“It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes, a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” — Edward Albee, The Zoo Story
A play in one act, The Zoo Story was written by the late American playwright Edward Albee. According to the Edward Albee Society (they ought to know), The Zoo Story was first performed on stage at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin on September 28, 1959. I have never seen the play, but years ago, I heard an old audio recording of it performed off-Broadway that I thought stood on its own superbly (and I’m not alone in that, as the performance was award-winning and the play, itself, won multiple awards).
That line — about going a very long distance in order to come back a short distance correctly — quietly emerged from my memory a week or so ago. I was sitting on a bus, looking out the window, far from home, surprised (although I shouldn’t have been) by the perspective that being a long distance out of my way was able to give me. About several things. Things that I didn’t want to see, things I knew were there but had forgotten, things that had become obscured from view because I didn’t have enough distance from them.
So I looked up the play, hoping that I could find the same recording that I remembered. Give it a listen (vinyl recording of the 1960 off-Broadway performance). Certainly, there are some linguistic choices that are not unproblematic by contemporary standards. Yet, in many ways, it was clearly ahead of its time. In that recording, the subtleties of the acting and the precision of the writing, as I listened to it again last week, were as noteworthy — and funny at times, but also, disturbing, it’s theatre of the absurd, after all — as when I first listened to the play all those years ago.
a few words ... from Montréal 