Edward Albee’s, “The Zoo Story” is about the innate animal instinct that resides in each human being. Regardless of things like social class, education, profession we are born with a primal animal instinct to either fight or flight when it comes protecting our territories much like wild animals. However, the animals at the zoo in this play are enclosed and isolated from each other just like the characters Jerry and Peter who struggle to break free from their own barred cages. In the poem the character
Edward Albee once said, "Every honest work is a personal or private yowl, a statement of one's individual pleasure or pain". The Zoo Story shows the attempt of the character Jerry to make a statement about himself, his life, his pleasure, his pain. It is, in effect, his "yowl." Language is his means. Albee shows that language does indeed have the potential to "facilitate authentic communication" between Jerry and Peter (738). As the play begins, Jerry announces that "every once in awhile I
Edward Albee's play, The Zoo Story, all Jerry wanted was to be heard and understood, and in the end, after sharing his life story with a complete stranger, he got his final wish - death. The Zoo Story not only tells of the alienation of man in modern society, but also reflects the philosophy of twentieth century existentialism. Jerry made a conscious choice of wanting to end his life, while Peter, a man that chose to act as the 'guinea pig'; and stayed and listened to Jerry's story, made a conscious choice
GCSE Drama Coursework - The script I chose to perform was entitled The Zoo Story and was written by Edward Albee. GCSE Drama Coursework The script I chose to perform was entitled The Zoo Story and was written by Edward Albee. I made a few alterations to the script to make it more interesting and easier to perform. I shortened the script to make it easier to learn in a short space of time, and cut out some pieces of the text. I also turned Jerry, into a female character, so that I could
The Zoo Story by Edward Albee In Edward Albee's play, The Zoo Story, Jerry tells Peter bizarre stories about people he has encountered that influence his shallow and lonely existence, to demonstrate Albee's view that society is unnecessarily consumed by indifference, unkindness, weakness, and emptiness. In an attempt to cause Peter to realize that his own life is filled with emptiness and shallowness, Jerry tells Peter about the lives of some of the people in his boarding house. He talks about
The Role of Women in The Zoo Story Although the women characters in "The Zoo Story" are never front and center staged, they have leading roles in shaping the conditions and sensibilities of Jerry and Peter. The women referred to by each of the male characters affects, or has affected, their perceptions and routines in life. Jerry has had many encounters with various women, while Peter speaks only of three. The quantity of women roles in each man's life is not the dominate cause of their behaviors;
Death of A Salesman and The Zoo Story Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman , is considered a to be one of the great masterpieces of American Literature. Comparatively, Edward Albee's, The Zoo Story, is also an incredible work of art. Miller and Albee both depict a the struggles of man in relationships. Interestingly, both plays seem to parallel each other throughout both works of literature. The Death of a Salesman tells a story of a distressed father, named Willy who struggles with
At the beginning of Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story, Peter is approached by Jerry, who leaves an first impression that he is eccentric by repeatedly shouting that he has been to the zoo. In actuality, Jerry has already mapped a plan in which to free himself from a life of isolation and loneliness using Peter. The result of his mother, father, and aunt dying has led to his lifestyle of a social recluse from a young age, which lends to Jerry constantly antagonizing Peter. An obvious showing of this
I’ll repeat… Imagine a zoo and tell me what do you really know about them? What is its purpose? Where do the animals come from? Why are they there? How are they cared for? What really goes into building and running of a zoo? If you were to ask me those questions in my more innocent years my answers would look rather simple. I thought of the zoo simply as an unusual type of farm considering I lived on one myself. I remember assuming they were all born in a zoo or too injured to be released back into
pessimism and despair. The modernist writer occupied a worl... ... middle of paper ... ... of Virginia Woolf. Best American Plays. Fifth Series, 1958- 1963. Ed. John Gassner. New York: Crown Publishers, 1972. 149-201. Print. Albee, Edward. The Zoo Story. 12 Oct 2011. PDF. 2 Feb 2014. De La Fuente, Patricia. Edward Albee: Planned Wilderness, Living Authors Series No. 3. Ed. Patricia De La Fuente. Edinburg, Texas: School of Humanities, Pan American University, 1980. Print. Heilpern, John. “Inadmissible
