose purpose is to establish contact "with God who is a colored queen who wears a kimono and plucks his eyebrows, who is a woman who cries with determination behind her closed door … with God, who I'm told, turned his back on the whole thing some time ago.…" And there is Peter, St. Peter, an average worldling who is stripped by the irresistible Jerry or his material goods and led toward a revelation of truth. So carefully constructed and maintained is the symbolic pattern that it skirts being allegory. What preserves it as symbol is that its function in the naturalistic design of the play is never lost. Let us examine the symbolic pattern more closely and observe its relation to the pattern of meaning we have discussed.

Jerry, when we meet him, has lived for a short time in a rooming house on the West Side. The inhabitants of the rooming house are a Negro homosexual, a Puerto Rican family, and a woman who cries incessantly. They are, in effect, the outcasts, the doomed, the "least of these." The gate keepers (the word is Jerry's) of the rooming house are a foul woman and a dog, "a black monster of a beast: an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears and eyes.… The dog is black, all black except for the bloodshot eyes." (36) The description immediately identifies the dog as Cerebus, the monster, all black with flaming eyes, who guards Hell. The drunken, lewd woman whose affection for the dog is almost maternal adds a further dimension to the allusion for we recognize the pair as Milton's Sin and Death. The symbol is again reinforced and expanded when Jerry throws poisoned meat to the dog in his effort to gain safe passage, for this is an unmistakable allusion to the myth in which Theseus throws drugged honey-cakes to Cerebus to gain entrance to the Underworld. The West Side rooming house, then, is Hell and Jerry's adventures with the dog symbolize the mythical hero's or God's descent into Hell. We see here Albee's method of symbolism. He chooses old symbols, that carry with them a wealth of meaning but that yet do no violence to the naturalistic surface of his play.

To go on to the identification of Jerry as Jesus—when the landlady asks him to pray for her sick dog, Jerry replies, "Madam, I have myself to pray for, the colored queen, the Puerto Rican family, the person whom I have never seen, the women who cries behind the closed door, and the rest of the people in all the rooming houses everywhere." This modernized Messiah first identifies himself with the outcasts and the afflicted and then assumes responsibility for them.

From time to time Albee gives the audience broad clues to his symbolic equivalents so that his meaning cannot be mistaken. For example, when Jerry is revealing to Peter the nature of the human condition by means of the parable of the dog (for that, indeed, is what the Tale of Jerry and the Dog is, a parable), he uses, in broad parody, a Biblical locution, "And it came to pass that the beast was deathly ill." Or again, after Jerry-Jesus has harrowed Hell (that is, gained entrance into the rooming house and assumed responsibility for its inmates) and is ready for the job of salvation, he must come to Peter by a very curious route.

… 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 come a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

(25)

The journey downtown and up, at the end of which lies the salvation of a man is, of course, Christ's descent into Hell and Resurrection which are necessary before the Redemption can begin.

Peter refuses Jerry-Jesus' message when it appears in the parable of the dog. He first deliberately resists understanding, then he pretends that he has not understood, and finally he covers his ears to escape the truth that has been revealed to him.

Jerry: Oh, come on now, Peter, tell me what you think.

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 to you as I went along. I went slowly; it all has to do with—

Peter: I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE.

(44,45)

Jerry's parable, like the Gospels, is spoken slowly and framed in the simplest terms. But, like the Gospels, it is rejected by Everyman who pretends not to understand, who pleads confusion, and who finally flees from the responsibility that understanding would demand. Jerry's truth cannot be conveyed in words.

In tickling Peter and causing him for a second to lose his grip, to penetrate the falsity of his life, Jerry is, in effect, symbolically stripping Peter of his worldly goods and causing him to "follow" him. Once Peter has, even whimsically, questioned the "happiness" of having the right life, the right family, the right pets, he has taken the first steps toward his salvation. He has taken the first step in a journey that will lead him to the realization of what it is like to be essentially human and to be an outcast. Finally, realizing the futility of trying to reach Peter with words, realizing too the fragility of the vision of truth that has flashed before Peter's mind during the tickling, Jerry dies for Peter. He dies to save Peter's soul from death by spiritual starvation. Peter will be forced by Jerry's death to know himself and to feel kinship with the outcasts for whom Jerry has prayed.

In the dialogue of the death scene Albee again makes his allusions very broad. In the instant before Jerry decides to impale himself upon the knife there is a suggestion of his momentary indecision, followed by acceptance of his fate which he declares in a spoken resolution.

Peter: I'll give you one last chance to get out of here and leave me alone.

(He holds the knife with a firm hand but far in front of him, not to attack, but to defend.)

Jerry (Sighs heavily): So be it.

(59)

This decision to accept death for man's salvation, with its air of the culmination of a foreordained pattern, is the modernized scene at Gethsemane. Again the somewhat archaic locution strengthens the allusion.

In the death scene itself the allusion is so broad that it becomes ironic. Peter's calling "Oh, my God" operates so well on both symbolistic and naturalistic level that the one level becomes an ironic commentary upon the other. The words are, of course, the very words we feel we would utter were we caught in so horrible a situation, so that they are naturalistically "true" and yet, ironically, on the symbolistic level it is God, the God he has slain, whom Peter is addressing.

Peter: Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.

Jerry (Jerry is dying, but now his expression seems to change. His features relax, and while his voice varies, sometimes wrenched with pain, for the most part, he seems removed from his dying.): Thank you, Peter, I mean that now; thank you very much. I came unto you and you have comforted me, dear Peter.

Peter (Almost fainting): Oh my God.

Jerry: You'd better go now. Somebody might come by and you don't want to be here when anyone comes.

Peter (Does not move, but begins to weep.): Oh my God, Oh my God.

Jerry (His eyes still closed, he shakes his head and speaks: a combination of scornful and mimicry and supplication.): Oh … my … God.

(62)

The allusion is perfectly sustained and in the mouth of a skillful actor Peter's repetition of the phrase contains infinite variety, expressing varying degrees of awareness. This Crucifixion scene is also underscored by Peter's betrayal when, taking his book and leaving the dying Jerry, he, in effect, denies that "he knows the man."

What Albee was written in The Zoo Story is a modern Morality play. The theme is the centuries old one of human isolation and salvation through sacrifice. Man in his natural state is alone, a prisoner of Self. If he succumbs to fear he enforces his isolation in denying it. Pretending that he is not alone, he surrounds himself with things and ideas that bolster the barrier between himself and all other creatures. The good man first takes stock of himself. Once he has understood his condition, realized his animality and the limitations imposed upon him by Self, he is driven to prove his kinship with all other things and creatures, "with a bed, with a cockroach, with a mirror.…" (The progression that Jerry describes is Platonic.) In proving this kinship he is extending his boundaries, defying Self, proving his humanity, since the kinship of all nature can be recognized only by the animal who has within him a spark of divinity. He finds at last, if he has been completely truthful in his search, that the only way in which he can smash the walls of his isolation and reach his fellow creatures is by an act of love, a sacrifice, so great that it altogether destroys the self that imprisons him, that it kills him. Albee, in recreating this theme, has used a pattern of symbolism that it is an immensely expanded allusion to the story of Christ's sacrifice. But the symbolism is not outside of the story which he has to tell, which is the story of modern man and his isolation and hope for salvation. He uses the allusion to support his own story. He has chosen traditional Christian symbols, I think, not because they are tricky attention-getters, but because the sacrifice of Christ is perhaps the most effective way that the story has been told in the past.