In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

At the Zoo: From O'Neill to Albee LUCINA P. GABBARD • EUGENE O'NEILL WAS unquestionably the first American playwright to become a major literary figure. Edward Albee is the most recent. Others are nudging their way into recognition, but none since Albee has created a body of work accepted for performance and study the world over. In a sense then, O'Neill and Albee set the limits of serious modern American drama. By a coincidence, almost fatefully opportune, they wrote early in their careers plays very similar to one another. In 1921 O'Neill transformed a short story, written in 1917, into a play - The Hairy Ape, which in 1922 became his third Broadway production. In 1958 Albee wrote The Zoo Story, which was not performed in New York until 1960. These two playwrights and these two plays have so much in common that they become ideal partners for comparison. Moreover, the differences in the plays' content and form highlight developments in American drama and its milieu during the intervening thirty-six years. The similarity of the plays is not strange considering the similarities of the authors. Both spent troubled childhoods within theatrically associated families; O'Neill's father was an actor, and Albee's was a theater owner. Both were wanderers in early manhood. More significantly, as writers both were seriously committed to life and to drama. Both wrote to protest social injustice and to express man's agonizing search for personal identity. Moreover, both found interest in exploring new forms to give fresh meaning to the universal themes which sprang from their insistent searchings for truth. The most striking parallel, however, is that each, in one of his earliest literary efforts, wrote a play based on the same metaphor: man imprisoned within himself equals an animal caged at the 365 366 LUCINA P. GABBARD zoo. In The Hairy Ape and The Zoo Story this common metaphor leads to similar situations, settings, and plots. Both plays feature a character who visits the zoo to contemplate his desperate isolation. Both characters travel the same path - from Fifth Avenue to the exact same New York City Zoo. They are,· of course, both outcasts, "have-nots," who struggle for acknowledgement. Yank and Jerry have had emotionally deprived childhoods; their mothers were alcoholics who died before their sons had reached manhood. Neither boy felt loved by his father. Both Yank and Jerry confront the "haves" of society. Yank's initial confrontation is with Mildred, daughter of a wealthy steel manufacturer. Jerry's encounter is with Peter, a prosperous executive of a small publishing house. Both outcasts are willing to die to gain proof of their existence, and both do die in relatively suicidal acts. Typically, these similar patterns are clothed in contrasting details which penetrate both the content and the form of the plays. Thus, viewed side by side in their almost identical frames, the plays picture some of the developments that the playwrights and the times have wrought. The contents of these dramas reveal some sameness as well as some subtle differences in society and in its individual antagonists. The huge mass of society crawls rather than marches through time, resisting change all the way. Thus, from O'Neill's play to Albee's the overall features ofsociety remain the same: conformity, materialism, indifference , and waning energy. O'Neill stresses all these traits in the Fifth Avenue scene. The emerging church-goers walk alike and dress alike. They parade in a slow, high-headed saunter. All the men wear "Prince Alberts, high hats, spats, and canes"; all the women are "rouged, calcimined , dyed, overdressed."l The shop windows behind them display extravagant items hung with enormous price tags blinking with electric lights (p. 66). O'Neill's crowd is "a procession of gaudy marionettes with ... the relentless horror of Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness." They are effete as well as indifferent, speaking in "toneless, simpering voices" (p. 69). Edward Albee's play offers no comparable picture of man within his group; he uses only Peter to mirror society . However, Peter exhibits the same qualities as O'Neill's Fifth Avenue crowd. Albee shows Peter's conformity by his predictability. Jerry...

pdf

Share