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The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Theater Mania

A Secret Paramour Who Nibbles Tin Cans, The New York Times

Albee's Latest a Tragedy? He's got to be kidding! , New York Daily News      

The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, Broadway.com

Finding Love Among the Species, Newsday

A Perverse Albee Gloats in 'Goat' , USA Today

Theater Mania The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? By David Finkle (3/11/02)

Edward Albee’s new play—and the first he has brought directly to Broadway in 20 years—is about a man in love with a goat that he’s named Sylvia. This neatly explains why the playwright straightforwardly calls his work The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? The unusual information comes out relatively early in the proceedings but not before the enamored Martin (Bill Pullman) has a long, extremely coy chat with his best friend Ross (Stephen Rowe) about the object of his current affection.

Architect Martin, about to turn 50, is the youngest recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Prize. He lives with his wife Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl) in a jaw-dropping home—that’s if it can be judged by the high-ceilinged living room, decorated in African-influenced modernity, in which the play unfolds. Presumably Martin designed it, but this is actually the handiwork of John Arnone, who has placed over the Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced area a kind of exposed-beam grid. It’s broken at several spots, a hint at what’s going to happen to the three-member family at the play’s center.  

After many years of marriage, Martin and Stevie are still gaga about each, other both sexually and intellectually. Touching often and falling easily into fast Mike Nichols-Elaine May-like improvs, they find nothing to mar their bliss. The sense of well being extends to their shared support of adolescent son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson), who’s announced that he’s homosexual. Although there’s a hint of friction between mom and dad and the lad, the trio generally looks to be having a painless, boulevard-comedy life. This, of course, is Albee’s point: Martin and Stevie, who frequently congratulate each other on their quick wits, are a civilized couple. Indeed, they’re something of an epitome. As such, the complications that ensue in the few hours after Stevie learns of Martin’s extra-curricular activity are presented as threatening the core of their being and, by extension, the foundations of civilization as we know it. The meddling Ross has sent Stevie a “you deserve to know” letter and she can’t accept his having breached the taboo. Albee is implying that if, as an intelligent and giving person, Stevie can’t see a way to share her man with a well-meaning and innocent goat, then whither any of us?

Yes, Albee is saying what Tennessee Williams declared through Hannah in The Night of the Iguana about nothing human disgusting her. With The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, however, Albee has taken Williams’ compassionate comment and inflated it into a play that is more or less unbelievable from start to finish. To begin with, in taking on bestiality as a subject, Albee defines it as it may never have previously been defined. According to Martin, he is not only having sex with four-legged Sylvia, he has fallen in love with her. Furthermore, he’s convinced that the goat reciprocates his love: Evidently, he can tell by the melting look in her eyes and the way she nuzzles his neck. As he comes clean, no one in the play suggests what rational people everywhere might have suggested: that he might want to consult a therapist. Nor does Martin, who encountered his new heartthrob on a house-hunting jaunt in the countryside, ever mention who owns Sylvia and whether that lucky farmer might already have given her a name.

 Since Albee stretches Martin’s situation so far past the breaking point, it follows that Stevie’s reaction to what’s revealed is also outlandish. Trying to take in what she’s learned, she presses Martin to tell her the whole story. When he does, she storms around the living room throwing pottery on the floor and saying “Oops.” Eventually, Stevie lunges out of the front door—to do what won’t be revealed here, but it’s fair enough to note that, when she returns, she has found a way to, umm, get Martin’s goat. Incidentally, Stevie returns only after Martin and Billy have seized the opportunity to exchange an incestuous kiss and only after Martin has reported a sexual response he once had while bouncing a baby on his knee.  

Albee’s narrative is meant to register as bold writing, which some viewers may sincerely believe it is. But no. Albee would like to appear intrepid on the dicey subject but he only succeeds at being grandly foolish. It’s a failing that shows up in his oeuvre every so often: He lands on a ambiguous and far-fetched premise with which he attempts to demonstrate the shocking depth of society’s ills but, at the end of the day (or play), the result is pretentious and ineffective. Tiny Alice is an example. (Perhaps, meaning to signal this play’s relationship to that earlier piece, Albee has Martin twice make a remark about a woman whom he calls “large Alice.” Wow, an Albee in-joke!) On the other hand, in A Delicate Balance Albee is successful at introducing an unexpected and ambiguous threat to upper class complacency.

