Albee's "Zoo Story' at Villanova

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, a play about New York that was first performed in Berlin. In the half-century since, Albee has evolved from the great new hope of the American theater to its eminence grise.

The fact is, however, that of America's major playwrights, only its very first one— Eugene O'Neill— got better as he got older. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams both wrote their most memorable work as young men; so, too, did Sam Shepard, who has been virtually silent for the past 20 years.

Albee went his colleagues one better: He'd written his best work by the age of 34, and has been embarrassing himself for decades since then.

Having been anointed as the Great Hope, however, Albee coasted on his early success without ever being called out for such tedious exercises as Seascape, or such outright repellent ones as The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Instead, he has regularly received Pulitzers and Tonys. He has won the Gold Medal in Drama— a lugubrious-sounding award if there ever was one— from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Medal of Arts. Only beatitude has thus far eluded him.

Gay politics

There is no point in arguing all this, at least here. America needs an official Great Playwright, and Albee has been accorded the role. His plays have always received a ready welcome, even when the later works of Williams and Miller could hardly get a hearing.

I think it inarguable that gay politics has played a great role in Albee's success, albeit in no very obvious way. Tennessee Williams's homosexuality— certainly no secret to anyone who knew him (or could read between the lines of his work)— was carefully masked in public. Albee has never been openly gay in the way that, say, Harvey Fierstein is; nor has Albee written about gay life as such. But he was the first playwright whose personal homosexuality was an acknowledged fact, and no small part of his prestige derives from that. For gay artists, there is before Albee and after Albee. The very fact that his public persona is so reticent and austere renders him all the more iconic.

Not so liberated

Only with this in mind, I think, can we understand the historical import of The Zoo Story. From a gay perspective, it's very far from a liberated text; but when the character of Jerry announces that, for 11 glorious days, he was (not pronouncing the word, but spelling it out) a H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L, the effect on gay culture was almost that of an emancipation proclamation.

It doesn't matter that Jerry immediately hastens to assure Peter, the straight man he has accosted in Central Park, that his relationships have, but for this single interlude, been rigorously heterosexual; a gay audience, or the gay members of a general audience, would know at once that they were being invited to witness a homosexual seduction.

Straight audiences were puzzled

Of course, this is coded in the text, and what happens onstage is that Jerry goads Peter into stabbing him, a love-death scene that, for the cognoscenti, carried the pathos of still-closeted gay life, while straight audiences were left to puzzle out the seeming mystery of Jerry's behavior and the dark hints of urban violence it suggested. Five years earlier, The Zoo Story might have been impossible; five (or at any rate ten) years later, it might have seemed superfluous. Coming when it did, at the tag end of the buttoned-down '50s, it caused a sensation.

What are we to make of it now? For this script to work today, it needs to be played against the grain— that is, not as the suppressed gay love story it actually is, but as the parable of urban anomie that straight audiences tended to take it as.

Solitude in the park

To recall the familiar plot, Jerry accosts the mild-mannered Peter, a married man who spends his Sundays alone with a book in the park. This ritual suggests the desperate solitude of Peter's life, but Peter himself is quite unaware of it.

Jerry, on the other hand, expresses not only his own loneliness but also that of everyone around him: the drag queen who lives next door; the lascivious landlady who presses her repulsive attentions on him; and so on. He's really lonely, quite obviously, because he cannot find guiltless satisfaction in homosexual love, and in Peter he sees the alter ego whose walls of resistance he must batter down. If he can force Peter to acknowledge his own repressed homosexuality, Jerry can perhaps save himself; if not, he wagers his own doom instead.

No longer credible

This narrative won't play any more, for the simple reason that, although it still may not be easy to come out of the closet in Kansas, a resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side these days would hardly have difficulty in pronouncing the love that dares not speak its name. In short, Jerry's psychology is no longer credible to a modern audience.

Nor is Peter's naiveté, for his modern counterpart would instantly recognize Jerry's advances for what they are. So unless one wants to do The Zoo Story as a period piece, one must emphasize the menace and violence that Jerry projects. In short, one must turn the play into something Harold Pinter might have written, thrusting its homosexual component into the background.

The cost of doing this, of course, is at least partly to negate the text itself. But whereas a contemporary playgoer may accept the idea of a sinister character jumping one out of the bushes, he will hardly relate to an agonized gay love-call sung for 60 minutes. A modern Jerry would more likely just drop his pants.

An operatic frame

The production currently at Villanova University, directed by Joanna Rotté, opts rather for a traditional approach, and a naturalistic one as well. Whereas most productions treat The Zoo Story as a minimalist chamber play, Rotté has set it in an operatic frame, with trees and foliage surrounding the obligatory benches and a pathway down which assorted extras make their way as the action proceeds. The intention— underscored by a soundtrack noisy with city life— is, presumably, to remind us that the play takes place not in some existential void but in a crowded urban venue where the principals may be interrupted at any moment. The lost dog whose (normally) offstage owner begins the play actually wanders downstage in another touch of verismo. The effect, for this viewer, was a little like Sunday in the Park with George.

Rotté is also elastic with the play's timing, stretching its one-act frame to a nearly full evening of 70 minutes. It's clear that she wants to set space of various sorts around the spare text, emphasizing all the city's crowded solitudes and not merely the ones that Jerry (played by Chris Serpentine) and Peter (Will Windsor Erwin) inhabit.

It's a strategy that does pay some dividends, but at the cost of sacrificing dramatic tension. And that tradeoff is worthwhile only if one can use it to probe more deeply into the characters themselves.

The trouble with Jerry

Clearly, Albee intended to convey the pathos and despair of Jerry's situation. But what Jerry is actually engaged in onstage— his ulterior purposes aside— is pulling apart Peter's character, much the way a child might pull the wings off a fly. This is not endearing.

In short, the more one discovers about Jerry, the less sympathetic he becomes. In that sense, we can relate to him better as a predator— sexual or otherwise— than as a presumptive sufferer. (One must bear in mind that there is no verification of the story he unfolds for us; the drag queen, the landlady, and all the rest may simply be fictions.) All we finally know about him is that he turns Peter into an instrument of his suicide. At the play's end, Jerry's suffering, such as it is, is over. Peter's has only begun.

Better as a villain

I don't think Albee cares about that. His Peter is inauthentic, a closeted homosexual who doesn't even realize he's in the closet. As he flees the stage in this production, our attention is on Jerry, dying after his final aria. He hasn't been very honest with himself, either. But Peter, after all, hurts only himself. Jerry has ruined someone else. That being the case, I like him better as a villain.

Albee is essentially a naturalist writer, and Rotté has caught him properly in that regard. Albee's efforts in later plays to adapt symbolist and modernist effects are radically unconvincing. But he also lacks the human sympathy that's essential to the naturalist stage.

Williams and Miller care about their characters: What they suffer on stage, one feels, their authors have also suffered. Such isn't the case with Albee.

It's not so much that he regrets the human condition. He seems to regret humans themselves. ♦



For another discussion of The Zoo Story by Dan Rottenberg, click here.