Actual meaning of the title (post-reading analysis)

Having read the play itself, I, of course, could put more thought into explaining and interpreting its title. The most immediate, off-the-surface reason is that one of the characters, Jerry, greets the other, Peter, with the words: “I`ve been to the zoo” and goes on to lure Peter`s attention by promising to tell him about “what happened at the zoo” throughout the play. Jerry tells Peter about the way animals live at the zoo. “I went to the zoo to find out more about the way animals exist with each other, and with people, too”. It eventually becomes clear that Jerry- at one point- uses the zoo as a metaphor for New York-even the whole modern society, where people live like animals in their cages, isolated from each other. They aren`t able to get in contact because they`re locked up in their own secluded existence. The zoo is also a foreign environment for the animals-a place where they have to smother their natural instincts and eventually become “vegetables”, as Jerry puts it, classifying the human species and making out two types. “Animals” have something to defend, and Peter becomes an “animal” in the end of the play, forced by Jerry to fight for his dignity and “his bench”, for his comfortable upper-middle-class values.
Peter lives isolated in his social class and has made himself a cozy second cage on a bench in Central Park, Jerry`s cage is the rooming-house he lives in. The stiff rules of socializing and “living normally” are the bars in Peter`s cage. Peter also has his “own zoo at home” – that does not only refer to his parakeets and cats, but also to the misunderstandings between him and his wife and daughters.
The characters in the play are trapped and lonely, like zoo animals. Jerry comes to Central Park craving communication, close contact with a human being. That is stated by his words: “Every once in a while I like to talk to somebody, really talk; like to get to know somebody, know all about him”.
Jerry is an orphan, just like many animals in zoos, who exist without full family structures. Each one of Jerry’s neighbors is like an animal put on show, a queer, exotic animal which nobody really knows much about. The “animals” in this house do not communicate with each other and do the same things over and over: a woman cries, the colored queen “plucks his eyebrows and goes to the john”. There`s also a fierce “zookeeper”, who is herself more like an animal – the landlady whose aim in life is to satisfy her basic instincts. She, too, could, by harassing Jerry, be striving to find some kind of communication and failing to do so.