SOURCE: "What's New at the Zoo? Rereading Edward Albee's American Dream(s) and Nightmares," in Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama, edited by June Schlueter, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989, pp. 183-91.

In the following essay, Pearlman studies what she terms Albee's bitter, negative, and harsh treatment of women in The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and The Sandbox.

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To reread Edward Albee's one-act play The Zoo Story (1958) is to reexperience the caustic, cryptic vision of an angry playwright thirty years after the play was performed (1959), in German, in Berlin.

The Zoo Story is a two-character dialogue of male strangers, both locked in rigidly defined "male" roles, with the resonately Christian names of Jerry (Jeremiah?) and Peter, whose chance encounter on a bench in Central Park provokes a clash of dichotomous visions of power, space, and society. Jerry is an antagonizing but isolated vagrant, whose life has been, in...