The question isn’t why Edward Albee’s The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? ran for only 300 performances on Broadway, but rather, how it ran any at all? Simply put, the play, which premiered in 2002, is about Martin, a 50-year-old architect who announces to his wife and friend that he is having an affair with a goat. (And they say there are only 10 plots!) Not exactly what you’d call commercial Broadway fare.
But it could take years and years to really understand what it’s “about.” Albee seems to be pushing us to the limits of acceptance regarding expression and sexuality, saying: “OK, you nice liberals — what do you think about this? OK, how about this? Or this?“
Or maybe it’s not about content at all, but the fracturing of time: This side of the fault is the time before Martin’s announcement, and this other side is the time after, and The Goat is about how razor-thin the fault, but how cavern-wide as well.
There’s also the nature of experiencing time. The Goat is performed without intermission, and much of it is deliberately filled with repetition. For the longest while, we don’t ever move past the exact moment of Martin’s confession.
I may not really know what it’s about — but I do know, and probably should have said paragraphs sooner, that I love it. It’s an amazing piece of theater: scalding hot, consistently discomforting and, at times, side-splittingly funny. (On more than one occasion I covered my mouth because I was laughing so hard.)
The Pittsburgh Playhouse Repertory Company’s production, under the direction of Rodger Henderson gets, at the very least, two things right — Albee’s intelligence and his humor. You couldn’t get smarter or funnier than Henderson and company have here and, with Albee, that’s huge praise.
There’s also a third thing they got right: Robin Walsh as the wronged wife. I have to admit that I forget what an amazing actress she can be until I see her onstage and am viscerally reminded of her genius.
The trick with Albee is that he is not a writer of naturalism. Putting aside his Absurdist elements, when it comes to dialogue Albee is as much a mannerist as Wilde or Mamet. The remaining cast of Tony Bingham, Daniel Krell and Justin Mark DeWolf are, by anyone’s definition, powerful actors, but Walsh is the performer most in tune with Albee’s twisted, sick and wickedly funny view of the world.
And honestly, Ms. Walsh, I mean that as a compliment.
The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia? continues Dec. 4-14. Pittsburgh Playhouse, 222 Craft Ave., Oakland. 412-621-4445. www.pittsburghplayhouse.com
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2008.
I saw The Goat in Houston several years ago. What is to be gained from Albee’s “The Goat” seems to transcend the marital love issues found in “Virginia Wolf” and focus more on the audience than the couple. After the end of the play, I noted the audience to be characteristically liberal with their black turtle necks, Van Dyke beards,long professorial hair styles, and an assortment of homosexual males who sat in groups together. What stood out in my mind was their contorted facial expressions reflecting shock, confusion, discomfort, and sheer loss of composure. Could it be that the premise of Albee was that the central character could break a social taboo that even liberals would find themselves having to sort out at the gut level as unnacceptable. It is commonplace for conservatives and traditionalists to receive criticism from liberals for their contumely against various immoral human behaviors and other violations of their code of propriety. Presenting this twisted variation on adultery seems to put the liberals in the same position as conservatives and surprisingly render as hypocritical the liberals’ stance on acceptance of others’ realities and widening of boundaries as the mature thing to do. Such a revelation that there are certain limits whereby humans can no longer hide their affectations must be uncomfortable to those who thought they could be the only ones to shock their ideological opponents with extremism. Albee, a homosexual, has inflicted a wake-up call onto the very subset of humanity than purports to be more open-minded than the rest of us.
Although I never experienced the angst or appreciated the dysfunctional love experienced by the married couple in “The Goat” as I did in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf”, I must say that “The Goat” took the concept of marital love and opened the door of thought to an even greater array of dysfunctions that may plague humanity. Although the end of the movie with Taylor & Burton was essentially a bleak, black and white scene, panning out of a quiet sorrowful place on earth where a man and woman continue to play out their twisted behavior in maintaining true love for each other. My feelings at the end of “The Goat” bore little assurance that that couple’s future relationship could survive what most assuredly was tainted by insanity. Being a conservative, I stand firm by this assessment (just as I find it unacceptable to permit “holy matrimony” between homosexuals….giving in to the concept of civil unions instead.) It was comforting to see the audience’s discomforture regarding Albee’s widening of boundaries to the chagrin of obvious liberals who disagree vehemently with conservatives on more conventional extremist issues. I think we were in the same corner for The Goat.