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Theatre Review

A Play Well Calculated To Offend , Hartford Courant

The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?' Brings A Bit Of The Bizarre To Broadway 

Animal Husbandry, Village Voice

A Man Falls for a Quadruped In an Edward Albee Play, The Wall Street Journal

Edward Albee's new play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is about a successful, happily married man who has just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, just received a prestigious award in his field (architecture) and a lucrative government commission, and nevertheless finds himself severely compromised because he is forced to confess, to wife and son, that he has fallen in love with a goat. 

"Things happen," is what this man, Martin, concludes, and he's not being glib or even sardonic. The Goat is, I think, about a man—an apparently fine man, caring and liberal, intelligent and principled—allowing something to happen that he should not. It is also about the nature of that allowing—words like tolerance or understanding or even justification don't quite do here, but they're all close—because Albee, via Martin, actually leads us to a place where we almost accept the play's impossible premise. 

 Elsewhere in this provocative, funny, troubling play, Albee touches on familiar themes like the myth of the American Dream and the hypocrisy of the striving American establishment, and on less expected but entirely welcome issues like irrational homophobia and disillusionment with people in power. The dialogue is smart and well-considered and that one degree more articulate than actual conversation that characterizes the playwright's work; it's witty and challenging and distancing, even in the midst of the most intense marital battles this side of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  The Goat starts as self-referential Noel Coward comedy of manners (there's even a reference to a woman called "Large Alice") and ends, grandly and ambiguously, as Greek tragedy, complete with ritual sacrifice. 

It's a play that demands to be seen, and read, and heard; there's stuff in it that will feel ringingly true and significant and useful to you. The particulars—the meaning, the precise resonance—are going to be different for each of us, I think, because the nature of Albee's work generally and The Goat specifically is to be dense, knotty, and not quite knowable. At once a profound conundrum and a malevolent game, The Goat is engineered not to be solved. It's designed, instead, to provoke, to challenge, to push buttons, to awaken us from lethargy and ignorance, to shock, and—yes—to amuse, too. That it does all of these so well is a measure of Albee's genius; that it frustrates us for its ultimate unfathomability is our weakness, not his. 

Don't get me wrong: The Goat is not perfect; it may not stand the test of time the way A Delicate Balance turned out to or Virginia Woolf indisputably does. But a playwright as smart as Albee deserves to be heard, and heard seriously: The Goat is an important piece of this theatre season, and what (or if) it will someday tell us about this American moment isn't important right now. 

David Esbjornson's staging seems to me just right: it has style, sharpness, and urgency. Recent cuts and tucks and alterations feel somewhat evident; I wonder if director and playwright are satisfied with The Goat we've been invited to review. The four actors who comprise the cast are in superb form, that's for sure: Stephen Rowe plays Ross, best friend and catalyst for the play's events, with an assured swagger that feels good at first but turns nasty; Mercedes Ruehl, Bill Pullman, and Jeffrey Carlson (as Martin and Stevie's son, Billy) create an organic family unit so strong that its destruction has real weight. All three give performances of immense emotional intensity; there may not be a better ensemble working on Broadway. 

I don't claim to understand all of Albee's intentions in The Goat, nor do I necessarily embrace the ones I do understand. But what I know is that the body blows Albee serves up in this discomfiting domestic drama are electric jolts of energy. We need that; boy do we need that. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what The Goat means. What matters is that it compels you to figure it out.

One of the most unusual and intriguing major plays to open in New York in many months has just arrived on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. In fact, Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is probably the strangest theatre experience since last year's The Play About the Baby, also by Albee.  

The Play About the Baby and this one have a fair amount in common, and both are unmistakably the property of the same author. But, despite what it's title might lead you to believe, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is really more than a play about a billy. 

If you're interested in a fascinating take on truly unusual subject matter, Albee's your man. Does anyone handle it better?  

