The Zoo Story By Edward Albee1

Admin عدد المساهمات: 42 تاريخ التسجيل: 07/03/2011

The Play in Focus

The plot. Peter, a man in his early forties, is spending another Sunday afternoon on his favorite bench in Central Park, reading. He cleans his glasses. A slightly younger man, Jerry, arrives and announces that he has been to the zoo.

The newcomer's attempts to strike up a conversation make Peter uncomfortable. Jerry's inquiries elicit the details of Peter's upper-middle-class lifestyle: a wife, two children, two television sets, two parakeets, an apartment in the affluent East Seventies, and a job publishing textbooks. Jerry describes his own very different life, set in a rooming house on the Upper West Side. There he shares a small living area with a flamboyantly gay black man. The other tenants in this fourstory brownstone include a Puerto Rican family, a woman who cries all the time, a repulsive landlady, and her dog.

Jerry promises to tell what happened at the zoo if Peter will first listen to "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!" (The Zoo Story, p. 526). After reminding Peter that he does not have to listen, Jerry recalls how the landlady's dog attacked him at every opportunity until he tried to poison it. Peter is shocked by the tale and seems to miss the point: that Jerry sought to establish a loving relationship with the dog, but finally both had to settle for a sad, suspicious coexistence.

Although Peter is more agitated than ever after this story, he is forced to loosen up when Jerry suddenly tickles him. Jerry then tries to recapture Peter's attention, this time to talk about his experience at the zoo. He explains that he went there to learn more about how animals and people coexist, even if the cages enforce a strict boundary. As he talks, he pushes Peter off the bench a little at a time. He finally provokes Peter into defending his claim to the bench, and by extension, into fighting for everything he values. When it is over, Jerry is impaled on a knife held by Peter. Jerry thanks him, wipes the fingerprints off the knife, and encourages Peter to hurry away. Confident that the implied lessons of the zoo story have finally been communicated, he dies, as Peter flees in horror.

Central Park. The Zoo Story is set in Central Park, which separates Manhattan's Upper West Side from its East Side. These contrasting neighborhoods are home to the main characters Jerry and Peter, respectively. The areas in which they live seem to account for some of the differences in the attitude between the two men. For example, Peter wishes to keep away from people who are not like him, but Jerry makes a point of noticing (and, as shown by his interaction with Peter, of communicating with) a variety of people, however straightlaced or unusual they might be.

Peter and his family rent a 74th Street apartment on the "safe white" East Side, between Lexington and Third Avenue (White in Rosenzweig and Blackmar, p. 476). In the late 1950s, this district was expensive, exclusive, and populated mostly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Rent control measures in the 1940s had allowed for voluntary rent increases of 15 percent, which East Siders were both able and willing to pay in order to maintain their neighborhood. On the West Side of the park, however, a more diversified and generally poorer class of tenants could not or did not do the same, and West Side properties deteriorated as a result.

Jerry lives in a four-story brownstone on the Upper West Side. Brownstones take their name from their exterior building material, a layered, reddish-brown sandstone reputed as being difficult to keep clean. Not only is Jerry's building a rooming house that provides shelter to various inhabitants, but even his room has been subdivided, with the help of an artificial board known as beaverboard. The tenants are nonwhite and different from the mainstream in other ways. A Puerto Rican family crowds into one of the front rooms in Jerry's building, and one unit also houses a gay black man. These two examples in the play reflect the striking ethnic mixture that really did characterize the area. The West Side housed a substantial number of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants as well as Puerto Ricans. The influx of Puerto Ricans to New York peaked in the mid-1950s, and like black migrants who moved to Harlem, just north of Central Park, many of these Puerto Ricans gravitated toward low-rent rooming houses, becoming a prominent part of the population on the Upper West Side.

Meanwhile, due in large part to exaggeration by the media, Central Park itself was gaining a reputation as a dangerous place infested by criminals and "perverts," a code word for gays during the era. In fact, crime in the park did increase steadily in the twentieth century, but the media "wildly exaggerated" the problem (Rosenzweig and Blackmar, p. 473). Furthermore, the 1950s saw coverage by the media that all but overlooked violence against minorities and homeless people in comparison with attacks on whites. Yet such stories made a strong impression on the public, especially whites, raising fears to a feverish pitch by the late 1950s, the time period of the play. This climate of fear helps explain Albee's characterization of Peter, a nervous park visitor who hopes the police are nearby.

