At Home at the Zoo: Homelife and the Zoo Story

by Edward Albee

“I’ve been to the zoo.” 

These opening words usher the audience into one of the most iconic plays in American theater
The Zoo Story . More than fifty years later, master playwright Edward Albee ( Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  and  The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? ) wrote a prequel to this classic.  Home Story  contains the events in Peter’s life immediately preceding his encounter with Jerry on the park bench and is every bit as powerful as the original. We meet Ann, Peter’s wife, and see the conversation that compelled Peter to go for that fateful walk in the park. For the first time collected in one volume,  At Home at the Zoo  is a must for any theater lover.

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama, Literature, Fiction, American, Read For School

95 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 26, 2009

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Reviews

[Danya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read The Zoo Story in a different edition: a copy of The American Dream and The Zoo Story. When I found out the there was a prequel to The Zoo Story, which is one of my favorite plays, I immediately read it. It was every bit as good as I was hoping it would be. The Zoo Story, while an excellent play in its own right, has only two characters, one of whom is rather underdeveloped. Homelife, the prequel (or first act, if you do the two plays together), serves to flesh out the character of Peter, making him more human. This in turn makes the impact of The Zoo Story even greater. Because Peter's humanity is emphasized in Homelife, and because the theme of human vs. animal is very important in both plays, the contrast in The Zoo Story between his humanity and Jerry's more animated, more animal personality is more striking. And while I'm not going to give away the ending, the horrifying events at the end of the play are more disturbing once you know who Peter is and what his life is like. Now, this all makes it sound as though Homelife is just there to strengthen The Zoo Story. That is false. Homelife is a wonderful play by itself, and is a powerful one act, although it is much more subtle, with less of a shock factor than The Zoo Story. But it has some wonderful points and monologues, and is a shockingly realistic portrayal of the complications that can exist in the most normal, happy, and "good" families. Homelife is a conversation between Peter and his wife Ann. They are both in love and distant, familiar with each other and total strangers, happy but with a sense of something missing. Their conversation is fascinating and, unlike many Albee plays, not entirely disturbing. In fact, in the end it is somewhat uplifting. Which actually makes the second act, or second play, The Zoo Story, even more awful. But either way, both of these plays are excellent and highly recommended.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been going through a bit of an Albee phase, reading one play after another. At Home in the Zoo is a single play with two acts, although it consists of Albee's classic 1959 play The Zoo Story (Act One) and a prequel that he wrote fifty years later, called Homelife (Act Two), in which he fleshes out the character of Peter through a conversation with his wife Ann. Strong, disturbing, riveting stuff.

[Gregorio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although At Home is definitely not a stand alone one act, zoo story is, making At Home a tangent to a phenomenal play that poises an important question of placement in a human society. The only reason why I rated this 4 stars is due to the first act, because the first Act, even though it is focused on something completely different, simply isn't as profound, nor as experimental story wise, and the overall arc is not as prominent. Zoo Story, on the other hand, will grab you and give you a good shake, and you'll remember it for some time.

[gwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in reverse-order, for whatever reason (so, The Zoo Story before Homelife).

The Zoo Story is funny and mean and brilliant.

Homelife is really good. It's sort of funny that Albee intended to flesh out Peter but mostly succeeded in making another well-realized character in Ann. Both acts, together, make Peter maybe eight-tenths of a full character. Perhaps a third act might finally do the trick!

[Federica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disturbing and funny.

[Sassy Sarah Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars! I was surprised by this one. Review to come.

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Odd- bad play. Don't do it!

[Amanda Fiorani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albee, o lindo ♡

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating all the way from A to Zoo.

[Martin Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward Albee, perhaps somewhat ingenuously, makes the claim in a note that The Zoo Story had always been a two act play ("I just hadn't told myself," he writes). With At Home at the Zoo, he expands his famous one-act into a longer piece; the result offers solid proof, if any were needed, that a work of art should not be tampered with. The earlier seminal work is, if anything, diminished by this addition.