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? starts off conventionally and even realistically, set in the smart, geometric living room designed by John Arone. The family housed there is headed by Martin (played by Bill Pullman), an architect who has won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, has obtained the contract to design a mammoth living community in the nation's heartland, and is celebrating his fiftieth birthday. "The sense that everything's going right," his wife Stevie, played by Mercedes Ruehl tells him, "is a sure sense that everything's going wrong."  

She couldn't be more right, actually. Despite his many accomplishments, Martin is faced with two problems of great significance to him. First, his 18 year-old son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson) has recently come out of the closet, and it has been very difficult for Martin to accept the implications of that. Perhaps more significantly, for the last six months, Martin has been having an affair with Sylvia.  

And yes, Sylvia is a goat.  

If the play, with its detached, staccato dialogue and speech patterns had not registered strongly as an Albee work by now, from this point on, there can be no doubt. As Albee covers all the bases - Stevie finding out in a letter written by Martin's oldest friend Ross (Stephen Rowe), the son's reaction, and the eventual retribution - a play of two wildly divergent attitudes emerges.  

The first is one of almost unrelenting comedy. No one involved shies away from the laughs the material brings out. For the audience, the laughter might be genuine or uncomfortable (it's hard to tell which, sometimes), but it's remarkably pervasive, affecting everything and everyone until the play's final moments, at which, for some strange reason, laughter is no longer enough.  

Under this is the perhaps expected dark, tragic undercurrent. Martin's fall from glory, because of his love for an animal, is significant enough, but it is Miss Ruehl who brings it out best, giving a stunning performance, one of the season's best. When Stevie rounds on Martin about his infidelity, the words, "How can you love me when you love so much less?" are truly stinging; she gets right to Martin's heart, and yours. No one balances the comedy out better than she does.  

That is not to say, though, that the other actors don't give strong performances. Everyone does a good job here. Carlson infuses his Billy with strong pain and hurt and Rowe's portrayal of Ross is equal parts disgust and bemusement. Pullman has a tendency to read more than a bit stiff onstage, though it's difficult to imagine Martin's words being spoken by any other voice. Albee's dialogue, through Pullman, sounds comfortable and natural.  

Director David Esbjornson has done well almost across the board here, bringing a sense of reality to subject matter that frequently seems almost impossibly unbelievable. Kenneth Posner's lighting is an important contribution, but there's something about Arone's set design that steals the show away from almost everyone else. The house, which bears the strong look of an architect, truly appears that it, like the family it contains, is about to come apart at the seams.  

There is much about The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? that is very good, though I doubt very much it is destined to be a classic. For a play of this subject matter, to last over an hour and a half while maintaining more than just a modicum of good taste and dramatic intensity is a remarkable achievement indeed.  

Yet there's something about the final moments of the play that strike a dishonest chord. It's the only time during the course of the show that the performances, writing, and direction don't really come together. It feels like Albee was settling, providing not a happy ending or even a correct ending, but merely an acceptable one. This choice is all the more curious, since no one involved refused to embrace difficult subject matter until that point. Adultery, bestiality, and more (that won't be revealed here) are fair game, yet The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? has to end on a safe, almost sanitized note?  

It's an unfortunate conclusion to what had been a provocative and thoroughly original play. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, yes, you have to see The Goat. It's a play that realizes so much of its potential, yet is sadly unable to drive its final words and images home.

NEW YORK -- At one point in her volatile, edgy, pottery-smashing performance in Edward Albee's bizarre, compelling new play, Mercedes Ruehl sardonically spits out a variation on Shakespeare's song: "Who is Sylvia, and what is she, that all our goats commend her?" 

Ruehl's Stevie, the chic 40-something mother of a gay teenage son, has just learned that her husband has fallen in love with another. This betrayal forms the crux of the witty, stabbing play whose title partly echoes the line from "Two Gentlemen of Verona." "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" which opened Sunday at Golden Theatre, brings back the onetime crown prince of Broadway with a play well calculated to offend. For Stevie's husband, Martin, played in a kind of sleepwalking trance by Bill Pullman, has fallen deeply for Sylvia, whose eyes simply entrance him. Moreover, they are carrying on an affair. Sylvia is a goat. 

