Features of The Zoo Story
K S Sivakumaran
A fortnight ago we were taking about American playwright Edward
Albee’s Absurd Play The Zoo Story. This week we shall conclude focus on
the play with a little more information.
We may look upon this play as an American version of the “Absurd”
theme with a dash of Naturalism in it. The theme of the supreme
loneliness and anguish in man and his pathological need to communicate
with a human being receives a powerful focus in this drama of a psycho
analysis.
There is also focus on sex in the play. Richard Kostelanetz, a
welknown critic declared that the sexual theme is so insistent in the
play has seen the entire play as Albee’s description of a failed
home-his sexual past.
In the Park scene Jerry solicits, but Peter is reluctant. Once J
captures P’s attention, J tells of his vain attempt to establish
communication with his landlady’s dog. After this long monologue, J
starts to nudge P provoking P to make the battle more evenly match. J
gives P a knife which P holds out in stiff armed defence. He impales on
it and thanks P for comforting him.
It would now be clear that the knife symbolizes an erected phallus. J
impales himself upon its blade with rhythm suggestive of orgasm.
Even in his dying speech J confess to P, that because “you have
defended your honour. You are not really a vegetable. You are an
animal.’
Critics have explained that by ‘animal’ is meant a male who will not
respond to a homosexual part. By ‘vegetable’ on the other hand
accommodate.
While this homosexual theme exist as an undercurrent, Albee places it
in a larger Absurdist time of man’s loneliness and anguish and passion
for relationship in this universe.
Richard Kostelanetz |
Edward Albee |
Martin Esslin calls Albee one of the few American exponents of the
'Theatre of Absurd.'However, this is only partially true. Please read
Albee’s 'The Death of Bessie Smith' dealing with disillusionment is a
clear piece of realism. His 'Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf' employs
the conventions of the Naturalistic Stage.
I enjoyed the film version of the play starring the brilliant Richard
Burton and the charming Elizabeth Taylor.
We should remember that the American tradition represented by Eugene
O’Neil, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams has developed a strong
focus on psycho analysis, sex and the family and has deliberately and
pervasively concerned itself with the need and obligation for
understanding.
Martin Esslin says that the Absurd “attempts to make man face up to
the human condition as it really is. Since the dignity of man lies in
his ability to face reality in all its senselessness”
The Internet provides a lot of material on the Absurd Theatre, Edward
Albee and all plays by him including The Zoo Story. You may supplement
these with your own understanding and interpretation of the play.
Literature is enjoyable, it presents life in an imaginative construct
and we become wiser in understanding people, events and places.
So why not we develop a regular habit of choosing good books and read
them slowly in our leisure time?
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