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The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Culturevulture.net

Theater Reviews, `Metamorphoses’, `The Crucible’, and `The Goat’ on Broadway,Metromix

Ewe and non-ewe behaviour, Sex in the farmyard? There's even a Broadway show about it, The Guardian         

Better on Stage Than On Screen ,NY Post

Call it his animal passion, Philadelphia Inquirer

THE GOAT or WHO IS SYLVIA?, AISLE SAY New York

THE GOAT or WHO IS SYLVIA?, Backstage.com

Mixed reviews greet Albee's 'The Goat' , Houston Chronicle

Edward Albee's new play is puzzling, powerful, bawdy, disturbing and deeply weird. It challenges a viewer to decide whether what seems to be happening in the world of the play is really happening, and once that conclusion has been reached the challenge becomes, as in any great play, to puzzle out how many ways the play can be experienced or understood. At the final blackout each member of the audience must take it all home and wrestle with it knowing that, as in most of Albee's work, it may never become completely clear. And why should it? Life, on the level of complexity with which Albee deals with it is a slippery thing to grasp at best.   

 In a bit of back and forth banter with his wife he tosses off the fact that he's having an affair with a goat. She laughs, quips back that she'll stop at the feed store on the way from a hair appointment. Ha ha. Well, and it's giving away almost nothing in plot suspense to say so, he is in fact having an affair with a goat, not like someone becoming especially attached to their dog or cat, but an actual affair with all it implies. This is a goat with whom--or rather, with which--he has become deeply involved.

His wife finds out. He tries to explain and she tries to understand, and this confrontation scene is the heart of the play. This is his first affair, he explains, after 22 years of marriage, and he's still happily married. It's just that there's Sylvia--that's the goat's name--to be dealt with. Sylvia is indeed dealt within the play's final scene that will make the viewer laugh, cry, or (at least want to) run screaming from the theatre. 

Edward Albee

There are echoes of Albee's previous plays here--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Play About the Baby come to mind. There are echoes of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author in its exploration of the idea of identity, and whether we are who we are at life's most intense acts, or who we are day by day in our ordinary, typical moments.  

Bill Pullman as Martin, the architect, dives headlong into a role that most top drawer actors would probably avoid, and he succeeds in making this twitchy, obsessed character believable and even sympathetic. Mercedes Ruehl is brilliant as his wife, a highly intelligent, consummately verbal woman. Her rage crackles in the air around her as she tries to process a stranger extra-marital affair confession than any reasonable spouse could ever expect.    

Unfortunately, the acting is uneven. Stephen Rowe plays the family friend-TV interviewer and he is saddled with a role that seems sketched in to serve the plot rather than written with much depth. Even so, Rowe seems to be half on stage and half somewhere else, in some other play. Jeffrey Carlson plays the couple's young gay son; his performance has the feel of an acting class exercise assigned by a teacher to explore only one aspect of the character. The heart of the play is confrontation between husband and wife, and the rest feels superfluous.

David Esbjornson's direction combines the elements of theatricality that Albee's work demands with careful moment by moment exploration of the minds and hearts of the main characters.  

On a defiantly smaller canvas, Edward Albee's  "The Goat," now at the Golden Theatre, offers a  fable addressing what Albee has called "the limits  of tolerance," in which one family's delicate  balance is tipped by an affair. In scenic designer John Arnone's cleverly off-kilter living room setting, architect Martin (Bill Pullman, giving a clenched, uneven portrayal of a clenched, unraveling character) reveals he is having it off with a goat  named Sylvia. His wife, Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl), and his son, Billy (Jeffrey Carlson), learns of it in a letter from Martin's friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe).  

 Laughter and hypocrisy  

 About half of "The Goat" is what Albee intended, which is "funny, in its awful way" per Stevie's description. The other half muddies his most explosive questions, the peeling-back of various hypocrisies. What's worse in theory and practice:  Bestiality or incest? (Nothing explicit here, but disturbing nonetheless.) What can be forgiven?  