 Because Albee has made The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? all but thoroughly unconvincing, he and director David Esbjornson needed to find actors who could make a gallant try at rendering it playable. Bill Pullman, forever pushing his straight hair back from his forehead, lends as much abashed and sweaty credence to Martin as he can. This is some challenge, particularly in a sequence during which Martin describes attending an animal-lovers’ self-help group and has to talk about a man who brought his goose. Yup, Pullman is game…although “game” might be the wrong adjective for this particular instance.

 Mercedes Ruehl lards her dialogue, whether it’s lighthearted or heavy-hearted, with conviction, and she lands some of the early laughs squarely. But, as a couple, Pullman and Ruehl are problematic. At first glance, they look as if they’ve been cast to play George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Ruehl has done the role.) Ruehl’s Stevie—and why does the character have that male-sounding name?—seems domineering in a manner at odds with the play. She’s stolid in a part that calls for more elegance, for actors along the lines of other Albee players like Rosemary Harris or Marian Seldes. She’s not helped by the second of two outfits that costume designer Elizabeth Hope Clancy puts her in: Ruehl is asked to wear a long suede skirt and high leather boots, perhaps because a point is being made about humans taking on animal attributes in a piece about an animal aping human characteristics.

As best friend Ross, Stephen Rowe is edgy, suggesting that the character has been repressing the hots for Martin. Since Albee is questioning civilization’s discontents, maybe Rowe is right to hint at homosexual longings by presenting Ross as if he were Michael in The Boys in the Band. Jeffrey Carlson makes his Broadway bow as Billy and acquits himself well, if a bit weepily, in the final father/son bonding sequence.  

By the way, Martin, Stevie and Billy inhabit their Architectural Digest-ready domicile without the companionship of a household pet. What a different and more upbeat play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? might be were a Labrador to romp through just before the final blackout and exchange meaningful glances with Stevie!

The New York Times A Secret Paramour Who Nibbles Tin Cans By Ben Brantley (3/11/02)

Now hold on a darn minute. Who exactly is supposed to be the author of this play? The same guy who wrote "Who's Afraid of Virginia      Woolf?" and "Tiny Alice"? Really? Not the guy who wrote "The Odd Couple"? 

Those who attend "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" which opened last night at the Golden Theater, may be forgiven for consulting their programs in the show's opening minutes to confirm the name of the playwright. It is indeed Edward Albee.

Nonetheless, that jolly chorus of laughter that keeps rising from the audience has a sound associated with the works of Neil Simon. These are not the uneasy, startled laughs usually elicited by Mr. Albee. No, there's a comfortable, self-congratulatory quality in the air, heard among people who are already in on the punch line of an elaborate joke. 

The punch line, as you may know, is implicit in the title. "The Goat," a play that sadly falls short of its high ambitions, is in fact about a man who has fallen in love with a goat. 

In the first scene, the unlucky swain (who is named Martin and is portrayed with grave, abstracted sweetness by Bill Pullman) is trying to work up the nerve to reveal this fact to those closest to him. 

As directed by David Esbjornson and enacted by a four-member cast that includes the redoubtable Mercedes Ruehl, the double-edged moments of awkwardness and misinterpretation seem to come with their own sitcom laugh track. So does much of the brazen wordplay about sex with animals that follows. 

Before Neil Simon fans rush out to buy their tickets, and before Edward Albee fans turn theirs in, they should know that there is devious method in the show's comic glibness. Mr. Albee may be in an unusually frolicsome mood, but he is also in a characteristically brooding one. As one of his barb-spouting characters says when asked to be serious, "No, it's too serious for that." 

And there you have the core of Mr. Albee's approach. "The Goat" is about a profoundly unsettling subject, which for the record is not bestiality but the irrational, confounding and convention-thwarting nature of love. The form this force takes in "The Goat" is beyond a joke. 

Yet for all their articulateness, the affluent, intelligent people in the play are ill equipped to deal with it as anything but a joke. It's outside the circumference of what Martin's wife, Stevie (Ms. Ruehl), calls "the rules of the game." As usual in Mr. Albee's world, language has its limits in accommodating the ineffable. 

