Reviews
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We've tried to collect all the reviews on "The Goat" that we could find. As you can guess from the difficult subject matter, the reviews were all over the place. Did we actually all see the same play? Although reaction to the play ranged from raves to disappointment, there was universal praise for the actors, especially the 2 leads - Bill and Mercedes. No matter what anyone thought of the play, it was successful in eliciting much discussion. And that is a great accomplishment in itself. (Note: Aren't you proud of how mature I was in including even the negative reviews. I could have called those critics names, and implied that they could only appreciate plays that didn't require brain cells. Or that they couldn't recognize genius, even when it bit them in the ass. But no! I'm too classy for that......) Reviews Page 1 New Albee Play Startling, Satisfying, The Associated Press Pullman Brings Dignity to ``Goat'' Love Story, Variety 'Goat' Underscores Creature Comfort, New Jersey Star Ledger It Isn’t Kid Stuff, New York Post The Goat or Who is Sylvia, CurtainUp.com Reviews Page 2 NYtheatre.com Theatre Review A Play Well Calculated To
Offend 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 Reviews Page 3 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! The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, Broadway.com Finding Love Among the Species, Newsday A Perverse Albee Gloats in
'Goat' Reviews Page 4 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
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The man has it all: a loving wife, a
successful career, good friends. He's even reached an accommodation of sorts with his gay
teen-age son. And yet there's a foreboding, ``the sense
that everything going right is a sure sign that everything's going wrong,'' according to
his wife, Stevie. Well, yes, something is amiss. Martin, it seems, is in love with someone
else -- a four-legged creature with a most alluring name. Welcome to ``The Goat or Who Is
Sylvia?’’ Edward Albee's new play that is as startling as it is satisfying. In
fact, it is one of the most satisfying productions of the Broadway season. Yet don't expect easy answers from the man
who gave us ``The Play About the Baby,'' ``Three Tall Women'' and, of course, ``Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' Although it is often quite funny, ``The Goat,'' which opened
Sunday at the Golden Theatre, is a serious, thoughtful, even tragic play despite the comic
outrageousness of its premise. The pain cuts deep, particularly in the
monumental performance of Bill Pullman as the tormented Martin. The fair-haired Pullman,
dressed in a crisp, buttoned-down blue shirt and striped, preppy tie, is all WASP good
looks. His apparent rock-solid prosperity (as the play opens he is preparing to be
interviewed for a television show called ``People Who Matter'') only heightens his inner
turmoil. The aching anguish of Martin's deception
is captured by Pullman in the most subtle ways possible. A quick, stricken glance. A
faltering, almost choking voice. The actor expertly portrays the horror he feels in
hurting the people he loves. Martin is a good man, one who has never
cheated on his wife -- until now. Not until a solo trip beyond the suburbs to look for a
country home did he stray. It's then that he saw Sylvia, standing on the crest of a hill
and looking at him, he says reverentially ``with those eyes of hers.'' The husband first reveals the affair to
his best friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe), and it is Ross, who ends up being the bearer of bad
news -- as best friends usually are. He sends Stevie a letter detailing Martin's
infidelity. Martin finds it impossible to
explain this overwhelming love for Sylvia to his shattered wife, played by the amazing
Mercedes Ruehl. Stevie is a gutsy, articulate woman, emotional and intellectual at the
same time. She is a next-generation Martha, Albee's bellowing ``Virginia Woolf'' heroine,
and Ruehl makes her a worthy successor. The battle between Martin and Stevie
recalls the fights in ``Virginia Woolf,'' Albee's best-known work. Stevie crashes around
their tasteful, upper-class living room (designer John Arnone's set is filled with
mile-high bookcases and decorated with African masks) and, in her anger, destroys things
-- bowls, vases, even a painting. The dialogue is fierce, often brutal and
laced with the blackest of humor. At one point, Albee even tweaks himself with an inside
joke that fans of the playwright (and even those who only know the titles of his plays)
will get immediately. Director David Esbjornson, who did a
sterling job last season with ``The Play About the Baby,'' is an accomplished referee. The
intermission less evening lasts less than 100 minutes, but it doesn't feel
undernourished. Ruehl's character has some powerful
speeches, particularly one in which Stevie describes her love for her husband. It contains
some of Albee's finest writing, and the actress rises to the occasion. In the middle of this marital wreckage
