The play The Zoo Story centers around two characters that very much like anyone else, have their own sets of issues and problems in their individual lives. Life issues in The Zoo Story can compare to the issues in playwright Edward Albee's own life and childhood. Albee was born in Washington D.C. and adopted at the age of 2 weeks, never knowing his birth parents or attempting to make contact with them. He was adopted into a wealthy social family, Mr. and Mrs. Reed Albee, and was raised around the theater in New York City. Albee's parents had many expectations for him but he wanted to pursue his own artistic ways and abilities, so at the age of 20, he left his family behind, never seeing his father again and not seeing his mother for 17 years.
In The Zoo Story, the character Jerry is very much alone, just as Albee felt for most of his life, not fitting in well with his adopted family. In an interview for the America Academy of Achievement, Albee says on the subject of troubles in his early family life, "I never felt related to these people. Since I knew I wasn't from them, I had a kind of objectivity about the whole relationship." This may be where the line in The Zoo Story came from, "I am a permanent transient. My home is the sickening rooming houses on the Upper West Side of New York City, which is the greatest city in the world. Amen!" Albee considered himself a permanent transient.
In Jerry's apartment he has two empty picture frames, which can represent the missing parents in Albee's life. When Peter asks Jerry about the two frames, Jerry says, "I don't have pictures of anyone to put in them.", and explains that his parents are dead and had long been missing from his life before they were dead so there is no need for pictures of them. Jerry also speaks a bit about his possible homosexuality. Albee is in fact, a homosexual, and The Zoo Story, being his first successful play, he lets a bit of that out. In an interview in The New York Times by David...