Albee

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature
Contents
Chapter I: America And Its History of Theater 2
Chapter II: Edward Albee: The Man and The Writer .. 8
II.1: Edward Albees Life .. 8
II.2: Edward Albee: The Writer ... 12
Chapter III: E. Albee: An Exponent Of The Theatre of the Absurd ... 22
III.1: The Theater of the Absurd: Definition (s) ..22
III.2: Narratological Glimpses of The Zoo Story ........... 32
Conclusion ... 45
Bibliography 47
Appendix . 49
Chapter I: America And Its History of Theater

American drama, for all practical purposes, is twentieth-century
American drama. There were plays written and performed on the American
continent well before there was a United States; and during the nineteenth
century the American theater was widespread and active, with theater buildings
and resident companies in virtually every city of more than village-size. But, as
was also true in much of Europe, this theater was, with rare exceptions, not the
home of a particularly rich or ambitious literature.
The theater was a broadly popular light-entertainment form, then, much
like television today. It is possible to do artistically ambitious work on
American commercial television, but television is not likely to be the first
medium to come to the mind of a serious writerjust as the theater was not for
the serious writer of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that the
playwrights of the nineteenth century were without talent, but that, like
television writers, they were more likely to be artisans skilled at producing the
entertaining effects that audiences wanted, rather than artists looking to
illuminate the human condition or challenge received values. The reasons for
this general absence of literary depth or quality were many and not restricted to
America: in Britain and on the European continent the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries were also generally fallow periods for dramatic literature.
Yet in America, as in Europe, a change in the kind of literature being

written for the theater began to become apparent in the last years of the
nineteenth century. (Ibsen in Norway, Chekhov in Russia, and later Shaw in
England rediscovered the theater as a vehicle amenable to ambitious dramatic
literature, serious or comic.) As with many historical and artistic developments
in American culture, this was much less a matter of an organized movement
than of trial and error and accidents of time, place, and personality.
Shakespeare, of course, wrote about kings, and even ONeill wrote
about Lazarus and Marco Polo, as did Maxwell Anderson about Elizabeth I and
Mary Queen of Scotland. But the overwhelming majority of modern American
plays are about people from the same socioeconomic world as the playgoers
the urban middle and working classes. This is not a narrow range, and it can
stretch from the barely-getting-by and underemployed to the comfortably welloff.
But the extremes of the economic ladder, along with other fringes of
societyblacks and rustics, for instanceare rarely represented before the
1960s, except as stereotypes, and infrequently thereafter except in plays
specifically addressing minority subjects. Audiences for American plays were,
and are, likely to see themselves or people like them, or people they might
believably, with good or bad luck, be like.
As with the rebirth of serious American drama at the beginning of the twentieth
century, the discovery of domestic realisms power and potential,
especially in the form of the problem play, was not the result of conscious
artistic manifestos or collusion among writers. The form worked, so individual
artists were attracted to it; indeed, in a number of cases dramatists who began as
non-realistic writers or who went through a period of stylistic experiment found

themselves drawn back to domestic realism in later works: Eugene ONeill
most strikingly, but also Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and others.
That stylerealistic, contemporary, lower-to-middle-class domestic
dramawas to become the dominant and artistically most fertile and flexible
mode, the one in which the greatest American dramatists were able to create the
greatest American plays, and in which writers with varying agendas could offer
compelling psychological insights, political criticism, or social counsel. So
absolute was the superiority for American dramatic purposes of domestic
realism that when, soon after the middle of the century, some significant
historical events led to another period of experiment and exploration, the artistic
center held.
Absurdismthe idea that man is entrapped in an irrational,
hostile, impersonal, and indifferent universe where the search for ultimate truth
is an exercise in futilityseeps into American drama, with Jack Gelbers The
Connection (1959) and Albees The American Dream (1961). Artistic
discoveries were made at this timesome of them greatly enriching the
dramatic vocabularybut domestic realism retained its place as the native and
natural American dramatic style as new generations of dramatists continued to
discover its flexibility and power. Whatever the subject, however dominant the
social or political agenda, however particular or unconventional the life
experience being investigated, the overwhelming majority of American plays
continued to find that their concerns could best be dramatized through the
everyday, personal experiences of ordinary characters even as playwrights
continue to discover the same today, well into the twenty-first century.
No Western nation has shown itself so sharply divided in its attitude to

live theater drama as has the United States. For decades the performance of
plays was banned by law in America-understandable in view of its Puritan
foundation. Now, throughout the twentieth century, the writing and study of
drama, the training of actors, and instruction in all aspects of the performing
arts have been vigorously encouraged by universities, foundations, and local
communities to a degree far beyond that prevailing in Britain. And yet, if it has
shaken off that early coolness, the record of American drama in the past four
decades seems to fall short of what might be expected from the massive
encouragement it has been given. In 1963 Edward Albees Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? failed to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize because it did not
represent in marked fashion the educational value and power of the stage, a
criterion laid down for the Prize. Only when that condition was rescinded was
the Pulitzer Prize again awarded to a play, to Albees A Delicate Balance. By far
the most successful American play of all time was an adaptation of a novel by a
woman to whom theater was anathema; which was educational; and which was
presented in many of its versions with all the stunning resources of nineteenthcentury Theater: Uncles Toms Cabin.
Moreover, American drama has been hamstrung by what ought to be a
major strength: innovation. That, however, perhaps inspired by vigorous
industrial practice, has been elevated to a dramatic credo, as witnessed by
Edward Albee in his Introduction to Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao
Tse-tung, first performed in 1968: a playwright, unless he is creating escapist
romances, an honorable occupation of course, has two obligations, first to make
some statement about the condition of man, and, second, to make some
statement about the nature of the art form with which he is working. In both
instances he must attempt changethe playwright must try to alter his
societythe forms within which his precursors have had to work.
The overall impression of American theater drama is that it is subservient
to other media and performance arts. American drama is more remarkable for
interesting, occasionally outstanding, plays than as an art form and so attention
here is focused on a few plays by Williams, Miller, and Albee.
The dawning of a new century marked a distinct change in the style and
subjects of literature. Rural, agrarian lifestyles were fast becoming a thing of
the past as industrialization made factory work the norm, and many people
began to feel isolated despite living in big cities. Writers who identified as
modernists reflected this new sense of isolation and displacement in their
works. The entire Western world was also deeply affected by the devastation of
World Wars I and II, and writers responded by evaluating humanity's seemingly
boundless inhumanity. Women and minority voices became more prominent in
the 1930s and beyond, further expanding the canon. The Beat Generation began
in the late 1940s and writers reflected the growing trend of anti-conformist
thought.
Global war is one of the defining features of twentieth-century
experience, and the first global war is the subject of one of this periods topics,
Representing the Great War. Masses of dead bodies strewn upon the ground,
plumes of poison gas drifting through the air, hundreds of miles of trenches
infested with ratsthese are but some of the indelible images that have come to
be associated with World War I (1914-18). It was a war that unleashed death,
loss, and suffering on an unprecedented scale. These are among the issues
explored by the writers and artists of the 20th century.
Another of the twentieth centurys defining features is radical artistic
experiment. The boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first
decades of the century are the subject of the topic Modernist Experiment.
The Off-Broadway movement developed in the late 1940's as a reaction
to Broadway commercialism. Its primary goal was to provide an outlet for
experimental and innovative works, unhindered by commercial concerns.
But in the 1960's and l970's, off-Broadway itself became more
commercial and there- for less experimental. As production costs rose, more
conventional productions were staged. In the past two or three decades, many
Off-Broadway productions- such as the enormously popular musical have later
moved to Broadway, indicating that the distinction between the two has been
blurred.
The Living Theater had, in the early Fifties, been part of a growing OffBroadway movement that included the Circle in the Square, the Phoenix
Theater, the New York Shakespeare Festival, and the artists Theater, all of
which were committed to producing serious theater in small-scale houses
without expectations of commercial success. By the early Sixties, however, the
Off-Broadway movement had become, for the most part, merely an
unimaginative stepping-stone to Broadway, and a younger group of actors,
directors, and playwrights were looking for a way to jolt theater anew. The
playwright Edward Albee was a direct forebear of the Sixties Off-Off
Broadway movement, not only as the key American exponent of the Theater of
the Absurd, and not only because his own works were first produced in Off-
Broadway Village theaters such as Cherry Lane and Provincetown Playhouse,

