The Zoo Story

Some background information        Tone of the play        "The Story of Jerry and the Dog"        "An Act of Love"

From rejection to purgation of illusions        Questions for discussions

Some background information

How did Albee write “The Zoo Story”?

After a period of severe depression, Albee gave up his job, and with his thirtieth birthday looming ominously he sat down to write a play. He himself explained, "I wrote 'The Zoo Story' on a wobbly table in the kitchen of the apartment I was living at the time—at 238 West Fourth Street, I did a draft, made pencil revision, and typed a second script, and that’s the way I’ve been doing my plays since. I finished ‘The Zoo Story’ in three weeks…."

The Zoo Story was read by a number of New York producers and duly rejected by them all. … Eventually it received its first performance in Berlin, at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, on 28 September 1959—some four months before its belated American debut: at the Provincetown Playhouse.

In a way it is fitting that a play whish attacks so directly the indifference and sterility of contemporary American life should have received its first performance in Europe. It is as though Albee’s subversive nature had been instantly recognized by a theatre and a public of which he has become increasingly scornful. As he puts aptly in the play, "sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly" (25).

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Tone of the play

The Zoo Story sets the tone for most of his subsequent plays, for his subject here, as later, is America and what he takes to be its contempt for human values. To Albee, as to those other analysts of American decay Allan Ginsberg and Randall Jarrell, the zoo has suddenly become a horrifyingly accurate image of a society where furious activity serves only to mask an essential inertia and whose sociability conceals a fundamental isolation.

There is no disguising the heavily ironical tone adopted by the play’s protagonist, Jerry, when he announces that he lives in “the greatest city in the world. Amen.” For his apartment is in a crumbling house on Columbus Avenue, an address which itself indicates clearly enough the object of Albee’s satire and the metaphorically basis of his work. But in the face of indifference and complacency Albee does not lapse into despair. He stresses the need for man to break out of his self-imposed isolation to make contact with his fellow man. What he is calling for, in other words, is a revival of love.

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"THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG"

Jerry lives in a large apartment building on the West Side in which the tenants are all outcasts of one kind or another. There is no contact between these tenants, and Jerry characterizes it as a “humiliating excuse for a jail.” Thus, whether the image be that of a zoo or a jail, the bars which mark human isolation seem self-evident. In the parable, the landlady is so closely identified with the dog that it must be accepted that Albee intends them to be interchangeable, as symbols. For the dog, which is as hideous as its mistress, has a permanent erection which parallels the woman’s sexual desire. It is also described as “making sounds in his throat like a woman,” while the landlady has eyes which “looked like the dog’s eyes.” Both the dog and its mistress attack Jerry in the entrance to the building, a Freudian image which links violence to sexuality in a way which foreshadows Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The symbolic nature of this story is further emphasized by an otherwise enigmatic statement which is a perfect description of the process of symbolism. Jerry explains that "What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."

Jerry’s response to these attempts to make contact is the same in both cases. He repulses them. He sees both the dog and the landlady as a threat to himself as an invasion of the isolation which he has come to accept as the norm of human existence. He offers the animal food in an attempt to secure immunity from contact, and when this fails he attempts to kill it. Although the dog survives the poisoned food, it no longer attempts to make contact, but lapses into the simulated indifference which, Albee urges, is equally a mark of human relationships. It is at this moment that Jerry suddenly reaches the understanding which sends him out in search of someone to whom he can pass on his insight.

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"An Act of Love"

Jerry recognizes that the dog’s violence had indeed been an attempt to make contact, and that, as such, it was an act of love: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach other… 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?" It is this message of the need for love in a world that places its faith purely in appearances which Jerry carries with him from the West Side; and it is, in effect, the ritual of Jerry and the dog that is now acted out on the stage. Peter now plays the role which Jerry had played in the rooming-house, while Jerry plays the role of the dog. So, too, Peter responds to Jerry’s intrusion firstly by kindly condescension, as Jerry had in offering the dog hamburger meat, and then finally by violence, as Jerry had in attempting to kill the animal.

Love, human contact, is an art which has to be learned. One has to begin with simple things, with a tree, a rock or a cloud. This science of love is essentially that which Jerry goes on to describe to Peter:" It’s just that if you can’t deal with people you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! … A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people …SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach… with pornographic playing cards, with a strongbox…."

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From Rejection to purgation of illusions

Peter’s response to the parable is that of a man who can no longer find arguments, but who still wants to cling desperately to his creed. Peter shouts out "I DON‘T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE" and gets up to leave. This parody of contact stimulates a momentary understanding on Peter’s part of the nexus which Jerry has been trying to establish between the zoo and the nature of contemporary life. Peter admits that he had his own zoo there for the moment. But Jerry adopts the same strategy which the dog had used-- violence. He provokes Peter into a defense of his bench-- a mock battle in which e is seen absurdly defending the privacy and property rights which are clearly the basis of his values. But Jerry is determined that this violence will not revert to the casual indifference which had been the result of his encounter with the dog. Accordingly he throws a knife to Peter and then impales himself on it. The "middle-class" Everyman, then, has finally been released from the solitude which he had taken as a necessary and even desirable aspect of the human condition. As Jerry insists, he has been "dispossessed." Peter, at the end of the play, has been liberated from his false assumptions and is finally purged of his illusions. Never again, as Jerry insists, will he be able to retreat into solipsism; never again will he be able to repeat the frantic cry of the alienated and the disengaged, “leave me alone.”

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Questions for Discussion:

1. Point out some of the ways in which Jerry likens people to animals. Consider in particular Jerry’s story of the dog. What is the point of this story? What does it have to do with the play’s overall story about Jerry and Peter? At the end, what is suggested by having both characters scream or howl?

2. How is a zoo ("with everyone separated by bars from everyone else," as Jerry says) a fitting metaphor for modern urban society? By what acts or gestures does Jerry try to break down the “bars” between Peter and himself?

3. What suggestions do you find in Jerry’s picture frames that lack pictures? In the park bench, which Peter thinks he owns?

4. Does the play contain any elements of plot structure that seem traditional? Point out any apparent crisis or climax.

5. What is the major dramatic question in The Zoo Story? At what point in the play does this question arise?

6. What is meaningful in Jerry’s repeated statement, "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way in order to come back a short distance correctly"?

7. What events and what attitudes in the play mark it as belonging to the theatre of the absurd?

8. Is there anything in The Zoo Story that seems realistic—recognizably faithful to ordinary life?

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