The Zoo Story, as you may know, is about a chance meeting in Central Park between a prosperous book publisher and a very disturbed, possibly unbalanced young man. Jerry is the young man, and the play is almost all him talking--first, getting Peter's attention, and then spilling a long harsh story about his relationship with his landlady's "monster" of a dog. Jerry's monologue, or rant, is loaded with subtext, the exact nature of which is revealed in the final moments of the play. His entire modus operandi has to do with getting Peter to fully engage with him; and we know very little about Peter except for what Jerry deduces will press his buttons and spur him to action. Peter is, in fact, the protagonist of the play, though it's hard to guess how the events of the play will ultimately affect him. Jerry, meanwhile, is antagonist to the nth degree, and the piece is a tour de force for the actor playing him.

Do we need more than this to feel the jolt that Albee wanted us to feel back in 1958: an alarm, a wake-up call, something to pull us out of our Eisenhower era fear and anxiety and complacency, back to the real world of human suffering and relationships?

No, we don't.

And indeed in Homelife, the new first act that Albee has written as companion to The Zoo Story, very little useful is accomplished. We meet Peter's wife, Ann, and we see him and her during the hour just preceding the events of The Zoo Story. They're sitting in their East Side apartment living room, talking in the articulate, loquacious way in which Albee couples talk, unpeeling secrets that have for whatever reason remained hidden heretofore in a 15-year marriage. The focus--oddly for such cerebral people--is on the physical: Peter bemoans his unasked-for circumcision (which he thinks might be reversing, whatever that means), and Ann speculates about having her breasts removed pre-emptively to avert the possibility of cancer. Then Peter lets loose a confession whose callousness sort-of matches Jerry's in Act Two, I suppose; it's about sex, and franker than practically anything I can think of in the Albee canon, and jarringly gratuitous for that. It's not clear that this particular revelation will change anything in Peter and Ann's life. And, once Jerry arrives on the scene in Act Two (and Ann is gone), it's easily forgotten.

In short, nothing in Homelife ultimately matters to The Zoo Story; Albee understood that when he wrote The Zoo Story as a one-act between two strangers (to each other and to the audience!).

[Colton Alstatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The immense punctuation (italics, colons, semicolons, EM dashes), the frequency of stage direction, the nothingness of the talk... no idea if this would be droll or musical for an actor. Before Jerry's long monologue, however, Albee suggests the director should be the final authority on delivery.

There is...
Care in the way a poetic phrase ("Either; both") said by one character is later repeated by the other.
Circularity in the way Peter's anger is aroused, with escalations each time.
Circularity with the topics discussed, with escalating emotional importance each time, because of all the other tones the conversation gained since.
Tender sadness in the way confessions are done as theoreticals, because the characters are too scared to confess truly... then the ship analogy, one character's view of a "common understanding"

Uncommon POVs expressing themselves in the language chosen, like Ann saying people "rise to" adultery instead of sinking to it.
Thinking about thinking, imagining imagining... people stuck beyond the ability to consider it.


p2
Jerry revs up
Testing: "Do you mind if we talk"/"Why... no, no."/"Yes you do; you do"
Prodding: "And you're not going to have any more kids, are you?"
Asserting authority: "And when you're bewildered you become patronizing? [...] (Amused, but not with the humor) So be it. The truth is: I was being patronizing."

Peter on the defensive
"(Bewildered by the seeming lack of communication.)"
Meta-conversing: "...it's that you don't really carry on a conversation; you just ask questions."

Building Jerry's world
Long, detailed passages of how sh*tty everything in his life is...
"I don't like to use words that are too harsh in describing people. I don't like to. But the landlady is a fat, ugly, mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage."
"she and her dog are the gatekeepers of my dwelling"
Extreme self-consciousness. "But you can't say 'a dog I know' without sounding funny [as if that's the part people would scoff at]; so I said, a little too loud, I'm afraid, and too formally: YES, A BITE FOR MY PUSSYCAT. People looked up. It always happens when I try to simplify things; people look up."
But he wants to pray for the rest of his class and doesn't want the dog to die (even if just do know "the effect of our actions")... and he derives a proof: kindness + cruelty = loss

Believable flurry of action at the end, but the result doesn't arise from either of the characters undergoing a lasting internal change. The end result felt more or less fated from the start.

[Yazmina .gh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actualmente, se está realizando una gira por España con la obra. Decidí asistir sin conocer previamente la historia, y tras verla, me surgieron muchas dudas, por lo que opté por leer el texto completo.