 Large questions, yet "The Goat" is fundamentally a drawing-room tragicomedy that ends in a blood sacrifice. It's exasperating. Well under two hours, it nonetheless plays like a protracted one-act, and the animal-love hook harkens back to such  "radical" 1960s experiments as "Futz!" (about pig-love) or the recent boulevard comedy "Sylvia"  (dog-love, but not really, but sort of). Yet I found more in it to think about afterward than I did with Albee's previous jape, "The Play About the Baby."  

 "It can't have happened," Martin says of his love for the fair Sylvia. "It did, but it can't have." Such are the words of anyone confronted by a world radically transformed, by the dictates of real gods  or phantom witches, or an animal attraction  beyond all reason.

On a flight back from America this week, I read in the complimentary newspaper about the startling case of Stephen Hall, a 23-year-old chef who pleaded guilty at Hull crown court to buggering a goat. He was spotted from a train and - after initially denying the offence - incriminated by goat hairs in his briefs.  

This story sent a tingle of recognition through my whiskers not because I'd frolicked under the sign of Capricorn myself but because, 24 hours earlier on Broadway, I'd attended the premiere of Edward Albee's new play.  

First famous for writing about a Woolf called Virginia, Albee, at 74, has now turned to a goat named Sylvia. The dramatist has been most praised for pieces about couples - apart from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his works include the divorce duels of A Delicate Balance and Marriage Play - and, at the beginning, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? feels like a replay of those shouting matches.  

Martin, who has just won architecture's equivalent of the Nobel prize, is celebrating his 50th birthday with Stevie, his wife, and Ross, a friend he's known since they were 10. But marital instability threatens when Martin is revealed to be enjoying what you might call a stable relationship outside his marriage. While his wife is out of the room, he admits to an affair. His chum is nudge-nudge sympathetic about this until he sees a picture of the mistress and it becomes clear that we're watching a drawing room comedy about bestiality.  

Art has often slipped into these passages before. There are allusions in Shakespeare and Ovid - and many mermaids, centaurs and fawns elsewhere - but it's modern literature which has really been able to let the cat out of the closet. The 1977 Italian film Padre Padrone features boy-poultry romance in Sardinia. And while Niall Griffiths's cult novel Sheepshagger invokes in its title a notorious English libel about Welsh sex-lives only to reject it in the text, there have been many pet-shop boys in British fiction. A man gets coltish with his horse in Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus, while an Ian McEwan novel and short story both touch on four-legged sex. Heavy-petting with an alsatian occurs in Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo. Albee isn't even the first dramatist to inch open the barn-door on Broadway. In 1968, Bamber Gascoigne (now here's a nicely obscure University Challenge answer) premiered his Leda Had a Little Swan there, although the play was taken off before its opening night when the audience failed to come in two by two.  

Even so, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? is an unusual event: a full $90-a-ticket Broadway production wedged between the musicals and starring a film actor, Bill Pullman. The casting echoes Albee's scheme in the script which is to present not the stereotypical image of a goat-romancer (a desperate peasant) but a rich and successful man who suddenly finds himself surprised by the eyes he's gazing into.  

So what is it that Albee's trying to look at? He suggests in a programme note that he's "testing the tolerance" of the audience and this seems to be the drama's main intention. When Virginia Woolf opened 40 years ago, it was possible to shock the audience with a frank depiction of heterosexual married relationships. Since then, drama and society have disarmed each of the moral bombs in turn so that now only child abuse and bestiality remain explosive.  

You probably couldn't get finance for a Broadway play presenting paedophilia as just another option of the heart (except possibly for Lolita, of which Albee once wrote a flop adaptation). So the dramatist seeking inflammatory impact must get down in the straw. Apart from the possibility for shocks, Albee can also target middle-class hypocrisy. The architect is uneasy with having a gay son, who can riposte: "You called me a faggot but you're a goat-fucker."  