As in "Virginia Woolf," flippancy is linked directly to savagery and anguish. Yet "The Goat," at least in this production, never achieves a similar cumulative power. The play may consciously set a trap for its audience, luring it by levity into a dark pit. Yet it keeps retreating to its brighter surface. 

"The Goat" is short (100 minutes, no intermission) and, in terms of story, simple. It is also by Mr. Albee's cryptic standards remarkably straightforward. 

Even John Arnone's rendering of Martin and Stevie's high-ceilinged living room has a feeling of brightness and openness, of 1970's-style sterilized suburbia. Of course, there are all those symbolically appropriate primitive artworks that adorn the place and those expensive-looking pots and vases that Ms. Ruehl will symbolically shatter. 

Martin, an architect who has just reached the weighted age of 50, is the recent winner of the Pritzker Prize and a contract to design "the billion- dollar dream city of the future." He leads an ostensibly ideal life with Stevie and Billy (Jeffrey Carlson), their gay teenage son. He has even kept the same best friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe), a television producer, since prep school. 

It is Ross, in whom Martin unwisely confides, who sets in motion the events that will destroy this family. As written and as portrayed by Mr. Rowe in the unctuous manner of Gig Young in a 1960's sex farce, he is the smug embodiment of liberal hypocrisy. Cheating on your wife is one thing, as Ross sees it; doing it with a goat is another. So he writes a letter to Stevie in which Martin's secret love is laid bare. 

Unfortunately, it's impossible to believe in this condemning creep's friendship with Mr. Pullman's reflective, big-hearted Martin, and it diminishes the impact of Martin's betrayal when he learns of Ross's letter. A lack of emotional credibility is a problem throughout. True, there are isolated pockets of intensely depicted pain where you feel as if you're falling into a black hole. 

It happens when Ms. Ruehl, an expert at finding the fierceness in facetiousness, suddenly slips from aggressive frivolity into three primal howls. Or when Mr. Pullman's competent, all-American dad sinks into a bewildered, childlike passivity that bespeaks an infinite loneliness. 

But as in many of Mr. Albee's plays, the characters are less detailed personalities than archetypes, giving voice to universal conflicts. And Mr. Esbjornson hasn't guided his performers toward a style that would meld their characters' dazzling ways with words and their elemental fears. Mr. Carlson, who plays adolescent angst like Greek tragedy (as adolescents will), probably comes closest to a happy medium. 

The semantic quibbles among the characters, while they have a thematic point, can seem juvenile. (When Martin talks about going "to bed together" with Sylvia, Stevie shouts, "To stall together.") The theatrical in-jokes (like a reference to a prostitute called Large Alice) gratuitously wrench you from the present tense of the play. 

More crucially, there is too much repetition of message-hammering speeches and exchanges and too little of the breathless dramatic momentum for which Mr. Albee can usually be relied on, even in a work as baffling as "Tiny Alice." 

One wishes heartily that Mr. Albee had devoted more time to specific descriptions that would give you a stronger, even stomach-turning sense of Martin's relationship with Sylvia, or describe more vividly the members of the animal lovers' therapy group he attends. 

There is a feeling — and who would ever have thought this could be said of Mr. Albee? — that "The Goat" lacks the courage of its darkest convictions. It may be that the performers' rhythms are thrown off by the friendly hilarity with which the audience greets their one-liners. But there's an abruptness here that suggests punches being pulled. 

This is all the more dispiriting because "The Goat" includes some of the most potentially powerful scenes in the Albee canon. There are two extraordinary moments toward the end that unsettle as only Mr. Albee can: one involving a kiss and another in which a man is described holding a baby on his lap. 

These are moments that force you against your will to reconsider the erotic patterns in your life. Martin poses the evening's basic question: Is there anything anybody doesn't find arousing, "whether we admit it or not, whether we know it or not?" 

Four decades after "Virginia Woolf" sent shock waves through the mainstream theater, Mr. Albee still asks questions that no other major American dramatist dares to ask. It's good to have him back on Broadway, even wearing kid gloves.  

