Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Absurdism asserts the pointlessness of existence—we want the world to mean something but it doesn’t—and The Zoo Story certainly gets bleak. A poor slob named Jerry shows up at a Manhattan park bench occupied by Peter, a prim middle-aged man with a pipe, a wife, kids, a good address, some pets, and what he calls an “executive position” at a small publishing firm that specializes in textbooks. “I’ve been to the zoo,” Jerry tells him by way of greeting, and though Peter ignores Jerry at first, we’re off. What follows is basically Jerry’s motormouthed valedictory address to the world, which for some reason—or maybe none—means Peter.
Jerry is in despair, all right. He’s lost his faith. But that in itself doesn’t make his existence pointless. For his existence to be pointless, at least in the universe of this play, Peter would have to validate Jerry’s despair—to act in a way that would crack his remote, tweedy veneer and corroborate Jerry’s sense of the essential futility of things. The twentysomething Albee who wrote The Zoo Story grasped this fact, and set about contriving a climax that would do the job. Trouble is, the climax he came up with is exactly that: a contrivance. Tom Amandes is one hell of an actor. It’s a privilege to watch him work Peter’s angles. But I didn’t for a minute believe the things he has to do in the play’s final minutes.