Battling indifference. As he is dying, Jerry tells Peter:

I think this is what happened at the zoo... 1 think. I think that while Iwas at the zoo, I decided that Iwould walk north... northerly, rather... until Ifound you... or somebody... and Idecided that Iwould talk to you... Iwould tell you things... and things that Iwould tell you would... Well, here we are.

(The Zoo Story, p. 60)

By this time, Jerry is communicating with Peter (and hopefully the audience) in a meaningful way. To get to this point, however, he has had to overcome a crucial obstacle: the reluctance of Peter to engage in conversation with him at all. Together with polite rejection, this sort of indifference has made Jerry lonely in the first place and prompted him to reflect on problems in human communication. In short, it has provided him with the thing he must communicate to someone, to Peter: to be worth anything, life must include contact that counts for something.

At first, their conversation limps along comically, then turns into an interrogation dominated by Jerry. As the afternoon passes, he senses that he is still not getting through to Peter. When Peter fails to see Jerry's point in the story about the dog, Jerry turns to physical contact as a way of demanding Peter's attention. After Peter has endured several punches on the arm, he gives away the fact that he has only condescended to listen all afternoon, telling Jerry, "I've put up with you long enough," (The Zoo Story, p. 53). Peter continues to miss the point, so Jerry helps the situation escalate until Peter stabs him. Albee explains:

Had Peter understood, had he not refused to understand, then I doubt the death would have been necessary. Jerry tries all the way through the play to teach and fails. And finally makes a last effort at teaching, and Ithink succeeds.

(Albee in Roudané, p. 42)

Jerry's success depends on the belief that the stabbing is an experience that will stay with Peter for the rest of his life, prompting introspection about himself and the nature of human contact. In this way, Peter now has the chance to be more fully alive than he was when the play began. The theatergoer who does not believe this-and many have not-will not be convinced by Albee's optimistic view that Jerry has won this battle.

Composition and sources. Except for a threeact sex farce he wrote at age twelve, Albee claims The Zoo Story as his first play. At age thirty, he quit his job delivering telegrams for Western Union and wrote the play in three weeks. Albee composed a draft, made some revisions in pencil, and typed a second script-the finished copy. In 1974 Albee explained that the old Western Union job had provided material for The Zoo Story: "Iwas always delivering telegrams to people in rooming houses. Imet [the models for] all those people in the play in rooming houses. Jerry, the hero, is still around" (Albee in Roudané, p. 27).

Critics quickly saw in Albee's work the influence of many other playwrights. Albee once made a list of the dramatists they proposed but stopped counting after twenty-six names. The general consensus was that his most obvious literary forerunner was the French absurdist Eugene Ionesco. Albee himself expressed admiration for the work of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Tennessee Williams, among others. In fact, the technique of using an unusually long monologue for the story of Jerry and the landlady's dog was inspired in part by a passage in Tennessee Williams's play, Suddenly Last Summer.

In addition, many critics have pointed out biblical references in The Zoo Story that seem to correspond with Albee's Christian background. Jerry's murder/suicide at the end of the play has been compared with Christ's sacrifice to redeem the world. Jerry's heavy sigh, his willingness to be killed, and the very phrase "So be it!" are reminiscent of the events surrounding the crucifixion (The Zoo Story, p. 59).

Production and reviews. Passed from friends to friends of friends, The Zoo Story traveled a circuitous route, from New York to Florence, Italy, to Zurich, Switzerland, to Frankfurt, Germany, before it was produced for the first time in Berlin, Germany. It premiered at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt on September 28, 1959. A German reviewer, Friedrich Luft, raved about the play on October 1, calling it "shudder-causing drama of superintelligent style." His enthusiasm for the production and playwright was clear:

On a bench in Central Park an ordinary citizen, very much a philistine, is spoken to by a visionary, troubled fellow, then drawn into an evil, deep conversation. In the course of it, his wildly threatening partner rips the ground right out from under his feet, and in the end forces him to stab the threatening threatened fellow....