 If you're going to have an affair with an animal, as someone does in Edward Albee’s "The Goat," why, you might ask, choose one with horns and an ornery disposition rather than one that is sweet, cuddly and more pliable — more like a sheep? 

These are the sort of philosophical questions raised by Albee's altogether specious play. 

The reason that Martin, a world-famous architect, is having an affair with a goat, and not some other animal, is that Albee is aiming for something bigger. The Greek word tragedy derives from "goat song." Scholars theorize that drama itself may have begun with the rituals surrounding goat sacrifice.  

Toward the end of "The Goat," the architect's wife charges that this affair has not just destroyed their marriage but that it will also unsettle everyone they know. In tragedy, of course, the well-being of a whole community rests on the shoulders of the tragic hero.  

But let's stop here. You don't really want me to go on about how Albee's plot exemplifies the ground rules of tragedy, do you? 

The sad truth is that the genre "The Goat" better exemplifies is boulevard comedy, and even here it fails. For comedy to work on more than a gag level, you have to believe in the characters. From the second it begins, almost everything about "The Goat" rings false. 

Martin constantly tells us how perfect his marriage to Stevie, is. Until he met Sylvia (the title character), he insists, he has never been unfaithful to her. If so, why is their conversation so forced and artificial?  

The same is true of his banter with his best friend, Ross. If his relationships with the two people closest to him are so strained, no wonder he feels more comfortable with Sylvia. 

The only character with whom he seems genuinely comfortable is his gay son, Billy.  

The actors do everything in their power to make the action believable, but the oh-so-arch (and, for Albee, surprisingly inelegant) dialogue defeats them. 

Bill Pullman has an innocent air that makes him perfect as the love-silly Martin. He handles his big emotional revelations skillfully and his scenes with his son gracefully. 

Mercedes Ruehl delivers Stevie's relentless zingers with relish (even the embarrassing "Oh, you kid"), but her most powerful moments come in inarticulate groans. Her work is especially impressive since the character has no grounding — all we know about her is that she is Martin's wife. 

Stephen Rowe can't make Ross believable, but Jeffrey Carlson has a touching vulnerability as the son. 

John Arnone's set conveys Martin's architectural pretentions stylishly. It has a lot of very attractive crockery that gets smashed.  

Talk about tragedy!

 Who Is Sylvia? is the alternate title of Edward Albee's newest play, The Goat, and both titles amount to the  same thing. The goat is Sylvia, Sylvia is a goat, and the premise of the play is that Sylvia the goat has somehow bewitched the heart of one Martin, a hugely successful and happily married architect. We are not speaking here in metaphors, nor of the fondness that an ordinary man might feel for the farm. The Goat is a challenging but woefully woolly-headed sketch about actual sex with an animal: bestiality, zoophilia, animal lust, pastoral love, heavy petting, the love that dares not bleat its name. 

 Martin, played by the affable Bill Pullman, is not the sort of man one would see on Jerry Springer's stage. He is as his wife Stevie, played by Mercedes Ruehl, describes him: "a decent, liberal, right-thinking, talented, famous, gentle man who right now would appear to be [fornicating with] a goat." In the play's opening scene, Albee shows us Martin and Stevie as a loving, playful couple. Their teenage son Billy (the sensitive Jeffrey Carlson) may be gay, but they can live with that. Their home, as designed by John Arnone, is a model of urban highbrow taste, straight out of the sets from Frasier: leather Eames chairs, primitive art on the wall, a tall library of books with a wooden ladder, many tasteful articles of pottery.    

By the end of the second scene, the pottery will be mostly shards, and much of the furniture overturned. By then Martin has confessed to his sanctimonious best friend Ross (Stephen Rowe) that he has been carrying on a sexual relationship with a goat he met in the country, and the outraged Ross has shared this secret with Stevie, who is understandably furious and confused: "How can you love me when you love so much less?" she asks. The play consists almost completely of anguished discussion about Martin's transgression. The shock value wears off fast, despite being punched up with frequent versions of the f-word, and The Goat becomes an exercise in escalating repetition. Martin's family and friends mouth variations on "How could you love a goat?," and Martin responds with variations on "What can I do? I love a goat."  