Sexual relationships between humans and lower animals have long occupied the minds of men and women. Though "Metamorphosis," Mary Zimmerman's retelling of selections from Ovid, does not include any such stories, most compendiums of myths abound in tales of gods and goddesses taking non-human forms to fornicate with desired mortals. William Butler Yeats retold the rape of a great beauty by Zeus with visceral eloquence in "Leda and the Swan," and James Dickey wrote spellbindingly of a sheep/child preserved in a laboratory jar. There are also tales of women and animals. The legend of Catherine the Great and her stallion is apocryphal, but the Danish writer Peter Hoeg convincingly and rather lyrically told of a passionate affair in "The Woman and the Ape." 

But Albee has taken bestiality to the suburbs, in a most amusing but emotionally piercing way, in his new intermission less, increasingly disturbing play in three scenes. The production, tautly built by David Esbjornson, begins as a comedy of manners, then ignites into a fiercer, more destructive marital clash than Albee depicted in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," recently staged by the director with Ruehl and Patrick Stewart at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. In the third scene, after Stevie has stormed out, the suspense intensifies. At last, Albee delivers a shocking coup de theatre. 

Throughout his career, Albee has often focused unsparingly on troubled marriages. In "The Goat," he sketches a happy one - at first. 

The play begins on a light note, as Pullman's befuddled Martin stumbles into the stately modern living room designed by John Arnone. He cannot remember anything, Martin claims - "My mind's going" - and there is talk of Alzheimer's. It soon develops that a celebrity television type named Ross is coming to interview Martin on his 50th birthday. For Martin is a world-famous architect with two new claims to greatness: winning the Pritzker Prize, his profession's Nobel, and designing a $27 billion World City to rise in a cornfield in Kansas. 

Before Ross arrives, Martin and Stevie banter, and he makes a cryptic remark about a goat, which she takes as a joke, before departing with her own quip about going to the feed store. But Martin, seated in one of two tan Eames chairs, cannot concentrate on the interview with Stephen Rowe's glib, slick Ross. So, as Ross is Martin's oldest friend - there is much Albee wordplay about the phrase - the brain-clouded architect tells the interviewer of his discovery of Sylvia during a search for a farm in the countryside. Aghast, Ross departs and the first scene ends. 

The final scene, in the rubble-strewn living room, focuses on the anguish of Billy, as he tells his father how much he has loved and admired both his parents. The blond, lean Carlson now becomes the engine of the play with a moving, finely controlled performance. Ross turns up briefly. Then, before the curtain, Ruehl's Stevie returns to fulfill her promise. 

Early in the play, the Eumenides are mentioned. And, in fact, Albee's play has the feeling of Greek tragedy, of an inexorable playing out of fate, driven by the Furies. 

As in so many dramatic accounts of falls from grace, a great man is brought low by a careless act. For Albee, the goat is both symbolic of any forbidden passion, but also real. How audiences will respond to this world premiere - his first on Broadway since the disastrous "The Man Who Had Three Arms" way back in 1981 - is only one of the big questions that arise from this rare and strangely moving theater experience.  

Tragedy always dares parody. One of the easiest plays in decades to burlesque and ridicule, Edward Albee's The Goat is also the one most likely to be talked about seriously—angrily,   ferociously—for years to come. You can hear the controversy rising around you as you exit up the aisle, and it does not abate on the way home. For a moment, the theater has become the principal source of New York conversation again. Never mind what Bloomberg or Bush said to the press, people are much too busy wrangling over what Bill Pullman says to Mercedes Ruehl on the stage of the Golden Theatre. Things haven't fallen out this way since Mamet's Oleanna, and Oleanna's predecessor in the debate-igniting department was a certain Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Yes, Mr. Albee knows the art of giving moral debate an aesthetic shape. If it's too early to list The Goat among his masterpieces, still, those who are scrambling to inscribe it on the scroll of his disasters had better move slowly: They may yet find themselves off in the hall of shame, with the guys who suppressed Ghosts and hooted down The Rite of Spring.  