but also because he helped produce younger playwrights. In 1963 Albee with
Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, his producers for Whos afraid of Virginia
Woolf? On Broadway in 1962 organized the Playwrights Unit, dedicated to
producing the work of younger playwrights in workshop productions at the
Village South Theater on Van Dam Street. The same group, as Theater 1964,
produced plays at the Cherry Lane, including LeRoi Joness Dutchman and
plays by Arrabal, Beckett, Pinter, and Albee and the East End Theater.
The most visible cooperative artistic venture of the early Sixties was the
Off-Off-Broadway movement. In the Fifties, Off-Broadway had sprung up as an
alternative to commercial theater, but eventually it was beset with financial and
artistic problems similar to those of mainstream theater. By the late Fifties it
was clear that most of the theaters were simply producing yet more bourgeois
traditional drama, plays by Europeans and by a previous generation of
American writers, ONeill, Williams, and Miller. This was not, in other words,
an outlet for young new American playwrights, except perhaps Edward Albee.
It also was no longer an outlet for new methods of staging.
Chapter II. Edward Albee: The Man and The Writer
II.1. Edward Albees Life
Born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C., he was adopted two weeks later
and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up.
Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate
Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first
gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third
wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
Albee attended the Clinton High School, then the Lawrenceville School
in New Jersey, from which he was expelled. He then was sent to Valley Forge
Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he was dismissed in less than
a year. He enrolled at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in
Wallingford, Connecticut, graduating in 1946. His formal education continued
at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was expelled in 1947 for
skipping classes and refusing to attend compulsory chapel. In response to his
expulsion, Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is believed to be based
on his experiences at Trinity College.
Albee left home for good when he was in his late teens. In a later
interview, he said: "I never felt comfortable with the adoptive parents. I don't
think they knew how to be parents. I probably didn't know how to be a son,
either." More recently, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that he was "thrown
out" because his parents wanted didn't approve of his aspirations to become a
writer.
Albee moved into New York's Greenwich Village, where he supported
himself with odd jobs while learning to write plays. His first play, The Zoo
Story, was first staged in Berlin. The less than diligent student later dedicated
much of his time to promoting American university theatre. He currently is a
distinguished professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches an
exclusive playwriting course. His plays are published by Dramatists Play
Service and Samuel French, Inc.
Immediately, Albee became perceived as a leader of a new theatrical

movement in America. His success was in part predicated on his ability to
straddle the two divergent traditions of American theatre - the traditional and
the avant-garde, combining the realistic with the surreal. Thus, critics of Albee
can rightfully see him as a successor to American playwrights Arthur Miller,
Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill while at the same time unmistakably
influenced by European playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.
Albee has also called Ring Lardner, James Thurber, and Jean Genet important
influences on his writing.
Throughout the following years, Albee strengthened his reputation with a
series of one-act plays, including The Death of Bessie Smith and The Sandbox,
which he dedicated to his beloved grandmother, in 1960. In 1961, The
American Dream dealt with themes that would be drawn upon in Albee's later
career. That same year, Albee adapted an unsuccessful production of Melville's
short story Bartleby with his friend William Flanagan.
Despite the success of his original work, Albee's adaptations - Carson
McCuller's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in 1963 and James Purdy's Malcolm in
1965 - have not been critically or popularly successful. Critics described them
as being static representations of literary works, simply transplanting existing
scenes from the books to the stage.
Albee's real successes have always come from his original and absurdist
dramas. His first three-act drama and the play for which he is best known,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was produced in New York in 1962.
Immediately it became popular and controversial. When its nomination for a
Pulitzer was not accepted unanimously by the prize committee, two members of
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the Pulitzer Prize committee resigned. Nonetheless, the play received the Tony
Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
After the failed McCullers adaptation in 1963, Albee's original drama, a
dream play called Tiny Alice, opened in New York. That same year, Albee
joined with two friends in creating an absurdist group called "Theater 1964,"
which produced, among other things, Beckett's Play and Pinter's The Lover at
Cherry Lane Theatre. After Malcolm closed after only five days, Albee
rebounded with the success of A Delicate Balance in 1966. For this play, he
received the Pulitzer Prize.
Albee continued to write plays throughout the 1960's and 1970's.
Everything in the Garden, adapted from a play by Giles Cooper, was produced
in 1967, followed by the original plays Box and Quotations from Chairman
Mao Tse-Tung in 1968, All Over in 1971, and Seascape in 1975. For Seascape,
Albee was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize. Counting the Ways and Listening
which initially debuted as a radio play in England was staged in New York in
1977.
Throughout the 1980's, Albee's playwriting career failed to produce a
substantial commercial hit. Plays from this period include The Lady from
Dubuque (1980), an adaptation of Lolita (1981), The Man Who Had Three
Arms (1983), Finding the Sun (1985), and Marriage Play (1987). During this
time, Albee also taught courses at various universities and maintained his
residence in New York.
In 1994, Albee experienced a much-awaited success with the play Three
Tall Women. That play earned Albee his third Pulitzer Prize and his first
commercial hit in over a decade. Three Tall Women also won the New York
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Drama Critics Circle Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Albee's most
recent productions have been Lorca Play in 1993 and Fragments: A Concerto
Grosso in 1995.
A member of the Dramatists Guild Council, Albee has received three
Pulitzer Prizes for drama for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975),
and Three Tall Women (1994). His play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962)
was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer by the award's drama jury but overruled by
the advisory committee. He received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime
Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors
and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996).
Albee is the President of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., which
maintains the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center, a writers
and artists colony in Montauk, New York. Albee's longtime partner, Jonathan
Thomas, a sculptor, died on May 2, 2005, from bladder cancer.
In 2008, in celebration of Albee's eightieth birthday, a number of his
plays were mounted in distinguished Off Broadway venues, including the
historic Cherry Lane Theatre. The playwright directed two of his one-acts, The
American Dream and The Sandbox there. These were first produced at the
theater in 1961 and 1962, respectively.
II.2. Edward Albee: The Writer
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Edward Albee, with nice irony, once wrote of how deeply he had been
offended when told ha was a member in good standing of The Theater of the
Absurd. The absurd theater, he considered, was the theater uptownBroadway. Such a theater pandered to the public need for self-congratulation
and it was a place avowedly in which to relax, to have a good time. The health
of a society, he argued, could be determined by the art it demands. We have
insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with
anything, that they be our never-never land. To Albee, the truly contemporary
theater was where an audience faced mans condition as it is.
Albees little polemic throws into sharp relief the dilemma of the
contemporary dramatist caught between pandering to audiences seeking
relaxation in a never-never world, itself a minority audience as compared to
film and TV, and dramatizing mans condition as he sees it to a coterie minority
of that minority. It is a mark of Albees achievement that he has resolved this
dilemma in a number of plays. In attacking the hollowness he finds in American
society he has also proved dramatically effective outside America: the ills he
diagnoses are not peculiar to his own society. Albees prime dramatic strength
lies in his marvelous ear for certain kinds of dialogue-for empty chit-chat,
lacerating sarcasm, and banality concealing hollow emotions which he uses to
serve his dramatic ends. No one writes with more cruel vitality of what is at
heart empty.
His second strength is his fierce, even demonic, urge to expose what he
takes to be the falseness of The American Dream, the title of one of his short
plays, which does just that. It was, he wrote in a Preface to it: an examination
of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values
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in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and

