The Zoo Story (Criticism)

Criticism

Stephen Coy

Coy is an esteemed authority on drama who has contributed to numerous publications. His essay praises the power of Albee’s dialogue and the class dischord that it illustrates. Coy also addresses the religious imagery in Albee’s play.

There is very little action in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story: two men meet, they exchange information, and one dies at the hand of the other. But to a framework of action which any writer might have imagined, Albee brings a master’s sense of the ways in which, psychologically, some people are able to dominate and manipulate others, and a frankness and grotesqueness of language which are startling even now, almost forty years after the play’ s premiere.

Albee opens with an impressive display. Peter, the quiet, insular, middle-class publisher, is reading a book on “his” bench in New York’s Central Park. Along comes Jerry, who (as we will see) is not out for a stroll but urgently looking for someone with whom to talk. He spies Peter, approaches him, and begins the elaborate process of getting Peter (who wants only to be left alone) to put down his book and surrender to Jerry’s desire to talk. This opening section of the play is too long to quote here, and in any case should be read through or better still seen onstage, but it is a marvel of resourcefulness.

Jerry announces that he has been to the Zoo, and when that produces no response he yells it. Peter barely responds even to this, so Jerry changes tactics and begins to ask Peter questions about where they are in the Park and in what direction he has (therefore) been walking. Peter fills his pipe as a way of trying to ignore Jerry, who, seeing this, uses it as a way of accusing Peter of a kind of cowardice: “Well, boy; you’re not going to get lung cancer, are you?” Peter does not rise to the bait, so Jerry becomes more aggressive and more graphic: “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?”

Poor dim Peter, college-educated but not street-smart, can’t stop himself from showing that he knows the word: prosthesis — Jerry seizes on this in a way that shows that he himself knows the word, and sarcastically asks Peter if he is a doctor. When Peter says no, he read about prosthetics in Time magazine, Jerry responds that “Time magazine is not for blockheads.” This line is generally delivered sarcastically, so that it both patronizes Peter and shows the audience that Jerry thinks himself superior to most of middle-class America. Finally, Jerry bullies Peter into giving him his full attention by inflicting what is sometimes called “liberal guilt:”

JERRY: Do you mind if we talk?

PETER: (Obviously minding.) Why . . . no, no.

JERRY: Yes you do; you do.

PETER: (Puts his book down. . . smiling.) No, really; I don’t mind.

JERRY: Yes you do.

PETER: (Finally decided.) No; I don’t mind at all, really.

At this point the first section, or movement, of the play comes to an end. Many critics have pointed out that The Zoo Story is a play about the difficulty of communication. But that is a common problem offstage or on and only rises to dramatic urgency when there is something urgent to be communicated. Now that Jerry has finally succeeded in capturing Peter’s full attention, the question is: what message has Jerry brought with him from the Zoo that he is so avid to communicate, even (or particularly) to a total stranger?

Avid or not, Jerry suddenly seems in no hurry. He returns to the subject of the Zoo, hinting that “it” (what “it” might be is not explained) will be on TV tonight or in the newspapers tomorrow. He begins to ask Peter about himself and his family, eliciting pieces of personal information. When Jerry guesses that Peter and his wife are not going to have any more children, Peter asks how he could possibly know that. Jerry responds: “The way you cross your legs, perhaps; something in the voice. . . . Is it your wife?” A subtle game is afoot here: Jerry earlier attacked Peter’s manhood by implying it was somehow cowardly to smoke a pipe rather than cigarettes, and now, with his remarks about the legs and the voice, he seems to imply effeminacy or perhaps even suppressed homosexuality (a line of thought to which he will return later). In any case, he ends the line with a different kind of attack on Peter’s manhood, implying that the dominant voice in the no-children decision, and the household, is that of Peter’s wife, whose name is never given. When Peter tacitly admits this, Jerry actually shows a moment of compassion before briskly moving on: “Well, now; what else?”

During this second section of the play, in which the men exchange information about their lives, Albee avoids the dullness which often attends exposition by two means: frequent allusions to the Zoo and tantalizing hints about what may have happened there (we learn that Jerry was depressed by the way the bars separated the animals from each other and from the people but not if he actually did anything about it); and a combination of startling information and aggressive behavior that keeps Jerry firmly in our minds (and Peter’s) as a figure of instability and menace.

Jerry tells Peter about his hellish rooming-house, the serio-comic loss of his parents, his first real sexual experience (while admitting it was homosexual, he gets in another dig at Peter’s masculinity: “But that was the jazz of a very special hotel, wasn’t it?”), and his landlady, “a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage.” But the landlady, despite being one of the most arresting offstage presences in American drama, is only the prelude to what might be called the third movement of the play.

