Edward Albee’s first play, The Zoo Story, is an acknowledged classic and one of the most-produced works in American theater. Written in 1958, it’s a pithy, intense, deceptively easy to mount one-act that college students and fledgling theater groups just love to cut their teeth on—though its dramatic and philosophical subtexts often elude even experienced artists. The quintessential two-men-on-a-park-bench drama, it depicts a confrontation between Jerry, a volatile young loner, and Peter, a middle-aged, buttoned-down book editor whose complacent, emotionally compartmentalized worldview is shattered by the experience. Originally rejected by New York producers, it premiered in West Berlin in 1959 before circling back to these shores the following year, when the off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse paired it with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.