vacuity; it is a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of
ours is peachy-keen.
Some critics found the play offensive, to which Albee replied in this
Preface: Is the play offensive? I certainly hope so; it is my intention to offendas well as amuse and entertain. Albee can well claim to have offended
entertainingly in this and several other plays.
The third characteristic that marks an Albee play is a sense of uncertainty,
of doubt, even of terror of the unknown. He has a considerable gift for making
what cannot be precisely pinpointed dramatically convincing: Grandmas neatly
wrapped boxes in The American Dream, Jerrys motivation in Zoo Story, the
underlying truth of George and Marthas fantasy child in Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, the implications of the model and Julians marriage through
Miss Alice in Tiny Alice, and, if not quite so successfully, the terror that impels
Edna and Harry to seek refuge with Agnes and Tobias in A Delicate Balance.
Albee is capable, as it were, of dramatizing a fourth dimension and it is a mark
of what he can achieve in this respect that an hour of vigorous discussion can
prove illuminating and yet leave the mystery inviolate.
For so short a play, A Zoo Story is extraordinarily powerful. This is the
more remarkable because these are only two characters, one of whom, Jerry,
spends a considerable time regaling his unwilling listener, Peter, with the story
of his relationship with his dog, a story comic, cruel, and puzzling. Peter, a
rather retiring writer of textbooks, is found seated on a bench in Central Park,
New York, reading a book. Jerry is returning from a visit to the Zoo and insists
on engaging Peter in conversation. Part of the plays effect is a result of the
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frisson most of the audience will recognize from just such unwelcome attempts
to make contact. Peter is resentful and fears, with pathetic timidity, that he will
lose his park bench. Jerry has a great deal to say but little is about his visit to
the Zoo, and the play ends with Jerry impaled on his own knife, now held by
Peter. The play has been called more melodramatically pretentious in its
conclusion than seriously ambiguous by Walter J. Meserve and considered with
cold objectivity that might not seem unjustified, but in performance Albees
skill is such that we become party to Peters act, even though that act is
unwitting and defensive. By means of a combination of realistic and popular
dramatic techniques. Albee confronts his audience with its reluctance to become
emotionally involved in a concern for others. By this means inaction can be
shown as being as dangerous and as violent as action.
Tiny Alice shows considerable skill in its attempt to dramatize an
abstraction in the form of the reality or otherwise of Julians faith. Albee has,
with justice, argued that an audience can be assumed to be capable of grasping
more complex matters than simple addition or subtraction they regularly do
for Shakespeare but what remains in the memory of Tiny Alice is the
ingenuity of the contrivance rather than the force of dramatic illusion.
In A Delicate Balance, which perhaps received its Pulitzer Prize in 1967
because Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was denied the award in 1963, one
ageing couple descends upon another, driven to seek refuge from some
unexplained and undramatized terror in a neighboring suburb. With the family
with whom they take shelter there is also an alcoholic sister and a daughter who
has run home after her fourth marriage has failed. It is a play of wit, interest,
and style, but on this occasion the terror is too ill-defined and the assembly of
15
so many neurotics unconvincing. The play lacks the hard edge, the driving
compulsion, and the terrifying juxtaposition of hate and love that makes Whos
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? outstanding. In the latter, the mystery springs from
within the play and its characters; in A Delicate Balance it is asserted,
superimposed.
In Whos Afraid o Virginia Woolf? the sterile marriage and lives of
George and Martha, long-time members of a New England college community,
are contrasted with those of the young, starry-eyed, new arrivals, Nick and
Honey. George is a disillusioned member of what is regarded as a pass subject,
history, who has failed to realize his early promise. His wife is the college
presidents daughter, older than George, professionally outrageous, and
frustrated by his inability to advance himself. Nick represents the new; his
biology, according to George, looks forward through genetic engineering to
millions upon millions of tiny little slicing operations.on the underside of the
scrotum, an opinion expressed the more bitterly because of George and
Marthas inability to produce a child. Both families share an illusion. George
and Martha resort to fantasizing that they have a child; Honey had a hysterical
pregnancy. She blew up, and then she went down. The action is much taken up
with a series of blue games for the guests- Humiliate the Host, Hump the
Hostess, Get the Guests: game and fiction in effect take over from a life
rendered meaningless through its sterility. At one point, George tells Martha
that she has ugly talents and the play dramatizes with raw ferocity what the
American-or any other-Dream can be when superficial values have replaced
true virtues. The names, George and Martha, are, of course, those of the first
President of the United States, George Washington, and his wife. If the play has
16
a weakness it is that we cannot really believe in the efficacy of the exorcism of

the last act. Exorcism is the title of the last act and was a working title for the
play itself. Perhaps not even Albee can quite face the logic of an emasculated
dream that has become a nightmare.
More significant than Kopit, Edward Albee appeared at the end of the
fifties with a series of short plays in which irredeemably separated people grope
toward each other in alternate spasms of desire and hatred. Albees settings,
beginning with the Off-Broadway productions of The American Dream and The
Zoo Story in 1959, are bleak, unfurnished, vaguely specified boxes. Whether
indoors or not, the atmosphere is closed and airless. In each play a handful of
characters, sometimes just two, engage in verbal and even physical assault,
usually for no conventional reason. There is an echo of the theater of the absurd
in these plays and of slapstick as well. Events and their resonances, according to
Albee, are more important than explanations.
In Albees own reading of his work, his plays are chapters in a volume of
social criticism, an anatomy of a disordered culture from which love and
heroism have, understandably, fled. The analysis is never quite clear, but
capitalist greed seems to bear much responsibility for the emotional and
spiritual torpor of Albees characters. In a prefatory comment on The American
Dream, he argued that the play is an attack on the substitution of artificial for
real values in our society. In fact, the early plays were less memorable as social
comment than as dirges for a gallery of grotesque lost souls, fumbling to break
out of their isolation but ultimately subsiding into it.
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the most naturalistic of Albees plays,
was also the first to premiere on Broadway. It opened in October 1962 and
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quickly established itself as one of the indispensable works of the postwar

years. Set on the campus of a small New England college, Virginia Woolf is the
brutal record of the relationship between a middle-aged couple, George and
Martha, who have invented an imaginary son to replace the child they could not
have and whose decades of savage recrimination have brought them to the edge
of physical violence. The plays theatrical achievement lies in its dialogue, e
witty, articulate, ultimately dangerous and scarifying language that pierces all
the facades that protect each naked soul from the assault of others. For whatever
sentimental reason, the play lapses into an unearned optimism at the end; hatred
is redefined by compassion. In the final crisis, the characters apparently face
reality and outgrow self-deception. The titles of the plays three acts summarize
something of its weakly affirmative intentions: Fun and Games;
Walpurgisnacht; and The Exorcism. Albee intends no irony in this
sequence. Violence leads to a ritual cleansing and a hint of communion between
George and Martha.
Tiny Alice shared with Virginia Woolf a fascination with the blurred but
essential line that separates illusion from reality. The plays main character, a
lay brother named Julian, asks at one point if he was actually most sane during
his six years in a mental institution: WAS THAT WHEN I WAS RATIONAL?
THEN?. A less accessible play than its predecessor, Tiny Alice initiated a long
series of increasingly opaque work that has had difficulty finding an audience.
Committed to testing the limits of conventional theatrical experience, Albee has
refused to turn his early success into formula. His absorption in the tension
between reality and pretense remains profound, but his inquiry into themes has
relied on experiments that have proved sealed in obscurity.
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Among the younger playwrights of the fifties and sixties Edward Albee
seemed the most promising. The Zoo Story, The American Dream and Whos
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were among the first American plays to incorporate
techniques of the Theater of the Absurd, which Albee adapted to an American
idiom. In The American Dream, Albee does not deal with the degradation of a
lost ideal, as do Crane, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Nathanael West, and other
modern writers; his play is a devastating comment on the very notion that the
American dream is anything but a lifeless image of shoddy materialism
produced by the banalities of advertising. Like Ionesco, Albee is concerned with
the ways in which language fragments and thus controls perceptions of reality.
In this play the American family, the principal subject of modern American
drama, is reduced to a stereotype of impotence and greed; in Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, Albees best-known drama, it is a desperate connection
between a husband and wife who communicate primarily through contempt and
cruelty. Here, as in Tiny Alice, history is a mockery, motivation an illusion.
Albees nihilism, relieved only by shocking wit and the tension of impending
violence, seems to have defeated not only his protagonists but the playwright
himself, whose more recent dramas, for example A Delicate Balance and
Seascape have not had the impact of his earlier work.
The Sandbox is a one-act play written by Edward Albee in 1959. The first
performance of this play was April 15, 1960 in the Jazz Gallery in New York
City.
The play is approximately 15 minutes long and involves direct address by
the actors to the audience, their acknowledgment that they are performers in a
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play, and the offering of cues to the musician. The play received an almost
universally negative reception, as critics attacked the confusing, absurdist plot.
Edward Albee, in The Sandbox, not only presents as his main character a
Grandma who buries herself alive and speaks after she is presumably dead; he
systematically breaks down the barriers between his fictional world and the real
one. The musician, instead of being concealed in an orchestra pit, is summoned
onstage and told by Mommy and Grandma when to play and when not to play.
Grandma addresses herself much of the time directly to the audience and at one
time shouts to the electricians offstage, instructing them to dim the lights. The
young man reminds us that he is an actor by telling Grandma that he has a line
here and by delivering the line like a real amateur. When Mommy and
Daddy hear a noise offstage, Daddy thinks it may be thunder or a breaking
wave, but Mommy says, with literal accuracy, It was an off-stage rumble. In
short, Albee keeps reminding us that this is a play, not reality, and not even an
imitation of reality but a symbolic representation of it. The effects he gains
thereby are various: partly comic, partly antisentimental, partly intellectual; and
the play that results is both theatrically effective and dramatically significant.
Beginning with brightest day, the Young Man is performing calisthenics
(which he continues to do until the very end of the play) near a sandbox (or
sandpit) at the beach. Mommy and Daddy have brought Grandma all the way
out from the city and place her in the sandbox. As Mommy and Daddy wait
nearby in some chairs, the Musician plays off and on, according to what the
other characters instruct him to do. Throughout the play, the Young Man is very
pleasant, greeting the other characters with a smile as he says, "Hi!". As
Mommy and Daddy cease to acknowledge Grandma while they wait, Grandma
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reverts from her childish behavior and begins to speak coherently to the
audience. Grandma and the Young Man begin to converse with each other.
Grandma feels comfortable talking with the Young Man as he treats her like a
human being (whereas Mommy and Daddy imply through their actions and
dialog that she is more of a chore that they must take care of). While still
talking with the Young Man, she reminds someone off-stage that it should be
nighttime by now. Once brightest day has become deepest night, Mommy and
Daddy hear on-stage rumbling. Acknowledging that the sounds are literally
coming from off-stage and not from thunder or breaking waves, Mommy knows
that Grandma's death is here. As daylight resumes, Mommy briefly weeps by
the sandbox before quickly exiting with Daddy. Although Grandma, who is
lying down half buried in sand, has continued to mock the mourning of
Mommy and Daddy, she soon realizes that she can no longer move. It is at this
moment that the Young Man finally stops performing his calisthenics and
approaches Grandma and the sandbox. As he directs her to be still, he reveals
that he is the angel of death and says, "...I am come for you." Even though he
says his line like a real amateur, Grandma compliments him and closes her eyes
with a smile.
Through his one-act play The Sandbox, Edward Albee has extended the
allegory; his characters not only exist as symbols, but are more than vaguely
aware of themselves as such. As caricatures rather than characters, they
maintain a consciousness of their presence on stage as well as the stereotypical
rules and emotions they are meant to display. Specifically through Mommy and
Daddy's vacuous and immediate shifts to "appropriate" attitudes, Edward Albee
issues his value statement. In effect, Shakespeare's assessment that "All the
21
world's a stage,/And all men and women merely players" has been reanalyzed
and extended by Albee, culminating in a work which declares the conventional
conception of death as affected and contrived.
Almost deceiving in its straightforwardness is the opening note on
Mommy and Daddy and the "pre-senility and vacuity of their characters."
Daddy's ensuing questions as to what is to be done, and Mommy's resulting
composed answers set in motion the implication of an end-of-life ritual whose
spiritual meaning has long since passed away. At one point, Daddy asks
Mommy if they should conduct a conversation. Mommy responds, "Well, you
can talk, if you want to...if you can think of anything to say...if you can think of
anything new." Daddy's rejoinder in the negative establishes early on that his
and Mommy's existences, and therefore actions, are hackneyed, artificial,
mundane, and devoid of any true, personal meaning.
By the air of preparation which pervades the play, and by Grandma's
death in the end, a connection is made, and The Sand Box is duly noted as
Albee's address on custom surrounding the coming of life's passing. The
creation of a W W W W W W in which the actors are aware of their presence of
stage breaks ground for Albee's take on society's engagement in role-playing.
Requesting appropriate background music, and making remarks on lighting,
Albee's characters cannot escape discredit regarding the genuine. Similarly,
Albee greets the close advance of death with the suitable stereotypes of sudden
darkness, violin playing, "a violent off-stage rumble," and Mommy's brief tears.
Inevitably, the sincerity of Mommy and Daddy has been cast in doubt
and all subsequent words and actions bear resemblance to conventions. In a
remarkable shift of attitude, Mommy declares to Daddy: "Our long night is
22
over. We must put away our mourning..." They do so by gazing at an inanimate