Structurally, The Goat is as simple as a one-act play can be, its straightforward action laid out in an intermission less 100 minutes. A man has two loves, one of them his wife; he tells his best friend about the other love. The best friend tells the wife. The wife has a long, violent confrontation with her husband and storms out. The husband, not unreasonably, has a quarrel with the friend, which is interrupted by their discovery that the wife has committed what can only, in this context, be called a crime of passion. The end. Between 1840 and 1920, nearly every working playwright in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and New York wrote a version of this story; Albee's brilliant way of extending its boundaries had to wait for our own transgressive time. In this version, the man's other love is a goat. He calls her Sylvia, though it is unclear whether that is her name. The goat has no lines.  

 Pellucid as storytelling, Albee's script is a dense web of byways—philosophic, social, ethical—overgrown with psychological clues. The hero, Martin (Pullman), has just turned 50; an architect, he has also just won both a major award and the giant contract to design a visionary "world city" with a whopping $27 billion budget. Far from swelling his ego, this success has left him bemused and forgetful, prone to quibble, like earlier Albee heroes, over niceties of word use. This amuses his wife, Stevie (Ruehl), but nettles his old college chum Ross (Stephen Rowe), the host-cum-producer of what's apparently a cable show called People Who Matter. It's during Ross's attempt to interview Martin for the show that the revelation occurs. 

Martin's simultaneous passions for Stevie and Sylvia are apparently the only certainties in his view of his own life. Architecture, success, friendship, the daily trivia of domestic life—everything else provokes him to puzzled questions. He's most openly dubious about the homosexuality of the play's fourth character, his and Stevie's 17-year-old son, Billy (Jeffrey Carlson). Martin and Stevie, liberals, have met Billy's coming out with loving, supportive tolerance; Martin's ambivalence on the subject only worsens his own case: A powerfully fraught scene in which Billy finds himself confessing, to his own incomprehension, that he still loves his father is cut short when Ross walks in on them embracing. (The casting of Carlson, a gifted novice actor, adds to the disquiet: He looks 17 but speaks in the raspy bass-baritone of a much older man.)  

At every turn, Albee displays a sense of responsibility that's almost unique among the artists who've lately been testing art's permissible boundaries. "For the poet, he nothing affirms," Philip Sidney told the English Renaissance, "and therefore never lyeth." Albee has played fair; he affirms neither side in his onstage debates, merely noting what the people say and do. When Martin declares that Sylvia returns his love, Stevie is there with remarks about mistreating animals. When questions of normality and permissiveness arise, Billy is there to shout that his sex partners are two-legged. Martin may be scathing, in his climactic dispute with Ross, about friendship and betrayal, but the disturbing truth that answers his sneers has been heard onstage in the opening scene, when a puzzled Stevie asks Martin about the odd scent emanating from him. And Stevie's anger, during their hair-raising confrontation, is constantly refueled by her realization that Martin has been moving, with almost complacent casualness, from goat to wife and back again.  

 Albee doesn't convey one key point: how Martin's goat-love has survived the transition from platonic affection to physical intercourse (a shift from feeling to action that even human-human affairs often don't survive). Yet here, too, Albee shows us fairly how the others give Martin little chance to explain himself (understandable, given their shock), and the awful struggle that he goes through finding words sufficient for the little they let him convey. Here Albee proves his mettle by investing his familiar word games with a newly fierce relevance. When Martin and Stevie haggle over whether Sylvia's a "she" or an "it," the question not only has philosophical ramifications—if you don't believe me, check Peter Singer's Animal Liberation—but is also, literally, a life-or-death issue for them.  

