Final Bravo for the Best (Variety Magazine)
June 9, 2002

It's a virtual given at the Tonys these days that a Brit (or two) emerges triumphant. But even rampant Anglophilism can't explain the absence from this year's nominees for actor in a play of "The Goat's" Bill Pullman, who gives the finest performance I've seen by an American on either side of the Atlantic since Jessica Lange's Mary Tyrone on the West End more than 18 months ago.

One intends no slight to throaty nominee Mercedes Ruehl to point out that Edward Albee's deserved Tony winner is utterly unimaginable without its male lead. Sure, Ruehl gets the laugh-grabbing lines, albeit of the gallows-humor sort, in what is an essentially reactive part. But without Pullman's gift for utter sincerity and, yes, soul, the daring journey of Albee's play could well get derailed into smarminess or shtick or (the worst-case scenario) seeming foolishness.

Instead, the actor gives a ceaselessly dignified and truthful account of one man's collapse into a world of crushing and loveless solitude -- in this Rodgers centenary year, one is tempted to think of Martin, the architect Pullman plays, as Albee's own lonely goatherd. "What matters is what it is, not what it means," Martin remarks at one point of his liaison with the eponymous Sylvia. I haven't a clue what Pullman's absence from the Tony short list means, but I'll tell you
this: HE IS THE BEST.