The Zoo Story Themes

You don't get any family members on stage in The Zoo Story, but family—or the absence of family—flutters about the edges of the play like one of Peter's pet parakeets. (Squawk! Caw!) Peter has...

The play is called The Zoo Story, but Jerry never actually tells you what happens at the zoo. That's how communication works in this play—poorly. Jerry babbles on and Peter doesn't understand him...

You can't really have Theater of the Absurd without death. Death is the absurd thing. Life has no meaning, but it's got no meaning because you die. What's up with that anyway, universe? That's not...

The Zoo Story is a play in which you never get to hear the story of the zoo. That's absurd because it reflects how sometimes the world just doesn't make sense. According to the philosophy of absurd...

Peter likes things just so. He goes to his bench, he reads his book, he goes to work, he goes to his bench. Everything is in its place. And then Jerry comes along and unleashes messy quirkiness, li...

You wouldn't think there was a lot of space in this play for sex. There are only two people in The Zoo Story, and they spend the whole time fully clothed in a public park. And yet, sex lurks right...

As with sex, sexuality isn't talked about explicitly much in the play. But Jerry tells you, at a couple of points, that he's homosexual, or at least had homosexual relationships. And for his part,...

Peter is comfortably upper-middle class; in today's dollars, he makes well over $100,000 a year at his swanky publishing job. Jerry, on the other hand, is poor; he doesn't have any visible source o...