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.

Associations with the title(pre-reading expectations)

“The Zoo Story” caught my attention at random. My pre-reading impression was unrightfully based on a couple of songs I really like, both bearing names containing the word “zoo” and hardly any resemblance to the atmosphere or thematic diapason of the play (but how was I to know that then?). The first song is called “The Zookeeper’s Boy” and it strikes me as a very pleasant, out-of-this-world, somewhat Scandinavian fairytale-like combination of voice, lyrics and music. The same could be spoken of the band playing it, which is called Mew. The lyrics do suggest a possibility of a comparison between people-animals, people-people and animals-animals relationships. The atmosphere of the song seems to be soaked through with love, cheerfulness and a feeling of being at ease with oneself, even though “evidently there’s a dark storm coming and the chain on my swing is squeaking like a mouse”.
The author of the song also compares the girl he`s singing to to a giraffe:
You`re tall just like a giraffe,
You have to climb to find its head,
But when there`s a glitch,
You`re an ostrich,
You`ve got your head in the sand.
This made me expect something like a kind allegory of a story starring a contemplative giraffe and some other animals it talks to and shares its wisdom with, at a zoo that is magically closed off from the rest of the world, or is located in a remote place, like a tiny suburban Swedish town.
Having also read a wonderful German story about a girl who wanted a giraffe for Christmas and her father, who got the zookeeper to hang a sign proclaiming the girl`s ownership over a giraffe at the zoo on the animal`s cage, I transferred the concept of a long-nurtured dream (the little girl`s) onto the allegorical character of the giraffe in what I imagined to be “The Zoo Story” – the giraffe, a bit of a philosopher in his nature, was supposed to be talking to various animals and then telling them a story with a veiled meaning, a parable of sorts. That is what I craved and expected from Albee`s play. Strange but true.
The other song I had mentioned that influenced my pre-reading expectations is called “At the Zoo”. It characterizes the animals as if they were human, e.g. “zebras are reactionary, antelopes are missionaries…penguins plot in secrecy”. What are those characteristics based on? It sounds a bit like Colonel Matterson`s ramblings in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest”: “America is.. the plum. The peach. The pumpkin seed. America is…tell-ah-vision.” But somehow, one, like Chief Bromden, can see-and sense- what they`re driving at.
Both of the songs I have mentioned have been recorded on the cd included in my course paper. Perhaps it will be easier to understand what I felt if you try listening to them.

The paper

I thought I`d start converting the paper I did for Prof. Volkova`s course into a collections of elements I can first post there and then on the site(soon as I figure out how to convert the former into the latter). The paper is a massive one, here`s the introduction:
The literary piece I’m analyzing in this paper could by no means seem an obvious choice; it could be called a risky one, even, if you ask me. Absurdist plays are not as popular in Russia as they are in the USA, and there exists a kind of a prejudiced opinion against those in the wider circles of our society. I even get the feeling that people are- afraid to explore the meaning (since it is stated that there is no clear meaning at all by the very name of the movement taken into focus) of such works of literature. The bohemian circles, of course, take interest in such plays and poems, but, to my mind, either tend to wave a thing or two off nonchalantly or immerse fully in the absurd or randomnisty to which they add generously so that they are no longer seen or heard – no self-assured, clear, ringing sound is to be made out from the fog of emotions and voices each speaking its own undisputable truth.
Giving what I have written so far a critical squint, I am forced to admit that I, too, am falling victim to the magical luring charms of what linguists call “the associational component of a word’s meaning”. Having conceded defeat in trying to express myself adequately with the means of language that are available, I salute the Absurdists and start nurturing a warm feeling of being able to relate to the desperation, vagueness, fragments-of-thoughts-swirling kaleidoscopically-in-the-head-type of atmosphere they wrote in(supposedly).
(...)