Grandma and casually observing how "It's hard to be sad... she looks... so
happy." Mommy's hesitation, and Albees exclusion of a stage note
recommending a serenely content-in-death Grandma, indicates the affected
nature of Mommy's statement, and inherently, that of The Sand Box, as a whole.
III. E. Albee: An Exponent Of The Theatre of the Absurd

III.1. The Theatre of the Absurd: Definition (s)
According to The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary
Theory (1999) , The Theatre of the Absurd (French: Thtre de l'Absurde) is a
designation for plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of playwrights
from the late 1940s to the 1960s, as well as the theatre which has evolved from
their work. It expressed the belief that, in a godless universe, human existence
has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down.
Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech
and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.
23
The Hungarian-born critic, Martin Esslin coined the term "Theatre of the
Absurd" in his 1960 essay and, later, book of the same name. He related these
plays based on a broad theme of absurdity, similar to the way Albert Camus
uses the term in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus. The Absurd in these
plays takes the form of mans reaction to a world apparently without meaning or
man as a puppet controlled or menaced by an invisible outside force. Though
the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in
many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with
horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do
repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichs, wordplay, and
nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or
dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".
Esslin regarded the term Theatre of the Absurd merely as a "device" by
which he meant to bring attention to certain fundamental traits discernible in the
works of a range of playwrights. The playwrights loosely grouped under the
label of the absurd attempt to convey their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and
wonder in the face of an inexplicable universe. According to Esslin, the five
defining playwrights of the movement are Eugne Ionesco, Samuel Beckett,
Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter, although these writers were not
always comfortable with the label and sometimes preferred to use terms such as
"Anti-Theater" or "New Theater". Other playwrights associated with this type
of theatre include Tom Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Friedrich Drrenmatt, Fernando
Arrabal, Edward Albee, N.F. Simpson, Boris Vian, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel,
and Jean Tardieu.
24
Although the Theatre of the Absurd is often traced back to avant-garde

experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, its roots, in actuality, date back much
further. Absurd elements first made their appearance shortly after the rise of
Greek drama, in the wild humor and buffoonery of Old Comedy and the plays
of Aristophanes in particular. They were further developed in the late classical
period by Lucian, Petronius and Apuleius, in Menippean satire, a tradition of
carnivalistic literature, depicting a world upside down. The morality plays of
the Middle Ages may be considered a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd,
depicting everyman-type characters dealing with allegorical and sometimes
existential problems. This tradition would carry over into the Baroque
allegorical drama of Elizabethan times, when dramatists such as John Webster,
Cyril Tourneur, Jakob Biederman and Calderon would depict the world in
mythological archetypes. During the nineteenth century, absurd elements may
be noted in certain plays by Ibsen and, more obviously, Strindberg, but the
acknowledged predecessor of what would come to be called the Theatre of the
Absurd is Alfred Jarry's "monstrous puppet-play" Ubu Roi (1896) which
presents a mythical, grotesque figure, set amidst a world of archetypal images.
Ubu Roi is a caricature, a terrifying image of the animal nature of man and his
cruelty. In the 1920s and 1930s, the surrealists expanded on Jarrys
experiments, basing much of their artistic theory on the teachings of Freud and
his emphasis on the role of the subconscious mind which they acknowledged as
a great, positive healing force. Their intention was to do away with art as a mere
imitation of surface reality, instead demanding that it should be more real than
reality and deal with essences rather than appearances. The Theatre of the
Absurd was also anticipated in the dream novels of James Joyce and Franz
Kafka who created archetypes by delving into their own subconscious and
exploring the universal, collective significance of their own private obsessions.
25
Silent film and comedy, as well as the tradition of verbal nonsense in the early
sound films of Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers would
also contribute to the development of the Theatre of the Absurd, as did the
verbal "nonsense" of Franois Rabelais, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and
Christian Morgenstern. But it would take a catastrophic world event to actually
bring about the birth of the new movement.
World War II was the catalyst that finally brought the Theatre of the
Absurd to life. The global nature of this conflict and the resulting trauma of
living under threat of nuclear annihilation put into stark perspective the
essential precariousness of human life. Suddenly, one did not need to be an
abstract thinker in order to be able to reflect upon absurdity: the experience of
absurdity became part of the average person's daily existence. During this
period, a prophet of the absurd appeared. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
rejected realism in the theatre, calling for a return to myth and magic and to the
exposure of the deepest conflicts within the human mind. He demanded a
theatre that would produce collective archetypes and create a modern
mythology. It was no longer possible, he insisted, to keep using traditional art
forms and standards that had ceased being convincing and lost their validity.
Although he would not live to see its development, The Theatre of the Absurd is
precisely the new theatre that Artaud was dreaming of. It openly rebelled
against conventional theatre. It was, as Ionesco called it anti-theatre. It was
surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless. The dialogue often seemed to be
complete gibberish. And, not surprisingly, the publics first reaction to this new
theatre was incomprehension and rejection.
26
The most famous, and most controversial, absurdist play is probably

Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot. The characters of the play are strange
caricatures who have difficulty communicating the simplest of concepts to one
another as they bide their time awaiting the arrival of Godot. The language they
use is often ludicrous, and following the cyclical patter, the play seems to end in
precisely the same condition it began, with no real change having occurred. In
fact, it is sometimes referred to as the play where nothing happens. Its
detractors count this a fatal flaw and often turn red in the face fomenting on its
inadequacies. It is mere gibberish, they cry, eyes nearly bulging out of their
head--a prank on the audience disguised as a play. The plays supporters, on the
other hand, describe it is an accurate parable on the human condition in which
the more things change, the more they are the same. Change, they argue, is
only an illusion. In 1955, the famous character actor Robert Morley predicted
that the success of Waiting for Godot meant the end of theatre as we know it.
His generation may have gloomily accepted this prediction, but the younger
generation embraced it. They were ready for something newsomething that
would move beyond the old stereotypes and reflect their increasingly complex
understanding of existence.
Whereas traditional theatre attempts
to create a photographic
representation of life as we see it, the Theatre of the Absurd aims to create a
ritual-like, mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision, closely related to the
world of dreams. The focal point of these dreams is often man's fundamental
bewilderment and confusion, stemming from the fact that he has no answers to
the basic existential questions: why we are alive, why we have to die, why there
is injustice and suffering. Ionesco defined the absurdist everyman as Cut off
27
from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots lost; all his actions
become senseless, absurd, useless. The Theatre of the Absurd, in a sense,
attempts to reestablish mans communion with the universe. Dr. Jan Culik 1
writes, Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of
myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his
condition, by instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and
primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man
out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is felt
that there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of human condition.
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama is its distrust of
language as a means of communication. Language, it seems to say, has become
nothing but a vehicle for conventionalized, stereotyped, meaningless exchanges.
Dr. Culik explains, Words failed to express the essence of human experience,
not being able to penetrate beyond its surface. The Theatre of the Absurd
constituted first and foremost an onslaught on language, showing it as a very
unreliable and insufficient tool of communication. Absurd drama uses
conventionalized speech, clichs, slogans and technical jargon, which it distorts,
parodies and breaks down. By ridiculing conventionalized and stereotyped
speech patterns, the Theatre of the Absurd tries to make people aware of the
possibility of going beyond everyday speech conventions and communicating
more authentically.
Absurd drama subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically
impossible. According to Sigmund Freud, there is a feeling of freedom we can
enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic. As Dr. Culik points
Jan ulk (born November 2, 1952 Prague) is an independent Czech journalist and academic. He is the
founder and editor of the independent Czech Internet daily Britsk listy since 1996.
28
out, Rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects
of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite.
What, then, has become of this wonderful new theatrethis movement
that produced some of the most exciting and original dramatic works of the
twentieth century? Conventional wisdom, perhaps, suggests that the Theatre of
the Absurd was a product of a very specific point in time and, because that time
has passed, it has gone the way of the dinosaur. In a revised edition of his
seminal work, Martin Esslin disagrees: Every artistic movement or style has at
one time or another been the prevailing fashion. It if was no more than that, it
disappeared without a trace. If it had a genuine content, if it contributed to an
enlargement of human perception, if it created new modes of human expression,
if it opened up new areas of experience, however, it was bound to be absorbed
into the main stream of development. And this is what happened with the
Theatre of the Absurd which, apart from having been in fashion, undoubtedly
was a genuine contribution to the permanent vocabulary of dramatic
expression. it is being absorbed into the mainstream of the tradition from
which it had never been entirely absent The playwrights of the postAbsurdist era have at their disposal, then, a uniquely enriched vocabulary of
dramatic technique. They can use these devices freely, separately and in infinite
variety of combinations with those bequeathed to them by other dramatic
conventions of the past. In a New York Times piece entitled Which Theatre is
the Absurd One?, Edward Albee agrees with Esslins final analysis, writing,
For just as it is true that our response to color and form was forever altered
once the impressionist painters put their minds to canvas 2, it is just as true that
Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and
other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically
stretched across a wooden frame. It is also used in such fashion objects as handbags and shoes.
29
the playwrights of The Theatre of the Absurd have forever altered our response
to the theatre.
The Theatre of the Absurd will always have its detractors. But it lives on.
There is a tendency among modern theatre artists and patrons alike to
think of the Theatre of the Absurd as something outmoded--something that
vanished with the likes of the great absurdist playwrights: Ionesco, Beckett, and
Genet. Produce an absurdist piece today and you will likely be confronted by
well-meaning friends: Are you sure you want do that? An absurd piece?
Really? Do you think anyone will come? But produce an ancient Greek play or
an Elizabethan piece or a farce by some dead French guy and those same
friends will pat you on the back for doing real theatre. And yet ... isnt the
Theatre of the Absurd just as relevant today as it was fifty years ago? Has life
gotten less absurd? As far as I can tell, the absurdity of modern life is growing
exponentially. Maybe it's just me.
Admittedly, the Theatre of the Absurd, like abstract art, is not for
everyone. Some theatergoers aren't interested in extracting meaning from a play
that presents the meaninglessness of life, just as they are not capable of finding
enjoyment in a painting by Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock3. Their two-yearold child, they will tell you, could paint just as well. They want all of their art to
be easily digestible, whether they are in the art gallery or the theatre. It is easier,
I suppose, to recognize oneself in a photographic representation, but such
representations only reflect what is on the surface, whereas abstract art,
surrealism, expressionism, and yes, the Theatre of the Absurd, attempt to get at
Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential
American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock
enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile
personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who
became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
30
something deeper, something closer to real truth--a representation of our inner

being, of our fears, our weaknesses, our inadequacies, the archetypal human
predicament. It is, of course, more difficult to get ones mind around the Theatre
of the Absurd; we dont always have pre-programmed templates we can apply
to our understanding of it. But should art really be easy? Dont we get enough
mindless entertainment from our TVs? Do we really have to demand that our
theatre, too, subscribe to the dont hurt my brain method of entertainment?
Another obstacle, of course, is the fact that many theatre artists are afraid
of the Theatre of the Absurd. Its risky. Theyre afraid of looking foolish. If one
takes part in a realistic play, it's usually not necessary to move outside of ones
comfort zone, but with the Theatre of the Absurd, actors, directors and
designers may be forced to think outside the boxthey may find themselves
outside that comfort zone, doing something unusual. They may find themselves
forced to portray a raging pachyderm or waiting onstage for two hours for
someone named Godot who we all know will never come. A director may have
to find new ways to communicate with actors and with his audience. A designer
may be forced to experiment. But as theatre artists, shouldn't that be an
adventure that we embrace?
American dramatist Edward Albee once wrote, The avant-garde theatre
is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic and often wildly, wildly funny. If
you will approach it with childlike innocence--putting your standard responses
aside, for they do not apply--if you will approach it on its own terms, I think
you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content
with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block. You will not only
be doing yourself some good, but you will be having a great time, to boot. And
31
even though it occurs to me that such a fine combination must be sinful, I still
recommend it.
In 1962, responding to critical reviews linking him to the traditions of the
European Theater of the Absurd, Edward Albee remarked, Which theater is the
absurd one? He was pointing scornfully at the commercial Broadway Theater,
which had fallen on dismal days and stood in sharp contrast to the vitality of
Off-Broadway theater, he milieu from which Albee himself had come and for
which he has written his finest work.
Edward Franklin Albee, III, was foundling, adopted in infancy by a
wealthy theatrical family. Expelled from two private schools, he did better at a
third, where he had the opportunity to spend many hours writing poetry and
fiction. Much of his real learning, as with Eugene ONeill, came later from odd
jobs: office boy, restaurant counterman, Western Union messenger. Except for
one juvenile experiment, a three-act farce composed when he was twelve, Zoo
Story was Albees first play. Written in 1958, it was first produced in September
1959 in Berlin. The first American staging was Off-Broadway in 1960, and like
most Off-Broadway plays, Zoo Story is short, has a small cast, deals with
human encounter and the search for communion. Its authors structural pattern
is revealed: normal opening, increasing emotional tangle, peak of intensity,
quick drop-off.
Albees first full-length play, and his greatest hit, was Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, which ran on Broadway for two years, won many awards, and
was made into a memorable and successful film. Since that time Albee has
written an adaptation of Carson McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Caf, Tiny
Alice, Delicate Balance, All Over, and more recently Seascape and The Lady
32
from Dubuque. Albees later plays have marred by dubious excursions into
metaphysics and have failed to duplicate his earlier successes, yet they continue
to reveal a talent for wit and penetrating dialogue, and they offer compelling
portrayals of psychological and physical violence and of what Albee sees as the
complacency and emptiness of contemporary life.
The Absurdist abandoned all hope of finding meaning in life and
embraced a sort of nihilism. The Absurdist was convinced that everything was
meaningless and absurd. The subjectivity of a Romantic was appealing to the
Absurdist. However, even that implied that something was transcendent--a
desire--and the Absurdist would have nothing to do with that. (see J.A.Cuddon:
pp. 910-912)
33
III.2. Narratological Glimpses Of The Zoo Story

