Concern with idea, rather than character or plot, is not new in the American theatre, nor is the relationship between traditional symbol and naturalistic dialogue, situation and setting, however, never forced, as it so often is in, say, a Williams play. Rather, symbolism is part of the very fabric of the American play – a play functioning within, as well as enlarging, its surface meaning.
On the simplest level, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee employs symbols; their symbolism is almost always embarrassingly obvious. It calls attention to itself and exists as a kind of scaffolding which the playwright should either have built over or removed. For example, O’Neill’s symbolistic drama, which has, of course, shaped all later American drama, directs attention toward the symbol as a symbol, rather than upon a whole dramatic structure within which symbolism operates. The audience must identify the symbols and their equivalents to work out the play’s meaning.
What marks The Zoo Story as a new development of our drama is the way in which Albee blends symbol and meaning. Mourning Becomes Electra provides an excellent example. What is new, in modern terms, is the use of symbolism for the realization of an original significance.
In American plays, which employ symbolism, the symbolism is almost always a strong suggestion of the theme. Because American playwrights have been self-conscious in employing symbols, their use of symbolism is almost never embarrassing. Symbol and meaning are, therefore, internal to the play’s design.
The Zoo Story is concerned with human isolation. The world is a zoo “with everyone separated by bars from everyone else, the animals from the people”; that is, men are not only separated from each other, but from their own basic animal natures (as Peter, one of “the people” is, until the end of the play, separated from his own animal nature). The play opens upon Peter, who is seated on a bench in the park. As Albee tells us in his description of the dramatis personae, Peter is “neither fat nor gaunt, neither handsome nor homely.” He is, in fact, in no way distinctive. Peter is the modern version, middle-class Everyman.
He has the average number of children, the “right” Madison Avenue job. His is the New Yorker life which most middle-class citizens aspire to. He blends perfectly into the anonymous crowd in the park, has his own physicality, his own self, becomes interested in Jerry’s confessions, and is embarrassed by his own conventional small talk.
He would much prefer to steer the conversation into the safe, if shallow, waters of his brightly-packaged modern landscape. The “bars” which separate Peter from his own self, become interested in Jerry’s confessions, and try to expose it. Jerry’s candidness is the “right” that should belong to Peter, in spite of himself, and he consciously or unconsciously, would much prefer to expose the emptiness of his own life to Jerry, and, through Jerry, to himself.
He tries to separate himself from other people who are restricted by nature and talk only about material goods, the weather, or books. The only ideas with which he feels comfortable during conversation are the fabricated ones that surround himself. He indeed feels expansive when he launches into his carefully constructed isolation. Peter would prefer not to talk about the comparative merits of Marquand and Baudelaire, which to Jerry, his dislike of even Jerry’s opinions, is too polite and too afraid of anyone’s bad opinion.
In part, his isolation is forced upon him, but in large measure, it grows out of his need for truth. He is determined to discover the essential nature of the human condition. Therefore, contact by any easy means cannot buy love or understanding.
Jerry bribes the dog with hamburgers, he strips the obvious relationships of himself of goods and things, but this gains him only the tactical advantage of a strong box without a lock, a picture frame to race up the stairs with or a few extra minutes to play cards without the dog attacking him. Poor bastard, he never learned that the mind of the difference between love and sexual need.
Deprived of the usual family relationships, Jerry refuses either to sentimentalize or console himself with comforting justifications built upon memories of an unattainable range. But there he was, waiting with malevolence. The dog reflects all of the qualities which Jerry finds in the animals of his happy childhood.
The same urge for truth that enables Jerry to know himself also enables Peter to see clearly, for a brief moment, through the merely cause-and-effect barriers of his surface experience, to penetrate the interchangeable props whose function is to disguise the nothingness of his life, a life in which he is cut off from contact with any assurance that it can be sustained.
Jerry tells Peter what he has learned about human relations in his tale of enmity, caused by their isolation and fear. Their relationship is antithetical about human relationships, with any assurance that it can be sustained. They are a pair of armed relationships sizing one another up, waiting to spring or outmaneuver one another. Contact is made, but always with great pain and difficulty, with no guarantee that it can be sustained.
Any superficial attempt at conciliation at lulls merely causes him to throw up the emptiness of his life, life in which children, wife, and parakeets are interchangeable props whose function is to disguise the nothingness of his life because they are consciously preserved. Tickling, all experience, is merely a pleasure-pain theory of isolation.
