For all the controversy stirred by the shock value of the language in Edward Albee's early work, his plays are surprisingly chaste - more about lack of, or loss of, desire than sex. There is an erotic component missing from his plays, sometimes replaced by madcap performativity, as in the games in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Claire's dipsomaniacal antics in A Delicate Balance, and sometimes replaced by explosions of language, as in The Zoo Story (1959). Loneliness and alienation seem more important than sexual desire, which is usually more memory than present reality. Albee's The Zoo Story can be seen as a Central Park homosexual pick-up, but it ends in penetration by knife, not penis. Jerry may remember fondly his one homosexual affair, but he has forsaken homosexuality for joyless heterosexuality. Indeed, the rejection of the possibility of homosexual love for a compromised heterosexuality on the part of Albee’s characters and the playwright himself, in his work, is a particular problem for critics of Albee’s plays and may be responsible for some of their chilliness. Albee seems unable to read his own sexual desires and experiences into his heterosexual characters, which creates a nonerotic coolness. It is no wonder that frustration, not desire, is the compelling emotion in Albee’s work.