"The Zoo Story"
by Edward Albee (2006)
Two strangers meet in a park, and begin a conversation. Fifty minutes later, one of the characters lies dead on a bench, and the other screams like an animal from the wings.
Peter, a thirty-something publishing executive sits peacefully reading in the sunlight on a park bench.
There enters Jerry, a young, unkempt and undisciplined vagrant.
Where Peter is neat, ordered, well-to-do, conventional, the vagrant Jerry is a soul in torture and rebellion. He longs to communicate so fiercely that, when he does, he talks like a waterfall. He is a man drained for company, seeks to drain his companion. With ironic humour and unrelenting suspense, we see the young savage slowly but relentlessly bring his victim down to his own atavistic level and initiate a shocking and horrible ending.
As the play approaches its fatal denouement we realise the significance of the animal imagery which is shot throughout the entire play; we realise with sickening culpability that the microscope extends towards us and we too are caught behind the bars of the zoo.