The Zoo Story

The Zoo Story is a one-act play by Edward Albee (1928-2016) [1].

The original text

Albee's first play, it was written in 1958 in just three weeks, and was originally titled Peter and Jerry. The play offers a brilliant duologue between Jerry, a neurotic outcast, and respectable, bourgeois Peter who meet in Central Park.

Rejected by New York producers, the play premiered in West Berlin at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt on September 28, 1959, in a double bill with the German premiere of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The play premiered in the United States Off-Broadway in a production by Theatre 1960 at the Provincetown Playhouse on January 14, 1960, and closed on May 21, 1961. The play was paired with Krapp's Last Tape.

Performance history in South Africa

19**: Performed by students of the University of the Witwatersrand School of Dramatic Art in The Nunnery, some time between 1975 and 1983.

197*: Produced for CAPAB by Kaben Kreu Productions, directed by Mavis Taylor, with Keith Grenville (Peter) and John Burch (Jerry).

1978: A production in Grahamstown was directed by Carl de Gouveia, starring Christopher Weare and John Burch.

1983: Directed by Noël Roos for the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department in the Keller Theatre in March 1983, starring Neels Engelbrecht and Robert Finlayson.

1988: A Rhodes University Drama Department production was directed by Simon Jones.

1990: Directed by Willie Fritz for CAPAB, starring Peter Butler and Royston Stoffels, opening 28 June 1990 on the Grahamstown Festival Fringe and 13 July 1990 in Cape Town.

2008-2009: Presented by The Mechanicals, directed by Christopher Weare starring Nicholas Pauling and Scott Sparrow at the Intimate Theatre, Cape Town, October-November 2008. This production was also seen on the National Arts Festival Fringe in 2009.

2015: National Arts Festival.