How Albee’s 'Zoo Story' Birthed 'Peter and Jerry'


Published Aug 24, 2007


1. In 1958, Edward Albee, a West Village layabout, writes a one-act as “a kind of 30th birthday present to myself,” as he now puts it. In it, down- at-heels Jerry and bourgeois Peter erupt in violence over a Central Park bench. Albee calls it The Zoo Story.

(Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)


2. Albee finds a Swiss actor-director, Pinkas Braun, who agrees to translate it into German and help stage it in Berlin alongside Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In the fall of 1959, Albee travels to Germany to see his first produced play. He doesn’t understand a word.

(Photo: Matthias Kulka/Corbis)

3. Back in New York, the Zoo Story gets a reading at the Actors Studio. Norman Mailer declares, “That’s the best fucking one-act play I’ve ever seen.”

(Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)

4. The Zoo Story opens in 1960 at the Provincetown Playhouse. Reviews are mixed, but it makes Albee an overnight sensation. By the mid-sixties, he’s won five Tonys for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Zoo Story is the second-most-produced school play in America.

(Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)

5. In 1981, Albee writes an alternate version called Another Part of the Zoo—“a comedy, almost a parody thing, for a gay benefit,” he says, with a new backstory involving a gay affair. His biographer, Mel Gussow, considered it an artistic low point. “I knew what it was,” Albee counters. “It was a joke.”

(Photo: Denis Scott/Corbis)

6. Albee’s career rebounds a decade later, but The Zoo Story leaves him unsatisfied. “We don’t learn a lot about Peter,” he says. In 2003, Connecticut’s Hartford Stage commissions him to write a first act about Peter’s family called Homelife. Albee picks Pam MacKinnon to direct the two acts together, and they debut there as Peter and Jerry.

(Photo: Denis Scott/Corbis)

7. Three years later, it’s set for a New York transfer. MacKinnon stays on, and introduces Albee to Dallas Roberts. Albee loves him as Jerry. For Peter, he goes with an old favorite—Bill Pullman, whose role in 2002’s The Goat had helped get Albee his first best-play Tony since Virginia Woolf.

(Photo: Courtesy of Barlow Hartman)

SOURCE: New York Magazine

An atmospherical song

Since this blogspot doesn`t host audio files, I am posting a link to a youtube video. It features a song I have just stumbled upon which doesn`t actually have much to do with the play I`m commenting upon here, but I thought that the overall mood is something Jerry could experience at times...When he felt at ease with the world around him.

Here`s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGykXOamGqE

Some background information

How did Albee write “The Zoo Story”?

After a period of severe depression, Albee gave up his job, and with his thirtieth birthday looming ominously he sat down to write a play. He himself explained, "I wrote 'The Zoo Story' on a wobbly table in the kitchen of the apartment I was living at the time—at 238 West Fourth Street, I did a draft, made pencil revision, and typed a second script, and that’s the way I’ve been doing my plays since. I finished ‘The Zoo Story’ in three weeks…."

The Zoo Story was read by a number of New York producers and duly rejected by them all. … Eventually it received its first performance in Berlin, at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt, on 28 September 1959—some four months before its belated American debut: at the Provincetown Playhouse.

In a way it is fitting that a play whish attacks so directly the indifference and sterility of contemporary American life should have received its first performance in Europe. It is as though Albee’s subversive nature had been instantly recognized by a theatre and a public of which he has become increasingly scornful. As he puts aptly in the play, "sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly"

Tone of the play

The Zoo Story sets the tone for most of his subsequent plays, for his subject here, as later, is America and what he takes to be its contempt for human values. To Albee, as to those other analysts of American decay Allan Ginsberg and Randall Jarrell, the zoo has suddenly become a horrifyingly accurate image of a society where furious activity serves only to mask an essential inertia and whose sociability conceals a fundamental isolation.

There is no disguising the heavily ironical tone adopted by the play’s protagonist, Jerry, when he announces that he lives in “the greatest city in the world. Amen.” For his apartment is in a crumbling house on Columbus Avenue, an address which itself indicates clearly enough the object of Albee’s satire and the metaphorically basis of his work. But in the face of indifference and complacency Albee does not lapse into despair. He stresses the need for man to break out of his self-imposed isolation to make contact with his fellow man. What he is calling for, in other words, is a revival of love.

"THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG"

Jerry lives in a large apartment building on the West Side in which the tenants are all outcasts of one kind or another. There is no contact between these tenants, and Jerry characterizes it as a “humiliating excuse for a jail.” Thus, whether the image be that of a zoo or a jail, the bars which mark human isolation seem self-evident. In the parable, the landlady is so closely identified with the dog that it must be accepted that Albee intends them to be interchangeable, as symbols. For the dog, which is as hideous as its mistress, has a permanent erection which parallels the woman’s sexual desire. It is also described as “making sounds in his throat like a woman,” while the landlady has eyes which “looked like the dog’s eyes.” Both the dog and its mistress attack Jerry in the entrance to the building, a Freudian image which links violence to sexuality in a way which foreshadows Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The symbolic nature of this story is further emphasized by an otherwise enigmatic statement which is a perfect description of the process of symbolism. Jerry explains that "What I am going to tell you has something to do with how sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly."

Jerry’s response to these attempts to make contact is the same in both cases. He repulses them. He sees both the dog and the landlady as a threat to himself as an invasion of the isolation which he has come to accept as the norm of human existence. He offers the animal food in an attempt to secure immunity from contact, and when this fails he attempts to kill it. Although the dog survives the poisoned food, it no longer attempts to make contact, but lapses into the simulated indifference which, Albee urges, is equally a mark of human relationships. It is at this moment that Jerry suddenly reaches the understanding which sends him out in search of someone to whom he can pass on his insight.

"An Act of Love"

Jerry recognizes that the dog’s violence had indeed been an attempt to make contact, and that, as such, it was an act of love: "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach other… was the dog’s attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" It is this message of the need for love in a world that places its faith purely in appearances which Jerry carries with him from the West Side; and it is, in effect, the ritual of Jerry and the dog that is now acted out on the stage. Peter now plays the role which Jerry had played in the rooming-house, while Jerry plays the role of the dog. So, too, Peter responds to Jerry’s intrusion firstly by kindly condescension, as Jerry had in offering the dog hamburger meat, and then finally by violence, as Jerry had in attempting to kill the animal.

Love, human contact, is an art which has to be learned. One has to begin with simple things, with a tree, a rock or a cloud. This science of love is essentially that which Jerry goes on to describe to Peter:" It’s just that if you can’t deal with people you have to make a start somewhere. WITH ANIMALS! … A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people …SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach… with pornographic playing cards, with a strongbox…."

From Rejection to purgation of illusions

Peter’s response to the parable is that of a man who can no longer find arguments, but who still wants to cling desperately to his creed. Peter shouts out "I DON‘T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE" and gets up to leave. This parody of contact stimulates a momentary understanding on Peter’s part of the nexus which Jerry has been trying to establish between the zoo and the nature of contemporary life. Peter admits that he had his own zoo there for the moment. But Jerry adopts the same strategy which the dog had used-- violence. He provokes Peter into a defense of his bench-- a mock battle in which e is seen absurdly defending the privacy and property rights which are clearly the basis of his values. But Jerry is determined that this violence will not revert to the casual indifference which had been the result of his encounter with the dog. Accordingly he throws a knife to Peter and then impales himself on it. The "middle-class" Everyman, then, has finally been released from the solitude which he had taken as a necessary and even desirable aspect of the human condition. As Jerry insists, he has been "dispossessed." Peter, at the end of the play, has been liberated from his false assumptions and is finally purged of his illusions. Never again, as Jerry insists, will he be able to retreat into solipsism; never again will he be able to repeat the frantic cry of the alienated and the disengaged, “leave me alone.”

Source: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/iacd_2001F/asynchronous_drama/zooandsandbox.htm

　

Good evening

I thought I would post a photo of myself here, just so that people can see who is working on the project)