Empecé por la precuela, "Homelife, y debo decir que, tanto en su versión teatral como escrita, me gustó más que "The Zoo Story". Ambas partes abordan temas existenciales muy profundos a través de sus personajes. En la primera, "Homelife", asistimos a una conversación entre Ann y Peter, un matrimonio aparentemente estable. Ann expresa su insatisfacción con una vida rutinaria y segura, mientras que Peter, algo despistado, no logra comprender el malestar de su esposa. Es fácil empatizar con Ann, y también con esa sensación de conformismo que ella denuncia.

La segunda parte, "The Zoo Story", me resultó más desconcertante. En ella, Peter se encuentra con Jerry, un joven extraño que, en apariencia, solo quiere conversar. Sin embargo, lo que comienza como un diálogo casual acaba convirtiéndose en un enfrentamiento cargado de tensión, que desemboca en un trágico final. La crisis existencial de Jerry no me resultó del todo clara en una primera lectura. Él plantea que vivir en sociedad es como vivir en jaulas, y reflexiona sobre la soledad y la necesidad de crear un vínculo con otro ser humano, aunque sea a través de la violencia.

En conjunto, ambas obras pueden dejar al espectador o lector con una sensación de frialdad o desconcierto al principio. Sin embargo, con el paso de los días y una reflexión más pausada, se revelan matices y conceptos que quizá no se perciben de inmediato. En general, me ha gustado la propuesta, ya que invita a reflexionar profundamente sobre la incomunicación, la rutina y la condición humana.

[Alina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this right after "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"—I quite loved this work, and wanted to be taken back up into some imaginary realm comparable to it in intensity and depth. Unfortunately, I was not very impressed by either "At Home" or "The Zoo." Both works incorporate certain 'everyday' issues/problems, and suggest metaphoric depths to them; but I found this done in a flat-footed way. Moreover, the dialogue as a whole just isn't that remarkable. In his other play which I love, many lines were extraordinarily pithy, while also being humorous, and with the feeling that they were necessitated, naturally flowing from the social situation. In both plays of this book, the dialogue often felt artificial or unnecessary.

"At Home" especially was disappointing. Maybe if I read "The Zoo" alone, it would've been better; perhaps I was primed by the first play by disappointment, so I was less charitable or engaged in my reading of the second. Upon further reflection, I can imagine that reading "The Zoo" could be a profound experience. It deals with a character whose psychology serves as a pinnacle of hatred of self and of humanity at large, for reasons that are not unjustified. This is a fascinating issue, which I often don't encounter as exclusively focused upon in a single artwork. So I'd perhaps recommend the second of the plays, and to skip the first.

[Georgia Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a frequent reader of play texts, this one trumps them all. Since finishing it, it has stayed firmly on my mind.

Homelife, the prequel to Albee’s The Zoo Story, was published 45 years after the original text, which is interesting in itself. The Zoo Story is a two-character play where Peter meets Jerry on a bench in Central Park. However, Homelife brings to light Peter’s relationship with his wife, Ann, and the conversation that leads him to leave the house and head to Central Park. Whilst they still love each other, and are incredibly comfortable in their marriage, the dialogue between them often centres on what is missing from their relationship. However, it is clear that these missing things from their partnership won’t be achieved, as they can’t change who they are. What I found most interesting and stimulating about this play were the flashes of absurdist theatre appearing in amongst the seemingly contemporary and expressionist dialogue. Unlike Samuel Beckett’s works, one of the most well known absurdist playwrights, you have work a little bit harder with Albee’s texts. Absurdist theatre is embedded within a ‘conventional’ text, which raises the questions as to why Albee chooses to do this — this is one of the discussion points within my thesis.

Whilst I was focusing on The Zoo Story as one of the texts for my master’s thesis, and had originally decided just to include Homelife briefly, and probably end up just mention it in passing, I completely underestimated this text. Whilst it is short and punchy, it’s very rich, and it deserves just the same amount of attention as The Zoo Story in written work and scholarship.

[Bryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

one thing i enjoy about albee is his flawless ability to cultivate a certain type of domestic atmosphere.
As the child of parents who probably should've gotten a divorce, his dialogue choices really prod me with a vexing familiarity. The lulling, simmering strife is pervasive, inevitably exploding. However, this eruption rarely leads to a spiteful shouting match. Whether its Peter and Ann, or Martha and George, their exchanges are akin to acute daggers which hit their mark with a precision that stems from a bone-deep understanding of the target.
So much to mine from this pair of stories. Need to read more of his work.