stands the couple's son, Billy, played with convincing petulance by Jeffrey Carlson. Billy
has his own issues to work out and which are put on surprising display here. If bestiality
isn't enough to shock you, Albee has another trick up his sleeve. Still, the playwright never lets the
audience lose sight of the unbearable sadness of the main situation. ``I want the whole
day to rewind -- start over,'' says Stevie at one point after her husband's dramatic
revelations. ``Please make me not believe it.'' But believe it you will, particularly with
such compelling performers as Pullman and Ruehl breaking each other's hearts. |
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But before long that laughter begins to
stick in the throat, and by the end of the latest and possibly most provocative play from
the chronically provocative Edward Albee, it has been replaced by something closer to
anguish: for a family in tatters, and for the lack of compassion that is at the root of
human destructiveness and, one senses uneasily, at the root of so much laughter. But most
of all, it is for a man left in isolation, the goat-lover it has been so fun to laugh at,
who is played by Bill Pullman in a performance as brave and fine and unflinching as this
remarkable play itself. On one level, ``The Goat'' is Albee's
perversely funny sendup of a standard mid-life crisis drama. Pullman's Martin is an
architect whose fabulous success is rather plainly put before us in exposition referring
to his Pritzker Prize and his latest multibillion-dollar project. He and his loving wife
Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl) reside in a stylishly appointed home, the living room full of
Eames chairs and art books aptly assembled by set designer John Arnone. Their rapport is
witty and easygoing, entirely intimate, and even the homosexuality of their single son
Billy (Jeffrey Carlson) is treated as a kind of chic artifact, accepted with a hearty kind
of enthusiasm that belies just a little unease. The silken tableau could be a spread from
Architectural Digest come to life. It represents the kind of life that's traditionally
upended, on stage and screen and indeed in life, by the standard infidelities: the other
woman, the other man. And Martin's nauseated smile and the furtive, culpable look in his
eyes point toward this familiar fly in the ointment, which is hinted at in chipper comic
interplay between spouses: a moment of mock-Noel Coward melodrama in which Martin suddenly
confesses he's in love with someone named Sylvia. ``Who is Sylvia?'' Stevie grandly
intones. ``She's a goat,'' he replies. Ha ha! As in many Albee plays, this tight nuclear
unit has a satellite in the form of a best friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe), to whom Martin
soon confesses more sincerely. Ross is, of course, appalled; he writes to Stevie; soon the
dung has hit the fan, if you will. The play's centerpiece is a long, volatile
confrontation between a sad and sheepish (forgive!) Martin and a bewildered and enraged
Stevie, whom Ruehl plays with captivating wit and ferocity. Albee's writing, though funny and
ever-eloquent, is less oblique than usual here -- this is not an allegory shrouded in
abstract settings and stylized language, he insists, and David Esbjornson's crystal-clear
direction accentuates its actuality. It is not a play about a man in love with a metaphor
but with a real goat, which we will ultimately see onstage. The characters, too, are so specific in
their speech that they often interrupt their emotional combat to give credit for a pretty
turn of phrase or excuse an inappropriate locution (``Women in deep woe often mix their
metaphors,'' Stevie says at one bleak moment). But there is a mournful undertow to their
articulateness: Words are in the end a paltry way to describe the revolutions of the soul
and the peculiar perversities the heart is capable of. As Martin attempts with increasing
desperation to describe his predicament, Stevie only grows more enraged. Well, who can blame her? Certainly not the
audience, which delights in Stevie's blazingly sarcastic retorts to Martin's stammering
efforts to describe his experience. She rattles and rages and greets his pleas for calm
with witheringly funny ripostes. To Martin's protestation that he loves her, Stevie says,
``But I'm a human being. I have only two breasts. I walk upright. I give milk only on
special occasions. You love me? I don't understand.'' She cries, too, tears of confusion
and fury. ``You've broken something and it can't be
fixed,'' she says bitterly, but it's hard not to notice that she's the one smashing
crockery and upending the furniture. And the quiet sincerity of Martin, who recognizes the
absurdity of his situation but also insists on its gravity, soon begins to work strangely
on our sympathy. The cruelty in Stevie's shrill attacks is in stark opposition to Martin's
wounded pleas (``Don't mock me'') and tender descriptions of his ``epiphany'' with Sylvia.