The problem is - as playwright and audience discover - that, beyond the keenest members of the RSPCA, bestiality always tends to seem a comic dilemma rather than a tragic one. Reading the story about Mr Evans, my first reaction was that a goat was especially unlucky to be buggered by a chef, who might cook her afterwards.  

The reports of Evans's court appearance affect merriment at his counsel's suggestion that he should be offered therapy including "victim awareness", designed presumably to help him understand why goats so dread the tread of wellingtons towards their stall.  

Our failure to take bestiality seriously results from the perception that, unlike most human sexuality, it results from desperation rather than decision. According to rural lore, many farmhands utilise the stock rather as young Portnoy employs the family's dinner liver, moving on to human flesh as soon as it is possible. The goat-loving Mr Evans, it turns out, has a medical condition which might limit his chances with two-legged partners.  

What's truly shocking about the Albee is that it shows a man with many sexual options falling romantically in love with a goat rather than using its openings for a sort of souped-up self-abuse. To most who see it, this inexplicable transaction roots the play in the theatre of the absurd, even though a tragic ending is attempted.  

Perhaps as part of the therapy his lawyer seeks, Mr Hall should be given transatlantic plane tickets to see The Goat, an eloquent warning against the complications of cross-species romance. However, quarantine officials should be on hand just in case he asks for a second ticket.

                                             Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

One major difference between stage and screen is in the acting and the actors.  

It may look very much as though the guys up there on the screen are doing the same thing as the guys up there on the stage.  

But they are not - not quite. And the difference in that is really vast.  

Four film stars on Broadway at present - Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Proof," Kevin Bacon in "An Almost Holy Picture," Liam Neeson in "The Crucible" and Bill Pullman in "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" - are giving terrific performances.  

They all breathe the air of the theater like oxygen.  

All of them have had stage experience, of course (although Pullman has had a little less than the others).  

But what is interesting is that they are all, particularly Neeson and Pullman, more impressive on Broadway than they ever have been in the movies.  

Neeson, who manages to look smaller than Mel Gibson on screen (compare "Rob Roy" with "Braveheart"), is a gigantic presence as Miller's rugged conscience of the world in "The Crucible," just as he was earlier on Broadway as David Hare's Oscar Wilde and in Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie."  

I'm not saying he's not a fine screen actor, but I do suggest that as a stage actor, he is magnificent.  

Much the same can be said of Pullman - although I must admit that in movies, Pullman, unlike Neeson, has merely seemed a likable cipher.  

On stage, however, he is dazzling for his bewitching naturalness and the sheer technique of his acting.  

They are not alone. Other actors have proven better on the stage than screen, and, just as often, vice versa.  

Lillian Gish was fine on stage, but absolutely luminous in those early movies, while Vivien Leigh could subdue a camera and cameramen with a glance, but on stage . . . she was, well, OK.  

On the other hand, Helen Hayes never seemed quite happy in film, and although in the movies Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are two of film's unsung greats, on stage neither was quite as electric.  

The most important lesson I ever had in the difference between the two styles of acting was given to me by Alan Bates, who was with a movie director, Clive Donner, in a boozy late-night session nearly 40 years ago in the bar of the Roxburgh Hotel during an Edinburgh Festival.  

I'd never met Bates before (his play "Fortune's Fool" is now in previews on Broadway), and I'm sure he's forgotten the incident.  

But Bates, one of those rare, consummate craftsman/artists, was marvelously eloquent on the differences between stage and screen.  

He'd happily discuss the size of gestures, which are vastly magnified by the screen, the importance of vocal nuance, the tonal difference demanded by cinematic intimacy and, in movies, the need to convey character partly by projecting image.  

Of course, most actors start on stage, unless they're Lana Turner.  

Humphrey Bogart was on Broadway before he went to Hollywood. My first sighting of Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro was off-Broadway.  

