THEARTER the play The Zoo Story by Edward Albee - Thesis Example

Edward Albee's play, THE ZOO STORY1, takes place on a Sunday, summer afternoon in Central Park, New York When the play opens, we find the 1st lead character Peter, sitting on a park bench, quietly reading a book. Peter is a middle to middle-upper class male, text book executive in his early forties who lives with his wife and children on the upper east side of Manhattan. Dressed in tweeds, smoking a pipe and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, Peter is most likely a WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant) intellectual who graduated from an Ivy League college and has probably rarely associated with people outside of his class.

In walks Jerry, the 2nd lead, and the only other character in the play. Jerry is an fairly attractive, repressed homosexual male in his late thirties whose demeanor suggests a man who has known better days. It is difficult to determine Jerry's exact socio-economic status because, although he has clearly fallen on hard times, living in a single room in a boarding house along with an assortment of society's rejects, Jerry is very intelligent and it is clear from his few, reported possessions, that he is probably a writer, or at the very least, a struggling writer.

Jerry comes from a lower class background than Peter and has never known life on the upper east side of Manhattan. Jerry initiates the action at the beginning of the play in a direct, aggressive manner telling Peter, a total stranger, "I said, I've been to the zoo. MISTER, I'VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!" He is clearly the one with a mission and that mission is to make a connection with another human being. His desire is so strong that it is the driving force of the play. Once Jerry connects with Peter by eliciting his attention with the promise of "what happened at the zoo", he is able to unburden himself with his life story that culminates in "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG".

Jerry's willpower and desire is very strong because he has an ultimate goal beyond the conversation and that is to kill himself through the unwitting assistance of Peter, a goal he achieves at the end of the play. In this way Jerry is amoral because he uses whatever language is at his disposal to intimidate or patronize him, "Say, what's the dividing line between upper-middle-middle-class and lower-upper-middle class", so Peter will take the bait and engage him, which he does. When Peter first encounters Jerry it is clear that he would like nothing better than to be left alone with his book but he is too polite and too gullible to say so.

But there is something about Jerry that fascinates him and once Jerry succeeds at manipulating him through the personal information he reveals about having daughters instead of a son, it's the first chink in the armor as Peter's world's about to shatter. Peter's stance and decorum at the beginning of the play is one of moral ambiguity and indifference that later becomes upended. As Jerry cleverly paints a vivid portrait of his personal life in the telling of the dog story, Peter is pulled further into a world he has only read about in books.

Finally, Jerry goads him into the ultimate climax of the play by invading his physical space (tickling him), challenging him to take a stand by attempting to push him off of his favorite bench, (which Peter rises to by refusing to relinquish), and through bullying him physically with the word "fight". Once Jerry has gotten Peter to grasp the knife he offers him for self-defense, Jerry impales himself on it and dies, shattering Peter's upper-middle class world forever with his exquisite soliloquy about human life and loneliness.

THE ZOO STORY is about how human beings treat one another in society based on their class background, scio-economic status and core beliefs. Jerry's story about the dog was a parable about how we strive to receive recognition, whether it be in the form of affection or violence, from another living being, animal or human, to gain acknowledgement for our own existence in an often indifferent modern day world. In the end, Jerry succeeds at bringing out the "animal" in Peter and that's what he needed to help him die.

Albee does not judge Jerry's choices. Philosophically the play is about self-determination when it comes to how a man chooses to live or how to die. Edward Albee has been known to be controversial for his exploration and denouncement of upper class American values. His plays tend to be dark and challenging with themes of death, solitude and loss dramatized in many ways throughout his works.2 THE ZOO STORY was Albee's first successful play and it broke new ground in 1959 in establishing him as a new American playwright, unafraid to explore the dark side of the American Dream.

Works Cited 1) Albee, Edward. Three Plays. New York: Coward-McCann Contemporary Drama, 1960.2) Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.