Albee's first play, The Zoo Story, is a one-act satire set in New York City.
It was first staged on 28 September 1959, in a production directed by Walter
Henn at the Schiller Theatre Werkstatt in Berlin. It received its first American
performance on 14 January the following year, in a production at New York's
Provincetown Playhouse, directed by Milton Katselas. The play centers on
Jerry, a young drifter, who encounters Peter, a conservative publishing
executive, on a bench in Central Park. Jerry attempts to force conversation on
Peter, becoming increasingly more personal and direct in his questioning as the
reticent Peter fails to respond. Ultimately, Jerry instigates a physical
confrontation with Peter, who defends himself with a knife that the drifter has
thrust into his hand. During the scuffle, Jerry purposely impales himself on the
blade.
While many critics have regarded The Zoo Story as an absurdist
condemnation of the artificiality of American values and the failure of
communication, others have described the work as an allegory of Christian
redemption in which Jerry martyrs himself to demonstrate the value of
meaningful communication. Martin Esslin has cited the play's attack on "the
very foundations of American optimism" as evidence for placing Albee in the
context of the Theater of the Absurd. On the other hand, Rose Zimabardo has
viewed The Zoo Story as operating not within an absurd Godless universe, but
34
rather a distinctly Christian one. She has termed the work a "modern Morality
play" that employs traditional Christian symbolism to present the theme of
"human isolation and salvation through sacrifice." Robert S. Wallace and Mary
M. Nilan, among others, have also explored the play's themes of alienation and
social polarization, and Robert B. Bennett has examined its religious and
spiritual content in support of his contention that The Zoo Story is a tragedy and
not merely a melodrama.
Plot
(a narrative of events with an emphasis on causality, as opposed to story,
which is a narrative of events with an emphasis on chronology)
While Peter is reading a book on a bench in Central Park, he is
interrupted by Jerry, a total stranger, who announces that he has just been to the
zoo. Anxious to return to his reading, Peter reacts with merely vague interest
and lights his pipe, but he is immediately made uncomfortable by Jerrys
queries about his marital status, children, work, and menage of cats and
parakeets. After repeating that he has been to the zoo and that Peter will read
about it in the papers the next day if he does not see it on television that very
night, Jerry follows several digressions about sociological class distinctions,
literary tastes, and his daylong wanderings. He also gives a detailed description
of his rooming house and its characters on the Upper West Side. Peter is
embarrassed to hear these sordid details. Jerry says that, unlike Peter, he owns
little except for toilet articles, pornographic playing cards, eight or nine books,
cutlery, empty picture frames, an old Western Union typewriter that prints
35
nothing but capital letters, and a small box containing letters and some searounded rocks that he picked up on a beach when he was a boy. Then he tells of
his mothers desertion of his father and him, as well as her promiscuity,
alcoholism, and death at Christmas. He continues with his fathers accidental
death and the demise, on Jerrys high school graduation day, of his guardian, a
dour aunt. Jerry confides that his relationships with women are limited to
solitary encounters with prostitutes and that his only love affair was a brief one,
at age fifteen, with a Greek boy. Then he launches into a long monologue about
his disgusting, lusty, alcoholic landlady and her ugly, savage black dog that
attacked Jerry daily whenever he tried to enter the rooming house, although he
attempted to pacify it by feeding it hamburger for six days. On the seventh day,
he poisoned the meat, and the dog fell extremely ill. Strangely, Jerry no longer
wanted the dog to die; he had come to believe that if he could somehow make
contact with the dog, he could then make contact with people. The moment of
contact passed, however, and was lost. From then on, Jerry and the dog lapsed
into mutual indifference. Jerry claims to have learned from this misadventure
that kindness and cruelty, like other conflicting emotions, are the reality of
being. This story has a hypnotic effect on Peter, who makes no comment during
its lengthy recitation. Grotesquely exhausted at the end of the story, Jerry sits
down on the bench beside Peter and sees that he has annoyed and confused
Peter instead of making a breakthrough in communication. Suddenly playful, he
tickles Peters ribs, driving Peter into almost hysterical laughter. He pokes
Peter, then punches him in the arm and forces him to move down the bench.
Easily goaded by Jerrys insults to his manhood, Peter decides to fight for the
bench, but when Jerry clicks open a knife and tosses it at him, Peter refuses to
36
pick it up. Jerry rushes over, grabs him by the collar, slaps him, spits on his
face, and forces Peter to dart for the knife. Then, sighing heavily, Jerry charges
Peter and impales himself on the knife. As Jerry crumbles back onto the bench,
with his eyes and mouth wide in agony, his voice acquires an eerie remoteness.
Peter is transfixed as Jerry, with faint laughter, tries to summarize in broken,
disjointed sentences his knowledge of his own actions. The world, he has found,
is a zoo, and he thanks Peter for ending his anguished life. Slowly wiping clean
the knife handle with his own handkerchief, Jerry urges Peter to hurry away. As
Peter retreats with a pitiable howl, Jerry ends the play with a combination of
scornful mockery and a desperate supplication to the God who failed to give
him a cure for his desperate alienation.
Exposition
( the presentation of the circumstances obtaining before the BEGINNING of the
action)
The excerpt below presents the moment when the two characters, Peter and
Jerry, decide to break the ice and talk to each other.
JERRY: I've been to the zoo. [PETER doesn't notice.] I said, I've been
to the zoo. MISTER, I'VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!
PETER: Hm? . . . What? . . . I'm sorry, were you talking to me?
JERRY: I went to the zoo, and then I walked until I came here. Have
I been walking north?
37
PETER: [puzzled] North? Why . . I . . . I think so. Let me see.

JERRY: [pointing past the audience] Is that Fifth avenue?
PETER: Why ya; yes, it is.
JERRY: And what is that cross street there; that one, to the right?
PETER: That? Oh, that's Seventy-fourth Street.
JERRY: And the zoo is around Sixty-5fth Street; so, I've been walking
north.
PETER: [anxious to get back to his reading] Yes; it would seem so.
JERRY: Good old north.
PETER: [lightly, by reflex] Ha, ha.
JERRY: [after a slight pause] But not due north.
PETER: I ... well, no, not due north; but, we ... call it north. It's
northerly.
The play opens with an insignificant conflict: Jerry keeps asking Peter lots of
questions, which badly annoys the latter .
JERRY: [watches as PETER, anxious to dismiss him, prepares his pipe]
Well, boy, you're not going to get lung cancer, are you?
PETER: [looks up, a little annoyed, then smiles] No, sir. Not from this.
JERRY: No, sir. What you'll probably get is cancer of the mouth, and
then you'll have to wear one of those things Freud wore after
they took one whole side of his jaw away, What do they call
those things ?
38
PETER: [uncomfortable] A prosthesis?

JERRY: The very thing! A prosthesis. You're an educated man, aren't
you ? Are you a doctor ?
PETER: Oh, no; no. I read about it somewhere: Time magazine, I think.
[He turns to his book.]
Then when Jerry asked about Peters family and sons
JERRY: And you have children.
PETER: Yes; two.
JERRY: Boys?
PETER: No, girls ... both girls.
JERRY: But you wanted boys.
PETER: Well ... naturally, every man wants a son, but ...
JERRY: [lightly mocking] But that's the way the cookie crumbles?
PETER: [annoyed] I wasn't going to say that.
JERRY: And you're not going to have any more kids, are you?
PETER: [a bit distantly] No. No more. [Then back, and irksome] Why
did you say that? How would you know about that?
JERRY: The way you cross your legs, perhaps; something in the voice.
Or maybe I'm just guessing. Is it your wife?
PETER: [furious] That's none of your business! [A silence.] Do you
understand? [JERRY nods. PETER is quiet now.] Well, you're
right. We'll have no more children.
Conflict
39
(the struggle in which the ACTORS are engaged. The latter can fight against
Fate or destiny, against their social or physical environment, or against one
another (external conflict), and they can fight against themselves (internal or
inner conflict)
What follows illustrates the struggle in which Jerry and Peter are engaged:
JERRY: Now I'll let you in on what happened at the zoo; but
first, I should tell you why I went to the zoo. I went to the zoo to
find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way
animals exist with each other, and with people too. It probably
wasn't a fair test, what with everyone separated by bars from
everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other,
and always the people from the animals. But, if it's a zoo,
that's the way it is. [He pokes Peter on the arm.] Move over.
..
JERRY: [smiling slightly] Well, all the animals are there, and
all the people are there, and it's Sunday and all the children
are there.
[He pokes Peter again.] Move over.
...
JERRY: And I am there, and it's feeding time at the lion's
house, and the lion keeper comes into the lion cage, one of the
lion cages, to feed one of the lions.
40
[Punches Peter on the arm, hard.] MOVE OVER!