episode she learns the word zoo. “Mommy! What does zoo mean?” she wondered out loud. “A zoo is where the animals from your show can live outside of where they are from. It would be like if you went to live with grandma, that’s not your home, but you would still be happy to live there.” the mom explained. “Can I go?” Emma asked. “That’s a good idea sweety, we should go as a family soon.” Answered the mom as she pondered a good time to go. The day the family is going to the zoo will start early in the
In The Zoo Story, Edward Albee shows an encounter between two very different men, Peter and Jerry, sitting at a bench in Central Park. The play depicts people living like animals in cages, isolated from each other, and refusing to communicate. The play presents characters who suffer from lack of real human relationships, the sense of loneliness from being alienated and isolated from other members of their own society. This suffering leads mainly to agonizing life experiences and finally to the death
Baghdad Zoo. It was written by Lawrence Anthony, a South African conversationalist, and Graham Spence. The book depicts the struggle to save a critically damaged zoo and the animals within its walls. It is written in first-person point-of-view and narrated by Anthony himself. Lawrence Anthony was living comfortably on his nature reserve in South Africa when the reports of the destruction of Baghdad appeared on his television. Among the firefights and crumbling infrastructure sat the largest zoo in the
The Zoo Story It was your typical Sunday afternoon in Central Park. A slightly plump man is vegetating on a considerably cracked park bench, filling his head with commercial literature, as he did every Sunday afternoon. Peter is just your average hard-working, middle class citizen. He supported an archetypal family---two kids, his wife, and an anthology of many pets. Peter was content with his life; his complaints were few. However, he had no idea that his whole life would be altered by one
In The Zoo Story, a one-act play written by Edward Albee, Albee describes an intense conversation that takes place between two different types of men spending time at Central Park. During a Sunday afternoon Peter, “a man in his early forties” (30), reads quietly while sitting on a park bench. Later, a man named Jerry interrupts Peter with random conversation. Jerry begins to ask Peter a series of personal questions that reveal certain characteristics and details about both characters. Analyzing their
An Analysis of Dramatic Conflict in a “Zoo Story” by Edward Albee, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, and Sonnets for an Old Century by Jose Rivera In Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story”, the conflict between character vs. character is generated through the differing class backgrounds of Peter and Jerry. Peter is a well-to-do family man that appears to have very few worries in life. In opposition this class background, Jerry is a confused and lost individual that seeks a deeper relationship with other people
been mistreated, and uncared for, for centuries. Most zoos and circuses do not have the resources to care for animals properly, or they simply do not care at all. This is why the governmental Animal Welfare Act is not doing its job. Meanwhile the American Zoo and Aquarium Association has made a great test for zoos, employees, and animals. This is why zoos should become American Zoo and Aquarium Association accredited because it will make zoos more people and animal friendly and will stop mistreatment
have argued that zoos are educational buildings that aloud children and adults to gain knowledge about wild life and are not harmful for animals, closer examinations show that zoos are just entertainment centers that should be shut down. However, debate about whether the zoo should be shut down or not has become more serious. Zoos should be shut down. Animals suffer from mistreatment, malnutrition and murder, also people don’t gain the right knowledge about these animals because zoos aren’t educational
The intriguing story of Jan and Antonina Zabinki is told in the novel, The Zookeepers Wife by Diana Ackerman. In Warsaw during World War II and the Holocaust, Jan Zabinski was a Polish zoologist and the director of the thriving Warsaw Zoo, which contained the “wild, that fierce beautiful monster, caged and befriended” (Ackerman 19). His wife, Antonina, had a natural deep understanding of the animals of the zoo and developed unusual connections with many. When the Nazis invaded Poland, a majority
Zoos as Spectacles At the beginning of this course we tried to define the word spectacle, we came up with such ideas as catches attention, large, inauthentic, wide coverage, etc.(first day class) finally noticing that it is difficult to pin point the exact definition to a spectacle. For this research paper I decided to focus my research and analysis on Zoos and how they have become spectacles in today’s society. I will analyze the zoos myself, as well as relate the spectacles of zoos to some theories