the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt three)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

It would be ten years later, long after his meeting with Wilder, that Albee wrote his first one-act play. He completed The Zoo Story in February 1958—one month shy of his thirtieth birthday. It took him less than three weeks to write it, pecking away at the kitchen table of his walk-up apartment on a standard typewriter he had “liberated” from Western Union, using yellow copy paper he had also stolen from his employed. He called the process of writing the play an “explosion,” the dialogue just flowing out of him from the very first line. “I have been to the zoo,” one character, Jerry, says to a stranger on a park bench, who ignores him. “I said, ‘I’ve been to the zoo,’” he repeats. “MISTER, I’VE BEEN TO THE ZOO,” he yells, finally getting the stranger’s attention. One critic with a cynical eye later described the one-act as a play about “a homosexual who, despising the square world and unable to live in his own, tricks an inoffensive stranger into killing him.” While there is a modicum of truth in that assessment, The Zoo Story cannot be so offhandedly simplified. Albee wrote The Zoo Story the same year that The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt, was published, and the latter’s sweeping thesis about the dehumanization of the individual in society is more consistent with what The Zoo Story is about. Arendt warned against “our diminishing human agency and political freedom, and the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions.” In The Zoo Story, Jerry rants on and on in this vein, too, indignant, disconsolate, until he arrives at an even more pointedly existential conclusion about our helplessness in society, which he delivers with the thud-a-dud actuality of fact. “I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves, and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss.”