PETER: [very annoyed] I can't move over any more,
and stop hitting me. What's the matter with you?
..
JERRY: I'm crazy, you bastard.
PETER: That isn't funny.
JERRY: Listen to me, Peter. I want this bench. You go sit
on the bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the
rest of the story.
JERRY: You put things well; economically, and, yet ...

oh, what is the word I want to put justice to your ... JESUS,
you make me sick ... get off here and give me my bench.
PETER: MY BENCH!
..
PETER: [regaining his position] God da ... mn you. That's
enough! I've had enough of you. I will not give up this bench;
you can't have it, and that's that. Now, go away.
[JERRY snorts but does not mow.] Go away, I said.
.
PETER: POLICE! I warn you, I'll have you arrested. POLICE!
[Pause.] I said POLICE! [Pause.] I feel ridiculous.
JERRY: You look ridiculous: a grown man screaming
for the police on a bright Sunday afternoon in the park with
nobody harming you. If a policeman did fill his quota and
41
come sludging over this way he'd probably take you in

as a nut.
..
PETER: GET OUT !
JERRY: No.
PETER: I WARN YOU !
JERRY: Do you know how ridiculous you look now ?
PETER: [his fury and self-consciousness have possessed
him] It doesn't matter. [He is almost crying.] GET AWAY
FROM MY BENCH!
.
JERRY: I'll have to give you credit for one thing:
you are a vegetable, and a slightly near-sighted one,
I think ...
PETER: THAT'S ENOUGH....
JERRY: ... but, you know, as they say on TV all the time
you know and I mean this, Peter, you have a certain
dignity; it surprises me ....
PETER: STOP!
Climax
(the point of greatest tension, the culminating point in a progressive
intensification)
42
The reader witnesses the culminating point in the play: Jerry impaled on the
knife at th end of Peters still firm arm.
JERRY: [rises lazily]: Very well, Peter, we'll battle for
the bench, but we're not evenly matched. [He takes out
and clicks open an ugly-looking knife.]
PETER: [suddenly awakening to the reality of the situation]
You are mad! You're stark raving mad! YOU'RE GOING TO
KILL ME!
[But before Peter has time to think what to do,
JERRY tosses the knife at Peter's feet.]
JERRY: There you go. Pick it up. You have the knife
and we'll be more evenly matched.
PETER: [horrified] No!
[JERRY rushes over to Peter, grabs him by the collar;
PETER rises; their faces almost touch.]
JERRY: Now you pick up that knife and you fight with me.
You fight for your self-respect; you fight for that goddamned
bench.
PETER: [struggling] No! Let ... let go of me! He... Help!
JERRY: [slaps Peter on each "fight"] You fight, you miserable
bastard; fight for that bench; fight for your parakeets; fight for
your cats; fight for your two daughters; fight for your wife;
fight for your manhood, you pathetic little vegetable.
[Spits in Peter's face] You couldn't even get your wife
43
with a male child.

PETER: [breaks away, enraged] It's a matter of genetics, not
manhood, you ... you monster. [He darts down, picks up the
knife and backs of a little; breathing heavily.] I'll give you one
last chance; get out of here and leave me alone! [He holds the
knife with a firm arm, but far in front of him, not to attack, but to
defend]
JERRY: [sighs heavily] So be it !
[With a rush he charges Peter and impales himself on the knife.
Tableau: For just a moment, complete silence, JERRY impaled
on the knife at the end of Peter's still firm arm. Then PETER
screams, pulls away, leaving the knife in JERRY. JERRY is
motionless, on point. Then he, too, screams, and it must be the
sound of an infuriated and fatally wounded animal. With the
knife in him, he stumbles back to the bench that Peter had
Dacated. He crumbles there, sitting, facing Peter, his eyes wide
in agony, his mouth open.]
Denouement
(the outcome or untying of the PLOT; the UNRAVELLING of the complication)
The fragment below shows Jerry die.
PETER: [whispering] Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God ...
[PETER repeats these words many times, very rapidly. JERRY is
44
dying; but now his expression seems to change. His features

relax, and while his voice varies, sometimes wrenched with
pain, for the most part he seems removed from his dying. He
smiles.]
JERRY: Thank you, Peter. I mean that, now; thank you very much.
[PETERS mouth drops open. He cannot move; he is
transfixed.] Oh, Peter, I was so afraid Id drive you away. [He
laughs as best he can.] You dont know how afraid I was youd
go away and leave me. And now Ill tell you what happened at
the zoo. I think I think this is what happened at the zoo I
think. I think that while I was at the zoo I decided that I would
walk north northerly, rather until I found you or
somebody and I decided that I would talk to you I would
tell you things and things that I would tell you would
Well, here we are. You see ? Here we are. But I dont know
could I have planned all this? No no, I couldnt have.
But I think I did. And now Ive told you what you wanted to know,
havent I? And now you know all about what happened at the
zoo. And now you know what youll see in your TV, and the
face I told you about you remember the face I told you
about my face, the face you see right now. Peter Peter?
Peter thank you. I came unto you [He laughs, so faintly.] and
you have comforted me. Dear Peter.
PETER: [almost fainting] Oh my God!
JERRY: Youd better go now. Somebody might come by, and
45
you dont want to be here when anyone comes.

PETER: [does not move, but begins to weep] Oh my God,
oh my God.
JERRY: [most faintly, now; he is very near death]: You wont
becoming back here anymore, Peter; youve been dispossessed.
Youve lost your bench, but youve defended your honour. And
Peter, Ill tell you something now; youre not really a vegetable;
its all right, youre an animal. Youre an animal, too. But youd
better hurry now, Peter. Hurry, youd better go see? [JERRY
takes a handkerchief and with great effort and pain wipes the
knife handle clean of fingerprints.] Hurry away, Peter. [PETER
begins to stagger away.] Wait wait, Peter. Take your book
book. Right here beside me on your bench my bench,
rather. Come take your book. [PETER starts for the book, but
retreats.] Hurry Peter. [PETER rushes to the bench, grabs
the book, retreats.] Very good, Peter very good. Now
hurry away. [PETER hesitates for a moment, then flees,
stage-left.] Hurry away [His eyes are closed now.] Hurry
away, your parakeets are making the dinner the cats are
setting the table
PETER: [off stage, a pitiful howl] OH MY GOD!
JERRY: [his eyes still closed, he shakes his head and speak;
a combination of scornful mimicry and supplication] Oh my
God. [He is dead.]
46
Characters
(any of the persons involved in a story)
When the curtain rises, the two characters of the play are two strangers with
nothing in common. They accidentally meet on a park bench. They begin to
talk to each other but soon they discover that it is almost impossible for them to
communicate. The difference between them, that is, Peter and Jerry is striking.
Peter is a moderately successful, well-mannered bourgeois family man
whereas Jerry is a lonely, bohemian rebel, an outcast. Jerry tries to tell Peter
what happened to him at the zoo, which, actually, unveils his problem of
communication. But, instead, he speaks about an old hostility between himself
and a dog, a hostility that turned into mutual respect only when he nearly
succeeded in poisening the dog. Violence is both for Jerry and Peter the only
possible way of communication. Jerry compels Peter to kill him
he thinks
that his death will put an end to his endless conflicts with Peters society. Peter,
instead, is no longer the same man because of the change he has suffered: he
cannot deny any longer his complicity. The three stories told by Jerry (about the
house he lives in as well as his neighbours; about the dog and the zoo) and
Peters life, on the other hand, bring forth the two conflicting forces built on the
pattern of reality and illusion.
There is a similarity between the way in which animals live in the zoo
and the way in which human beings live together, communicate with one
another. Life or society is a kind of zoo, the bars separate animals and feelings,
money, color of skin, race, religion, social class, attitudes, interests and lack of
47
interests, generation gap, people. Jerry wants to die, because he cannot bear this
situation. The zoo is a microcosm of real life.
As Peter Conn remarks, Albees plays are chapters in a volume of social criticism,
an anatomy of a disordered culture from which love and heroism have, understandably, fled.
The analysis is never quite clear, but capitalist greed seems to bear much responsibility for
the emotional and spiritual torpor of Albees characters.( 1989 p 477)
CONCLUSION
Edward Albee appeared at the end of the fifties with a series of short
plays in which irredeemably separated people grope toward each other in
alternate spasms of desire and hatred. (Peter Conn: 1989: 477)
His plays reveal the very conflict between two traditions: the American
and the Absurd. The American prescribes that man must attempt to make sense
of his environment. The Absurd, instead, attempts to make man face up to the
human condition as it really is to free him from illusions that are bound to cause
constant maladjustment and disappointment for the dignity of man lies in his
ability to face reality in all its senselessness (Martin Esslin: op cit p 57)
Albee is considered to be a precursor of the American experimental
avant-garde. His plays are open to exploration, pathfinding, innovation and
invention, that is, to something new, something advanced (ahead of time) and
revolutionary.
The absurd drama he wrote mingles the realistic elements with fantastic
ones to present a savagely satirical attack on spiritual sterility, blandness,
conformity, and hypocrisy, and to summon up with deep feeling the tragedy of
alienation.
48
Albee's The Zoo Story shows the image of the difficulty of

