Ideas on acting the play out. Is The Zoo Story really that absurd?

Edward Albee`s play is something quite easily acted out on stage, as it requires a minimum of props; on the other hand, it provides quite a challenging task for the actors playing Jerry and Peter (especially Jerry). The play itself is extremely short, so there`s a whole lot staying underwater, what we see and read is just an iceberg peak. All the issues discussed, the overwhelming, bigger-than-life-itself feeling of loneliness are hard to act out and to show through the veil of irony and bitterness – which also need to be acted out. With the naturalistic and minimalistic set-up, the audience stays focused on the people, on human emotions, and any occurring falsity is sensed and spotted immediately.
The lack of physical action and diversity of movement (Jerry stands or walks around in front of the bench where Peter is sitting throughout half of the play), the dominating role of monologue that needs to be carefully read into – at least taken in slowly and thoughtfully, in complete silence would make it extremely unrewarding to try to film The Zoo Story, unless the film in subject is a low-budget conceptual snippet “for madmen only”.
The absurdity of “The Zoo Story” has long been questioned, and it seems to me that the play could hardly be considered wholly a specimen of the Theatre of Absurd. Naturalistic elements are easily found in the course of the story.
The absurd theatre demonstrates the the failure of language as an instrument of communication. Jerry’s attempts to talk to Peter end in senseless dialogues, and they end up talking at cross-purpose. The absurdity lies in the dialogue because it is more or less Jerry’s monologue.
The theatre of absurd resorts from specifying the time or the place it depicts. Albee`s play is as well not bound to time, but rather a certain condition of the society that keeps repeating itself and comes back around every so often after major catastrophes occur on the frontiers of time.
The theatre of absurd sets value on a fictive location and the characters do not have any personality and are often nameless. In Albee’s play the characters do not only have a name, they are described exactly at the beginning of the story. Even the location is described in detail.
It is quite a popular task set forward by playwrights of the naturalistic theatre to represent a man captured in social and moral structures, unable to act free. Peter is captured in his clichés he cannot disengage from, his thinking and action is controlled by external factors. The issues the play deals with taken into consideration, its naturalistic trails become evident.
A central condition for the theatre of absurd is to consider the world itself as absurd without a way out of this absurdity. To my mind, Edward Albee was trying to see a way out, trying to figure it out in the course of this play. It does not strike me as a story bearing an atmosphere of overshadowing sorrow, desperation and exasperation. It suffocates but it leaves a window open, there are hints to salvation scattered about – in the rustling foliage, in the glimmering dew-moistened grass, on the rusty ornamented legs of a park bench, in the smiles of mothers and children playing together, something obtained from the crowds of businessmen marching decisively along the streets of Manhattan, in the smell of the cherry pie cooked for you by your wife… Something Walt Whitman-like has made its way into this essay, clearing its way through the buzzing herd of multicolored machinery of absurdism, its wheels spinning furiously… Perhaps this gleaming clarity was brought about by the very same half-broken machinery, making me “go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly”, giving me the opportunity to sense, rather than read, to instinctively grasp the hope and the plain truth hidden within the absurd.