 On the provocatively splayed architecture of John Arnone's set, David Esbjornson moves Albee's people around with a subtle unassertiveness that anchors and heightens the text. If Pullman doesn't carry the hidden tensions that must be gnawing at Martin, the beatific blandness he exudes instead suggests an equally extreme denial: He's so detached you expect him to levitate when the argument heats up. His gracious withdrawal leaves the field open for Ruehl, who seizes the opportunity thrillingly. I used to think Ruehl only an OK actress, but this role has lit her inner fire. I love her dark-brown voice, like bitter beer, and the way her delicate features seem to sharpen as the emotional temperature rises. And while the number of actresses who can say the word "goatfucker" without raising a laugh will always be small, the number who can evoke pity and terror while saying it currently totals one.

 It’s been the most protracted, least shocking “coming out” since Rosie O’Donnell’s.

As the coy innuendos, buzz-generating leaks and publicity photos have so abundantly indicated, Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” – which opened Sunday at Broadway’s Golden theater in a production directed by David Esbjornson – is a bout a married man’s “love affair” with a cud-chewing, malodorous quadruped, and the havoc the relationship’s disclosure wreaks within his family. 

From the very start, even before the actors take the stage, we can see that the Grays would not feel at home on “Jerry Springer.”  Their spacious, exceptionally attractive suburban living room (designed by John Arnone and lit by Kenneth Posner) shows the same tasteful, liberal, educated sensibility as that of TV’s Frasier Crane, with its modern furniture and artful displays of books, African sculptures and pottery.  The slightly askew angles of the walls provide the barest hint of expressionistic unease. 

Martin (Bill Pullman), by contrast, is in a dither and, as the play begins, about to be interviewed for television by Ross (Stephen Rowe), his best friend from prep-school days.  In the past week, Martin has turned 50, to become the youngest architect ever to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize and was chosen to design a $27 billion World City in the wheat fields of Kansas.

In the minutes before Ross arrives, the preoccupied, befuddled Martin discloses to Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl), his wife of 22 years, that he has, "fallen in love...hopelessly," with a goat named Sylvia.  But as this confession is largely couched in veddy-British, flamboyant mock-Cowardian tones, Stevie thinks it's a big joke.  (That odd smell on his person raises no special alarms.)  "You try to tell them; you try to be honest.  What do they do? They laugh at you,"  Martin says to himself and the audience.

Stevie and the couples's gay 17-year-old son, Billy (Jeffery Carlson), aren't laughing after Ross wheedles the truth out of woebegone Martin and sends a letter brimming with smarmy self-righteousness to his best friend's wife: "... because I love you, Stevie, as much as I love Martin, because I love you both-respect you, love you- I can't stay silent at a time of crisis for you both, for Martin's public image..."

In the ensuing marital explosion, Stevie will overturn furniture, destroy a painting and bring new meaning to the expression "throwing pots" by smashing several pieces of crockery onto the floor. (A woman seated in the front row during a preview performance was hit by a flying shard and needed stitches.) Both Stevie and Billy will find their complacency shattered.  And Mr. Pullman, as Martin, will continue to look very sheepish, a little cowed but far from goatish as the heretofore flawlessly faithful husband who still professes to love his wife while in the throes of a love that dare not bleat its name. 

This very minor Albee effort has many flashes of wit and wordplay – the playwright finds humor, for example, in his upper-income, hyper-verbal New Yorkers lacing their sentences with the f-curse, like Mametian characters with graduate degrees. 

But what, exactly, is Mr. Albee after?  Are we supposed to take Martin’s transgression seriously or to relish the patent absurdity (okay, call me naïve) or the premise?  Are we to see Stevie’s rage as perfectly understandable or oddly excessive?  Is this meant to be a fable about the power of the media (in the person of the saponaceous Ross) to expose secrets and destroy relatively innocent lives? A coded message about homosexuality and homophobia?  A plea for the societal benefits of reticence?  A rumination about the strange paths love and betrayal take? Does Mr. Albee want to get our goats, or just PETA's?  Don't ask me, kids; I'm still chewing it over.

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