Paul Newman and Robert Redford, not to mention Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, made it in the theater before they went Hollywood.  

It's a pity more screen actors don't return to the stage more often - they could well give both themselves and us a surprise.

 NEW YORK - In Edward Albee's new play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, a successful and happily married architect takes an alarmingly literal view of animal husbandry and falls in love with - not too fine a point on it - a goat.

This proposition is supposed to send shock waves rippling through the Gershwin Theatre, but it put me in a mood of panicked reassessment of long-cherished assumptions. Was the deal between the Lone Ranger and Silver as platonic as I had innocently supposed in childhood? And when Poe's raven quoth "Nevermore!", was it really the bird-world equivalent of "Not now, I have a headache"? 

In raising the issue of trans-species sex, Albee gleefully opens a can of worms - creatures that, to the best of my limited knowledge, are not as yet into cross-dating. He certainly has the field - or at least the barnyard - to himself at the moment. 

And in presenting us with an intelligent urban man smitten with a goat named Sylvia, Albee seeks to use this love that dare not bleat its name as a way of discussing sexual intolerance and how we feel about the proclivities of others. The piece is in an area that is, as Mercedes Ruehl, the understandably appalled wife, says, "beyond the rules." 

There is a certain macabre fascination and no little admiration for the writing skill with which Albee lays out the premise and then stands back to admire the explosions like a man setting off a fireworks display. 

But The Goat has too many grinding gear-shifts and abrupt shifts of tone to work. It begins as a polished sitcom. Then the play darkens as Albee wrings the changes. The cutting put-down gives way to the intra-family flagellation at which Albee excels, and The Goat finally moves into tragedy. All in the space of 100 minutes (there is no intermission, presumably to discourage less-hardy souls from skipping the second act and sneaking home to watch reruns of The Black Sheep Squadron). 

Martin (Bill Pullman) has a loving marriage to Stevie (Ruehl) that has flourished without infidelity on either side for 22 years. He also enjoys a fond, if testy, relationship with his gay teenage son, Billy (Jeffrey Carlson in a promising Broadway debut). 

All is well until he confesses his secret passion to Ross (Stephen Rowe), his best friend. Ross detonates domestic bliss by writing a tell-all letter to Stevie. This idea might have a future as an all-out absurdist black comedy with someone like John Cleese (that noted collector of dead parrots) in the lead. 

But as the shadows lengthen over the crisis, Albee indulges in a cycle of repetition as the other characters respond to Martin's behavior. I also felt there is something of a cop-out in The Goat. 

Sex with animals strikes most of us as egregiously perverted, but its consequences are limited - unless, of course, you're the goat. A play that couched a plea for compassion and tolerance in terms of something more prevalent and devastating, such as pedophilia, could provoke howls of outrage and a stampede for the exits. 

Ruehl, who could make her laundry list sound the height of sophisticated wit, gives a winning and skilled performance. But even her talent is tested by the transitions Albee demands. With his stubborn, nice-guy demeanor, Pullman does everything you could possibly ask for Martin. 

Open-minded theatergoers and Albee's many admirers will enjoy The Goat, a production that leaves much to ponder. Certainly, if I ever see the front page of the National Enquirer emblazoned with a headline like "Famed Architect's Wife Cites Nanny in Divorce," I'll be doing a double take. 

Contact Desmond Ryan at dryan@phillynews.com or 215-854-5614.

Having just received the Pritzger Prize (the equivalent of the Pulitzer for architecture), Martin (Bill Pullman), on the week of his 50th birthday, is about to give an at-home interview to a teevee journalist…who happens to be his oldest friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe). The interview quickly becomes a futile endeavor; Martin is abstracted, uncooperative…but once they’re off-the-record, off-camera and talking as intimates, Martin unburdens. He and his wife Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl) have recently bought a farm: a home-away-from home to enhance their stable, wonderful, long-term marriage, one in which there has never been even the desire to be unfaithful on either side, going on nearly a quarter of a century. 