[Gonzalo Rodríguez Risco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por más que es una de las obras más celebradas de Albee, admito que nunca me gustó mucho “La historia del zoo”, y era más que nada porque sentía que Peter solo estaba ahí para que Jerry le cuente su historia y no lograba comprender por qué no se iba. Y de pronto descubro esta joya llamada “Homelife”, donde Albee escribe, 50 años después, un primer acto con la vida de Peter y su esposa... y le da total sentido a Peter y a la historia del zoo (el segundo acto). Un autor maduro confrontando a su yo más joven, y una verdadera lección de dramaturgia. Muy recomendable.

[Joel Fishbane · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Zoo Story: 5 stars
Homelife: 3 stars

Look, I love Edward Albee's work but "Homelife" isn't needed. "The Zoo Story" worked on its own for fifty years, so the prequel isn't really needed. It's nice to get a bit more info on Peter and it changes how to see his actions in "The Zoo Story". But that really just takes the fun out of it. One of the reasons "The Zoo Story" is so magnificent is that Albee managed to flesh out these two men in a single scene while still leaving a lot of mystery. That mystery is a key element of what makes the characters so engaging.

[Tony Loyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely well written. Good snappy dialogue for the most part. Not much of a plot. Just a couple dark scenes, interactions in a seemingly regular life that take obscure, unexpected, and vaguely horrific turns. I liked the dialogue, I think this is a good piece for actors with serious chops to play around with. I think the lack of a story or a point hurts the play, I also think it's going to be too weird and dark without much payoff for most people. Decent, memorable, didn't excite me.

[Roxie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As interesting as Homelife is, it doesn't hold a candle to At the Zoo, and I truly think it unnecessary as a prequel (although certainly entertaining) and as a fleshing-out of Peter's character. It's as if Albee is saying "See? See? This is how Peter is", but it's nothing that an attentive reading/seeing of At the Zoo cannot tell you.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a 3.5. Part of the problem for me might be that I waited too long to read this. I can see Zoo Story's appeal in a keyed-up angsty Catcher in the Rye kind of way, but it doesn't feel anywhere as revelatory as I was prepared for. Albee's later addition of Homelife as a (mandatory when staged) prequel is a little more my thing, another slow-motion car-crash of a marital tableaux.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could see how The Zoo Story could stand as its own one act, though it didn’t quite compel me. But the added pre-act thrilled me far less. It felt like the kind of thing a writing group might urge you to write to ‘develop’ a character, which is often an excuse of the lazy for not wanting to look for what might already be there.

[y · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. I couldn’t believe that he wrote Homelife and The Zoo Story almost decades apart. It’s wonderfully written and gives greater insight into The Zoo Story, which is a play I really enjoyed! Personally one of my favorites from this year’s reads.

[Miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Zoo Story is great. The prequel was readable and certainly gave some depth to Peter’s character (which was Albee’s intention), but lacked the spark of the original, and the dialogue wasn’t entirely convincing.

[Andrew Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simple, tragic, and raw. How our own experiences of another person differ from theirs of ours. About love, and hatred, and hurt - how the three are the same. Immersed, not too long, felt. More thoughts that I can’t put into words.

[Dary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favourite Albee I've read so far. The two plays are so different from each other yet they go together so well, the dialogue is mesmerising, and although you know you won't find out what happened at the zoo, you keep reading anyway. Such a wonderful surprise.

[Millie R Fell MD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albee is a genius playwrighter

Great dialogue; dramatic ending
Peter is a foil for both Ann in act one and Jerry in act two.
Albee’s first play with the two acts written years apart

[F]

Not my favorite play but I remember liking Albee more than I liked other playwrights in my American Drama class.

[Hugo Schnorrenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's funny how The zoo story is the famous play in this, and I really didn't care about it. But now, Brother, Homelife just became my favorite one act play of all. It's, simply put, perfect. Incredible. Amazing. Impressive. Truly, there's no word to describe it.

[arianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school.

[Ece · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5