(Luft in Kolin and Davis, p. 41)

The play did not open in New York until its off-Broadway debut at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14, 1960. There, The Zoo Story shared the bill with Krapp's Last Tape, a short play by the only living dramatist Albee admired without reservation, Samuel Beckett. The novice must have been delighted to share the spotlight with his idol, a bit of luck made sweeter still by the fact that the production enjoyed a total of 582 performances. Overall, The Zoo Story was received warmly by the New York critics, and they quickly pinned their hopes for a revitalized theater on the new playwright. Although this first play won an Obie Award in 1960, Albee's greatest success was still to come in 1962, with his Tony-Award-winning play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Admin عدد المساهمات: 42 تاريخ التسجيل: 07/03/2011

1959 The Zoo Story. This short one-act drama, Albee's debut, is first performed in Berlin and would appear in New York in 1960. It focuses on an encounter between a complacent middle-class man, sitting on a bench in New York City's Central Park, and an alienated young man who goads him into violence. Like much of Albee's early work, it challenges confidence in conventional American values. Albee was born in Virginia and grew up in a wealthy household in Larchmont, New York. He wrote his first play while working as an office boy, record salesman, and Western Union delivery boy.

Admin عدد المساهمات: 42 تاريخ التسجيل: 07/03/2011

Events in History at the Time of the Time

Prosperity and mass consumerism. The 1950s were a period of prosperity for many Americans, a time when a record number of consumers had access to an abundance of material goods. Catch phrases such as "standard of living" and "cost of living" came into vogue, implying that life could be measured in terms of income and acquisitions. Additionally, the nation was pervaded by the sense that it had come into its own. Americans had weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s; they had endured scarcity because of the war effort in the 1940s; and the horrors of the war-especially the Holocaust and the effects of the atomic bomb-had begun to fade from memory in most Americans not directly affected by the war. The real-life counterparts of Peter in The Zoo Story came of age around the time of the 1929 stock market crash and matured during the subsequent years of economic hardship. Their readiness to embrace the "good life" for a change helps explain Albee's characterization of Peter, a man pleased with himself and his prosperity.

Despite a recession in the United States during 1953 and 1954, the country's gross national product (GNP) increased by half during the decade. Confidence in the consumer soared: the amount of consumer credit rose a staggering 800 percent between 1945 and 1957, a result of the widespread use of charge accounts, payment plans, and credit cards. However, the general prosperity often failed to carry over from white males to white females and ethnic minorities, who still encountered job discrimination and earned smaller paychecks than most of their white male competitors.

Even so, the availability of goods like massproduced kitchen appliances and automobiles to unprecedented numbers of consumers was viewed as a phenomenon which-in theory at least-cut across lines of race, gender, and to some extent, class. One simply had to have the money to participate in an increasingly affordable material culture. In the eyes of many people, this democratic notion unified the country and made it easy for millions of Americans to share a common national lifestyle.

In The Zoo Story, Albee examines the television as a "must-have" appliance in American households. Peter and his family possess two of them. By 1957, a total of 35 million American families had purchased them, a vast rise from the 14,000 families who had their own sets just ten years earlier. The television age was perceived as an era of interconnectedness, when Americans could be brought closer together than ever before and communication might reach new heights. Not sharing this view, Albee wrote a play about one man's overwhelming loneliness and another man's difficulty in carrying on anything but empty conversation during the era.

The profusion of consumer goods was a triumph of capitalism and was celebrated as such. Vice President Richard Nixon made the point at a Moscow trade exhibit in 1959. There, he and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in a famous "kitchen debate" inside a replica of an American home. Whenever the Russian leader argued the superiority of communism, Nixon pointed to the products around them by way of rebuttal. In America, therefore, where anticommunist sentiment was running high, mass consumerism became a procapitalist statement as well as a sign of a relatively high standard of living in the nation.

Conservative values. The crusade against communism was just one manifestation of middle America's conservative values during the 1950s. Albee recognized the high premium society had placed on conformity, and explored its effects on the individual through Peter in the play. Peter has grown complacent in his bourgeois lifestyle, and Jerry tries to revive him from this "vegetative" state; according to Albee himself, the play as a whole examines "the intent to transfer the continuing awareness of life from one person to another" (Albee in Kolin, p. 94).