 Except on this farm…there’s this goat…who has these eyes…and Martin, helpless in the grip of passion, has taken on his first extra-marital lover… 

 Appalled and believing he must help his friend by exposing the secret, Ross writes a note to Stevie…and the marriage hits the fan. Only their college-age son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson) manages to find within him understanding and forgiveness…but not before going through his own anger and resentment; and, it would seem, empathy only comes because homosexuality has given him a unique perspective on the nature of passion beyond reason. 

 On the one hand, in "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" Albee is exploring an interesting theme–the aforementioned "passion beyond reason." Where’s the line between right-thinking tolerance and righteous condemnation? Where’s the line between emotional-biological imperative and intellectual restraint? And who has the right to judge? Albee, as in several of his other plays, examines his proposed questions by going to extremes, moving them to the point of what might be called logical absurdity. 

 In that exploration, Albee is blessed with a committed cast, a very attractively designed production (John Arnone), and a director (David Esbjornson) who has a firm hand on the shifting tones of the play–as it moves from domestic comedy to black comedy to suburban "Greek" tragedy, all with irony lurking in the background. Mr. Pullman has the perfect persona for the man with the problem, evincing sweet, cherubic confusion; Ms. Ruehl showcases her signature edge as the wife who cracks, and roars, and ultimately takes action; and the Mssrs. Rowe and Carlson do satisfyingly well by their assigned tasks too. 

 On the other hand, though, the logical absurdity of the premise doesn’t offer the audience much of a way in–Martin’s compulsion is perverse past any controversy or debate; nor does the dialogue help us understand what Martin has carried with him all these years–or had missing–that has propelled him into this carnal compensation. 

 And there’s an even subtler undermining current. This is one of those Albee plays that–once again–promulgates the quaint but not-yet-dead philosophy of the cynical, bitter homosexual who believes fundamentally that all straight relationships are suspect or corrupt, and that there is significant latent homosexuality in us all. "The Goat" is not quite as brazen as "The Play About the Baby" in this regard–"Baby" was so shameless that even some gay audience members of my acquaintance expressed dismay–but the earmarks are there just the same. To wit: 

 Albee doesn’t "wreck" a marriage that has had its elements of struggle–he destroys one in which both partners have up ’til now found utter fulfillment in one another. How does he destroy it? With the perversion of bestiality: not only can’t Martin be steadily straight–he must fall beyond latent homosexuality. Who is at the center of Martin’s destruction? His best male friend (why not destroy the concept of straight male bonding while we’re at it?). And finally–who is the one character in the play who can find his way to a tortured but admirable enlightenment about it all? Why, the gay son. Of course. 

 As I wrote when I reviewed "The Play About the Baby", in this more enlightened day and age (Mr. Albee, as an author, has his formative roots in the 50s and 60s), the author can hardly be construed as representing the gay community, or even anything other than his own michegoss. 

 And perhaps, more in this play than in the last, his anger–and the message it keeps sending–is at least somewhat subconscious. For in this one he’s not being so hateful that he doesn’t give you an interesting idea or two to mull over. There even seems to be a grudging compassion for Martin and Stevie (in the "Baby" play there was none for the parents, at all).  

But the straight-bashing manifesto that challenges you to call it by name–and bets that you will not–is still present. And sad. Because, this being a more enlightened day and age, you want to believe a prominent, gifted artist might be able to get past needing to send that kind of message–subliminally and overtly–over and over again. 

 I’ll give Albee this much, though: his play is about his problem: passion beyond reason… 

"The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" is less about bestiality than incest. Edward Albee, with David Esbjornson his directorial Svengali, marvelously mixes his metaphors, turning points into paradoxes. 

Martin (Bill Pullman) is world-renowned, architecture's newest Pritzker Prize winner. He loves wife Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl), gay son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson), slimy pal Ross (Stephen Rowe), and nanny goat, Sylvia. 