 Albee is a master of confrontational rhetoric, spoken through coolly clenched teeth, and there are good moments of that in The Goat. Ruehl is impressive in her wounded fury, and Carlson captures well the unformed quality of Billy's dialogue, the way it reaches for a wit it does not quite possess yet. But the play is surprisingly shallow in its treatment of its central issue. When bestiality turns up in the theater, as in Caryl Churchill’s play A Mouthful of Birds, it tends to be used for humor, but Albee's treatment is dead earnest; it has less in common with the brilliant sheep-loving sketch in Woody Allen's Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask than with the self-serving rationales Allen would use later in his career to defend his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. The heart wants what it wants, yes; but should the heart necessarily get what it wants?

 Albee is characteristically vague on this central question. At time, it seems as though the entire play is a theatrical extrapolation of the well-worn argument made by opponents of gay rights: that if we normalize homosexuality, bestiality and incest will follow. Martin and Stevie have accepted Billy. Why not Sylvia? Or why not the incest that in fact does make a cameo appearance toward the end of the play? The language used by Martin to defend his behavior has a familiar ring to it; he speaks with contempt of a fellow zoophile who had referred to himself as "cured" of the practice, and later, when Ross says "Jesus, you're sick," and Martin retorts with "Do you have any other words? Sick and Jesus? Is that all you have?" 

 Having implicitly raised this parallel, however, Albee does little to resolve its complexities. For a play of ideas, The Goat is disappointingly general and iconic--the perfect family, "absolutely normal, therefore great," torn asunder by a love that has no greater depth, in the end, than a psychotic episode. As such, the play ends up erasing itself into merely another exploration of a theme to which Albee has returned many times in the past:  the unfairness, unpredictability, and sheer randomness of life. This was the theme of last year's The Play About the Baby, which like The Goat was directed by David Esbjornson, but which unlike The Goat was theatrical and entertaining. Albee's aim can be painfully sharp, but here he can't seem to hit the side of a barn.

When the mysterious couple stole the baby in Edward Albee's most recent off-Broadway hit, "The Play About the Baby," the parents - and some theatergoers - are left wondering whether there ever really was a baby. In his 1966 "A Delicate Balance," exquisitely revived on Broadway six years ago, a comfortable family is shaken forever when neighbors move in with their existential fear. 

But in "The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" which boldly and outrageously and probably fool heartedly opened last night at Broadway's Golden Theatre, there is to be no debate about the reality of the catastrophe. There really is a goat. The good, long marriage of Martin (Bill Pullman) and Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl) is broken apart by his very real love affair with the animal, whom he swears is named Sylvia. 

Despite the Shakespearean subtitle and the superficial resemblance to such 20th century plays of trans- specie comedies as A.R. Gurney's "Sylvia" (a dog) and Rochelle Owen's "Futz" (a pig), this wildly flawed play - which I enjoyed but with wildly conflicted emotions - seems to be yearning back to the Greeks. Albee helps us out by admitting in the program that a second subtitle, "Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy," will be added to the printed script. 

And that helps. On the surface, "The Goat" - Albee's first new Broadway opening since he was banished into 20-year exile with a 1981 celebrity satire called "The Man Who Had Three Arms" - is just a willful comedy melodrama that exploits one of the last remaining taboos for a bit of fun and a lot of attention. 

On that level, his unspoken subtitle might have been "Consensual Bestiality: The Last Frontier." But the playwright with the three Pulitzer Prizes is going after bigger human issues than much of his flip virtuoso wordplay and his barnyard jokes - no matter how witty - may be able to touch. Think "Oedipus," not "Green Acres." Ultimately, Albee seems to be trying to combine an absurd domestic comedy with a primal-scream of a sex tragedy. It is a mixed marriage that requires all the world's good will to succeed. 

Albee also has said he's "testing the tolerance" of his audience. To do so, the lifelong provocateur has the game and gifted assistance of David Esbjornson - the young director last entrusted with the anticonventional affairs of the mature heart in Arthur Miller's bigamy comedy-drama, "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan." John Arnone's set for this seismic emotional disaster is an architect's dream of a living room, a tasteful mingling of South Western-colored pottery and African artifacts, thrusting to the sky and waiting the vengeance of the furies. 