communication between human beings in our world. Like all the other
playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd Albee expresses in his plays a deep
sense of disillusionment, a collapse of all previously held firm beliefs. The
social and spiritual reasons for such a sense of loss of meaning are manifold and
complex. The world of the mid-twentieth century has lost its meaning and has
simply ceased to make sense. Unfortunately, man sees himself faced with a
universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd. All assurances
of hope, all explanations of ultimate meaning have suddenly been unmasked as
nonsensical illusions, empty chatter, whistling in the dark.
An adopted child himself Albee shares the orphan's sense of loneliness in
an alien world; and the image of the dream child which exists only in the
adoptive parents' imagination recurs in a number of his plays, notably The
American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
If the latter is,
undoubtedly, one of the finest American plays since the heyday of Eugene
O'Neill, the former is a grotesque comedy in one scene. The latter is a savage
dance of death reminiscent of Strindberg, outwardly realistic in form, but in
fact, as in the case of Pinter's best work, existing on at least two levels apart
from the realistic one: as an allegory of American society, a poetic image of its
emptiness and sterility, and as a complex ritual on the pattern of Genet. The Zoo
Story (1958), one of Albee's earliest dramatic ventures, has a similar
complexity: it is a clinically accurate study of Schizophrenia, an image of man's
loneliness and inability to make contact, and also, on the ritual and symbolic
level, an act of ritual self-immolation that has curious parallels with Christ's
atonement. (Note the names Jerry - Jesus? - and Peter).
49
It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery

and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because
there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately
man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of
comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom
and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not
provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
Bibliography
Laurence Perrine, Literature Structure, Sound and Sense, third edition, USA:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, INC., 1978
Benjamin de Mott, Close Imaging An Introduction to Literature, New York:
Bedford, St. Martins Press, INC, 1988
Albee, Edward. The American Dream and The Zoo Story: New York: Plume,
1997.
Frederick Crews, J.C. Levenson, Leo Marx, David E. Smith, Anthology of
American Literature, Volume II, Realism to the Present, New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., Inc., 1980
50
Boris Ford, American Literature, volume 9 of the new Pelican guide to English
literature, published by the Penguin Group, USA, 1991
Peter Conn, Literature in America, An illustrated history, USA, Cambridge
University Press, 1989
Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to Postmodernism, A
history of American Literature, published by the Penguin Group, USA, 1991
Martin Esslin, Introduction to Absurd Drama, Penguin Books, 1965
Bert Cardullo, American Drama/Critics, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK,
2007
Susan C.W. Abbotson, Masterpieces of 20th century American Drama,
Greenwood Press, London, 2005
Britanica Educational Publishing, American Literature from 1945 Through
Today, Edited by Adam Augustin, 2010
51
APPENDIX
QUOTES ON ABSURDISM
Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us
in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open
up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the
same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd,
but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in
my protest.
ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel
52
The Theatre of the Absurd ... can be seen as the reflection of what seems
to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time. The hallmark
of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions
of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found
wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish
illusions.
MARTIN ESSLIN, The Theatre of the Absurd
The trouble with absurdism is that it dances with fate around the
quicksand of nihilism.
JOE KINCHELOE, "Fiction Formulas"
Two strongly influential movements--naturalism and absurdism--have
polarized western theatre, arguing respectively for a tidy global perspective of
human behavior or for an idiosyncratic local vision, in which ultimately no
human behavioral patterns can be abstracted. One is left to choose between
existence represented as strict linear determinism or as utter randomness.
WILLIAM DEMASTES, Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition
Absurdism, I would argue, itself is a strategic domestication of
modernism. The category subsumes a heterogeneous body of intensely specific
works under a series of unequivocal generalizations. With its user-friendly
philosophical precepts, absurdism allows a reassuring aura of meaningfulness to
emerge from recalcitrant works.
53
VARUN BEGLEY, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable
response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in
American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The
American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television
advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making
machines.
ARNOLD ARONSON, The Cambridge History of American Theatre
Realism provides only amoral observation, while Absurdism rejects even
the possibility of debate.
FRANCES BABBAGE, Augusto Boal
The Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious
or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to
bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers
see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is
a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and
absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there
are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is
alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting
illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief.
And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke
tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
54
MARTIN ESSLIN, introduction, Absurd Drama

The Absurdist abandoned all hope of finding meaning in life and
embraced a sort of nihilism. The Absurdist was convinced that everything was
meaningless and absurd. The subjectivity of a Romantic was appealing to the
Absurdist. However, even that implied that something was transcendent--a
desire--and the Absurdist would have nothing to do with that.
JAMES STOBAUGH, World Literature
Insofar as meaning is of importance to the absurdists, but they cannot
find it, they have an openness to meaning. Thus their absurdism is not total. It is
only reality oriented, which makes their absurdism relative. Consequently, it
may be suggested that meaning can be created. One can choose to declare
something to be valuable and precious. Thus absurdity has been superseded and
meaning has been found in one's projection of what one chooses to be
meaningful.
WILLIAM P. FROST, What Is the New Age?
In regard to absurdism, Samuel Beckett is sometimes considered to be the
epitome of the postmodern artist ... In fact, he is the aesthetic reductio ad
absurdum of absurdism: no longer whistling in the dark, after waiting for
Godot, he is trying to be radically silent, wordless in the dark. Beckett tries to
bespeak a failure of the logos that never quite succeeds in being a failure, for to
speak the failure would be a kind of success. Hence the essentially comic
(hence unavoidably and ultimately affirmative) nature of his work.
55
WILLIAM DESMOND, Philosophy and Its Others

The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of
the human condition; it merely presents it in being--that is, in terms of concrete
stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher
and that of the poet.
MARTIN ESSLIN, The Theatre of the Absurd
56

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Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Chapter I: America And Its History of Theater

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Yet in America, as in Europe, a change in the kind of literature being

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

non-realistic writers or who went through a period of stylistic experiment found

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

No Western nation has shown itself so sharply divided in its attitude to

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Broadway Village theaters such as Cherry Lane and Provincetown Playhouse,

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Immediately, Albee became perceived as a leader of a new theatrical

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

II.2. Edward Albee: The Writer

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation and

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

a weakness it is that we cannot really believe in the efficacy of the exorcism of

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

quickly established itself as one of the indispensable works of the postwar

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

over. We must put away our mourning..." They do so by gazing at an inanimate

III. E. Albee: An Exponent Of The Theatre of the Absurd

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Although the Theatre of the Absurd is often traced back to avant-garde

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

The most famous, and most controversial, absurdist play is probably

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

something deeper, something closer to real truth--a representation of our inner

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

III.2. Narratological Glimpses Of The Zoo Story

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

PETER: [puzzled] North? Why . . I . . . I think so. Let me see.

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

PETER: [uncomfortable] A prosthesis?

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

[Punches Peter on the arm, hard.] MOVE OVER!

JERRY: You put things well; economically, and, yet ...

Laura David (Orteanu), Eward Albee, a Major Voice in American Literature

come sludging over this way he'd probably take you in