That's paradox #1, for the bestiality theme is both an asset and a flaw. A flaw in that it's a hard sell--some will find it repugnant and even unlikely in a play adorned with Albee's most naturalistic writing in years. By weaving in other more stylized moments, Albee and Esbjornson, atop John Arnone's natural habitat of a set, pull and push you in and out until you're exhausted, your imagination piqued. 

But are you moved? That's paradox #2. The bald exposition, the way Martin's affair is exposed, the way word play is overused to define character--all oddly alienate. While Rowe, Carlson, and especially Ruehl operate with colossal emotion, Pullman's portrayal is curiously tempered, evenly pitched. And that's paradox #3, for the affair's revelation makes a fireball of Martin's world. 

Indeed, as Albee's scenes reach volcanic proportions, Ruehl, her voice rangy as a clarinet, delivers monumental arias with shocking, stunning emotional clarity. Buffeted by disbelief, bewilderment, and betrayal, her primal cries are unlike anything one hears in the theatre anymore. How fitting that Albee's second subtitle is "Notes on the Definition of a Tragedy." 

But now, back to the incest. While Carlson's Billy is finely wrought, his character's name is no accident. For me, the goat is a metaphor for Martin's latent homosexuality, or just sexual deviance. He hasn't known of Billy's orientation for long; the shock, disappointment, and/or trauma may have catalyzed some long-dormant desires in him. Even Albee makes the case when anguished Billy kisses Martin for a long beat. 

But the play's unquestionable strength lies in its interpretative malleability. For that reason, "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" kicks butt. The question is whose. 

Houston Chronicle Mixed reviews greet Albee's 'The Goat' By  EVERETT EVANS   (3/21/02)

WELL, The Goat finally is out of the bag. Love it or loathe it, Edward Albee's eagerly awaited tragicomedy -- his first new work on Broadway in 19 years -- has become the most talked-about play of the season. 

Its full title is The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and it depicts the crisis that erupts for a successful architect, his wife and their son when the architect's affair with the title character becomes public knowledge.  

You've got to hand it to the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who remains America's most provocative dramatist. Albee still enrages and enthralls as no other -- a fact demonstrated by the wildly divergent reviews that greeted the play's premiere last Sunday.

Depending on one's perspective, The Goat either is "a remarkable play ... brave and fine and unflinching" (Christopher Isherwood in Variety) or a "self-indulgent mess, in which the cynical, disdainful view of family life that has informed some of Albee's most eloquent works reaches its nauseating nadir" (Elysa Gardner in USA Today).  

New York Daily News critic Howard Kissel insisted that "from the second it begins, almost everything about The Goat rings false." Associated Press critic Michael Kuchwara countered, "Believe it you will, particularly with such compelling performers as Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl breaking each other's hearts."  

Response to Albee's latest continues the roller coaster of critical extremes that has characterized his entire career -- from early fame with The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to complete critical dismissal following his early-'80s Broadway disasters Lolita and The Man Who Had Three Arms to the career revitalization that came with his recent off-Broadway hits, Three Tall Women and The Play About the Baby (which made its U.S. debut at the Alley Theatre).  

The most influential critic, the New York Times' Ben Brantley, sat on the fence, likening much of the play's humor to that of Neil Simon: "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 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."  

While saying the play "lacks the courage of its darkest convictions," Brantley nonetheless praised it for "some of the most potentially powerful scenes in the Albee canon." He concluded that "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." (The "kid" pun was irresistible to several critics.)  

Albee is back in Houston to teach his annual playwriting course at the UH School of Theatre, but he and his Goat will continue to make their presence felt on Broadway.  

As Clive Barnes noted in the New York Post, "Pullman and Ruehl are powerhouses and could well be the two to beat at Tony time." With its highly bankable stars -- and the critical hubbub -- this one surely will have a decent run.

Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

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