Pullman plays Martin, an amiable and smartly distracted overachiever, 50, who has simultaneously been awarded the Pritzker Prize and a multibillion-dollar commission to build a "world city" in the wheat fields of the Midwest. But the man seems scattered in his banter with his lifelong love and wife, Stevie, a woman so suited to his accomplishments and his wordplay that neither has ever strayed. This bond is what makes his admission so wrenching. Unfortunately, their mutual admiration for their word play is what makes their confrontations, at times, seem more like a verbal fetish than an emotional abyss. Ruehl - whom Elizabeth Hope Clancy tellingly dresses in expensive suede for the horrific finale - has the bulk of Albee's most brilliant lines, which she delivers with an unlikely combination of chortle and bite. But even Ruehl cannot shoulder the burden of switching the tone from the incredible to the unthinkable. 

Eventually, she realizes that she cannot match her heartbreak by breaking pottery, which is when Albee raises the stakes by bringing in the Greeks. Jeffrey Carlson looks a bit old to be their 17-year-old gay son, but he juggles the childish and the knowing with deftness. Stephen Rowe is saddled with the most unpleasant character, the friend who tattles, and Rowe, so strong and evil in the revival of Albee's "Tiny Alice," never seems to get past arch discomfort as the self-righteous friend who tattles. 

Ultimately, Albee drops a willing theatergoer into big questions about the boundaries of sex and love, not to mention some strangely touching nostalgia for the pastoral and the natural that Martin's buildings will destroy. For all the distractions and disappointments, we are also left with some of the contradictory awe of his "Seascape," when a married couple sees two human-sized talking lizards come over the dune. "Terrifying," says the husband. "Yes, beautiful," says the wife. I can't help it. I see it too. 

 NEW YORK — The great thing about being an internationally celebrated playwright with three Pulitzer Prizes to your credit is that you can pretty much stage a food fight and get critics and audiences to approach it with intellectual curiosity. 

With his latest play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (  out of four), which opened Sunday at Broadway's Golden Theatre, Edward Albee has accomplished something even more perversely impressive. Albee recently told a reporter that he wrote Goat to test "the limits of tolerance" in theatergoers, musing, "I suppose some people will be offended and enraged." 

Others, he might have added, will simply be perplexed and sickened by this self-indulgent mess, in which the cynical, disdainful view of family life that has informed some of Albee's more eloquent works reaches its nauseating nadir. 

The marriage that comes under siege in this play is, at first blush, the very model of a happy, healthy modern partnership. After more than two decades together, Martin, a renowned architect who has just turned 50, and Stevie, his witty and devoted wife, remain passionately and comfortably in love. Relaxing in the den of their stylish suburban home — fashioned by scenic designer John Arnone as an elegant refuge filled with books and art — the two seem cozy, playful and engaged in each other's concerns, though not to the point of being co-dependent. 

Any shrink would tell you that this couple is too good to be true — and as it turns out, he would be right. For before the first scene is over, we learn that Martin has a dark secret, one that can be gleaned by referring to the play's title and imagining the most obvious worst-case scenario. Goat then degenerates into what is, depending on your perspective, either an awkward, mean-spirited black comedy or an even crueler and pettier reflection on relationships, in which Martin and Stevie's union is reduced to a construct for promoting moral relativism. 

Stars Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl deserve praise, and sympathy, for having managed to breathe some life into this construct. Pullman appears too young and guileless for the part of Martin at first, but the actor's earnestness and sweetly hapless edges make the character's crisis more credible and affecting. Ruehl establishes Stevie's earthy persona and handles her unraveling with instinctive comic prowess, and relays an easy warmth that makes some of Albee's nastier flourishes easier to stomach. 

Jeffrey Carlson is gamely irksome as the couple's 17-year-old son, Billy, a mincing, glowering creature who becomes a wellspring of convenient metaphorical references to Dad's deviant behavior. Stephen Rowe is more obnoxious still as Martin's oldest friend, whose interaction with his good buddy is so fraught with vague hostility and curious physical tension that one wonders why he doesn't just strangle Martin, or his wife, rather than merely help wreck their marriage. 

Granted, through this motley bunch, Albee does succeed in challenging our tolerance. If you can endure 100 minutes of their harried babbling without being tempted to sneak out during a scene transition, you surely deserve some sort of prize yourself.

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