It is called “The Story of Jerry and the Dog,” and it must be seen or read in its entirety, as no description could come within miles of doing it justice. It tells of Jerry’s attempt to “get through to” the disgusting landlady’s even more disgusting dog, which attacked him whenever it caught him leaving or entering the building. Albee makes sure that we understand that Jerry’s past attempt to reach the dog is parallel to his present attempt to reach Peter: he has Jerry try several ways to get through to the dog, from killing him with kindness to just plain killing him, just as he tried several different ways to get through to Peter.

The playwright has Jerry, who has so far disgusted Peter but not aroused his sympathy, say, “it’s just that if you can’t deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! Don’t you see?” Of his final truce with the dog, a sad indifference, Jerry says, “I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty, by themselves. . . create any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together . . . are the teaching emotion.” This lesson Jerry learned from his experience is of great thematic importance in the play, where every step forward in communication, large or small, is accomplished with a combination of kindness and cruelty.

Next comes the final section of the play. Of Jerry’s story, Peter says, in fact he yells, “I DON’T UNDERSTAND!”, but Jerry doesn’t believe him and neither do most critics. They think he does indeed understand that Jerry is trying to tell him something about the pain, the loneliness, and the hideous suffering of those parts of society not normally encountered or even acknowledged by Peter’s middle class; and they think that Peter’s real feelings are more clearly seen in a subsequent line: ‘ I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE.” Peter prepares to leave, they say, because “his” space has been invaded not only by an unwelcome person but by unwelcome information, both of which threaten the comfortable ignorance of his life.

Jerry is at first angered by Peter’s refusal to comprehend, then apparently resigned to it. But he is not ready to quit. He taunts Peter, punches him and pushes him to the ground, challenging him to fight for his bench. Peter refuses, fearing he will be harmed. Jerry pulls out an ugly looking knife (a switchblade, wicked-looking and illegal in New York, is used as a prop by most productions) and throws it on the ground between them. Peter cowers back. Jerry tells Peter to pick up the knife but Peter won’t. Jerry grabs Peter and says the following, slapping Peter each time he utters the word “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.”

Angered at last beyond caution, Peter snatches up the knife, even now holding it defensively. Jerry sighs heavily, says, “So be it,” and rushes at Peter, impaling himself on the knife and giving himself, deliberately, a mortal wound. The words Jerry says as he is dying are most important: “Thank you, Peter. . . . Thank you very much. Oh, Peter, I was afraid I’d drive you away. . . . Peter. . . thank you. I came unto you and you have comforted me. Dear Peter.” Jerry then sends Peter on his way, making sure he takes his book with him, but asserting that the bench (and, by implication, some part of Peter which will never be the same) belongs to him, to Jerry.

Many critics have pointed out that the Biblical language in this reference to Peter, together with other such language in the play (regarding the dog, Jerry says,“AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT THE BEAST WAS DEATHLY ILL.”), and with the number of times God is called on from the stabbing to the end of the play, suggests Christian symbolism: Jesus (Jerry, a distantly similar name) dies for the suffering of mankind but not before he has passed on his gospel to his disciple Peter. This seems a reasonable inference, since playwrights choose their words, Albee more carefully than most. Whether the implication of Christianity expands or narrows the impact of the play is highly debatable, but the language is there — not by accident — and it should not be ignored.

The Zoo Story can best be understood (especially by actors, who are trained to play intentions but not mysteries or ambiguities) by starting off with a single, basic assumption. Jerry, lonely, unstable, and desperate, made a life decision at the Zoo — or perhaps even at home before he went to the Zoo “correctly.” He would leave the Zoo and walk “northerly” in the Park until the first human being he spotted. He would strike up a conversation with that person, by whatever means it took, and then make the best effort of his life to teach that person what Jerry already knew about the sufferings of mankind, especially the sufferings others prefer not to notice. He would force that person to understand, or, to make a cliche literal, die trying. Jerry’s suicide is thus the last logical item on the list of “whatever it takes” to take from Peter his ignorance, his indifference, and his complacency. Peter may never wander preaching in the wilderness, but he will never again draw breath without the burden of the knowledge that Jerry has conveyed to him. That much of the torch, at least, has been passed.

Source: Stephen Coy, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• It is essential that anyone wanting to understand Edward Albee read his 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Whether as relevant to Albee or not, everyone interested in modern drama should read Martin Esslin’s 1961 text The Theatre of the Absurd.
• Those interested in Albee as an adapter of other people’s work (and what might draw him to that work) would enjoy The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, which he adapted from Carson McCullers’s novel and Malcolm, adapted from the work by James Purdy.
• After years of obscurity and what some took to be decline, Albee suddenly returned to prominence (and major awards) with the play Three Tall Women, produced on Broadway in 1994.
• What was it about America in the 1960’s that made Albee call it “this slipping land of ours”? Two places to look for answers are in books and articles about President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration and in a book called On the Road by Jack Kerouac.