Some conservatives felt that the Cold War standoff between Russia and the United States also necessitated an anticommunist campaign at home. In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led the effort to harass and prosecute prominent individuals suspected of ties to the Communist Party. The witch-hunts he conducted became infamous for their nastiness, randomness, and success in blacklisting the accused. Some Americans denounced McCarthy and his policies openly, while others-especially government officials-thought it wiser to avoid the senator's scrutiny if possible. President Dwight D. Eisenhower himself refused to take McCarthy on, saying privately, "I will not get into the gutter with that guy" (Eisenhower in Bailyn, p. 1121).

Conservative Americans also tried to exert influence over the discussion of another topic of optimum interest: sex. Their insistence on oldfashioned values intensified as people in the 1950s became more willing to talk about sex openly. Albee's characters grapple with the delicate subject, too. In one example, Jerry uses gay slang and makes frank, hurried admissions about his sex life, as when he tells Peter:

For a week and a half, when I was fifteen... and I hang my head in shame that puberty was late... I was a h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l. I mean, I was queer... (Very fast)... queer, queer, queer... with bells ringing, banners snapping in the wind. (Albee, The Zoo Story, p. 30)

Three developments in particular worried conservatives: the phenomenal popularity of rock music, with its suggestive lyrics and rhythms; the fact that movies were becoming more explicit to win back an audience lost to television; and the published findings of a scientific team led by zoologist Alfred Kinsey. To Kinsey's surprise, his first exhaustive report, Sexval Behavior in the Human Male (1948), became an instant best seller. A second book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), generated even more controversy.

Critics objected most to the team's failure to pass moral judgment on its data, and they stepped in to fill this void. In regard to the second study, for example, the evangelist Billy Graham lamented that it was "impossible to estimate the damage this book will do" to American morals (Graham in Layman, p. 273). Like many others, he feared that discussion of sexual intimacy would lead to more premarital sex and a perversion of the American character in general.

Outside the mainstream. Inevitably, during the 1950s many people were at odds with the dominant culture's demands for conservatism and conformity. It was natural that those living far outside of the mainstream (or dissatisfied within it) often felt alienated and lonely. In the play, they are represented by the characters Jerry, the woman who cries all the time behind closed doors, and the black gay man in a kimono. When Jerry describes his landlady and her sexual fantasies, Peter has trouble relating to her: "It's so... unthinkable. I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are" (The Zoo Story, p. 34). Those who did not fit the prescribed model coped with their marginal status in a number of ways. Often they simply continued with their unconventional lifestyles, but some of them turned to psychologists for help in making a change. Although it was used widely in advertising, psychology had only begun to find gradual acceptance by the public as a means of rehabilitation. There were, meanwhile, extreme cases of those outside the mainstream whose situation culminated in their going insane or considering suicide. In The Zoo Story, Jerry says matter-of-factly that he is crazy, and some critics have even assumed on the basis of his mood swings that he is schizophrenic. Their reviews were likely influenced by the fact that the news media had recently started to make household words out of psychological terms and concepts.

A bold rejection of mainstream values was the only satisfactory reaction for some people in the 1950s. The Beats, for example, were part of an artistic protest movement centered in New York City and San Francisco. The popular media condemned them as unwashed, irreverent, and promiscuous idlers who were enamored of drugs like marijuana and amphetamines. The fact that many of them lived in Greenwich Village (also home to Albee) probably accounts for Peter's suspicion in the play that Jerry lives there.

Backlash against conservative attitudes was also evident at the movies and in the theater. Even mainstream moviegoers idolized Marlon Brando and James Dean, two actors famous for their roles as tough guys at odds with "the establishment." One of the most famous examples of a movie that questioned mainstream values was Rebel without a Cause (1955). In it, Dean starred as a teenager struggling against his parents, his peers, and the police to ultimately tragic results.

At the same time, a radical theater movement called Theater of the Absurd was making an impact on world drama. Absurdist playwrights employed techniques like unusually long pauses and seemingly incomprehensible plots that violated conservative audiences' expectations. The movement dominated the French stage after 1950 and later found one of its few American practitioners in Albee. Specifically the French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco influenced Albee's work. Ionesco's plays explore the notion that human life is fundamentally absurd and therefore terrifying, and that language as a means of communication is equally absurd. Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is a toned-down expression of this philosophy.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/the-zoo-story-events-in-history-at-the-time-of-the-time#ixzz1GDfUMfyW

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The Zoo Story By Edward Albee1

The Zoo Story By Edward Albee1

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