At the Zoo: From O'Neill to Albee

Abstract

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.