Albee has described the play as ``testing the tolerance of the audience'' -- another way
of saying that it tests the audience's empathy. It's impossible to overpraise Pullman's
work: Not for a second does he sell his character's soul for an easy laugh by betraying
the truth of Martin's feeling. The humanity of this performance is really a marvel to
behold -- forget the Tony (or don't), Pullman deserves some sort of medal of honor for the
simple conviction he brings to speeches that are liable to set the audience squirming when
they're not snorting (descriptions of a bestiality support group, for one). Pullman
remains fiercely loyal to the dignity of his character, and his performance is integral to
the play's effectiveness. In the play's last scene, Ross reappears
to witness a moment of complex intimacy between father and son, as Albee dares to probe
even more deeply into the confusing intersections of love and sexuality -- the moments
when the forces of affection and need lead people to lose their bearings and tumble into
strange behavior. This is not just flashy envelope-pushing,
either, but an extension of the play's explorations into the darker corners of human
sexuality. Ross' sneering disgust (``Sick, sick, sick'') is maybe a bit overplayed, but
it's the kind of reaction many people have to behavior they regard as aberrant or
abnormal. As Martin says, ``Is there anything 'we people' don't get off on? Is there
anything someone doesn't get off on, whether we admit it or not -- whether we know it or
not?'' Martin's love for the goat does ultimately
take on a more than literal significance. It stands for the secret failings, weaknesses,
losses of way, moments of shame, embarrassing indulgences that mark every life and are
usually carefully guarded from the scorn of public exposure. Driven to seek understanding
for his, Martin meets only rage and ridicule: ``I am alone ... all alone,'' he cries in
the play's harrowing last moments. ``The Goat'' dares to suggest that even
the most flawed and confused human beings deserve compassionate understanding, and the
failure to proffer it is a species of bestiality far more abhorrent than the sexual kind.
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NEW YORK -- No kidding -- Edward
Albee's new play regards an eminent middle-aged man who's passionately in love with a
goat. Opening yesterday at the Golden Theatre,
"The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" proves to be a weirdly entertaining tragicomedy
from the ever-provocative three-time Pulitzer winner. The usually enigmatic Albee's story is
straightforward: Martin (Bill Pullman) is a world-famous architect, just turned 50,
happily married to Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl), but somewhat bemused about -- well, he
divulges his secret early in the 105-minute play. Martin confesses to his best friend Ross
(Stephen Rowe) that six months earlier he was driving out in the country and was instantly
smitten by Sylvia, who just so happens to be a goat. "It wasn't like anything else
I'd felt before," he says. Appalled, Ross tattles to Stevie, who
understandably reacts badly to the news of her husband's bizarre infidelity. In the play's best scene, Martin doggedly
attempts to explain his bestial liaison, noting how he even tried group therapy with
others into animals until he realized he was happy with his affair. "Love of a ...
unimaginable kind," he calls it. While he talks, a seething Stevie prowls
their tasteful living room, smashing knickknacks in alternating furies of rage and
anguish. The couple's teen son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson) is also drawn into the fracas.
The play's sudden yet almost inevitable
conclusion evokes Greek tragedy, which is not so surprising since the Greek word
"tragoedia" means "goat song" and refers to the hymn to Dionysus that
evolved into the ancient root of western theater. The Shakespearean allusion in the play's
subtitle as well as joking passing reference in the conversation to certain absurdist
works by Arthur Kopit and Albee himself signals that this drama intends to be more than
merely a gamy story. To better address a society where adultery
has long become commonplace, Albee craftily raises the bar of taboo behavior to extremes
to comment upon the devastation that such betrayal still causes. Albee characteristically mixes into his play
elements of Catholic theology and no little amount of sardonic humor. In fact, despite its
disturbing particulars, "The Goat" is often very funny. A world premiere -- quite a rarity these
days for Broadway, where every so-called "new" show seems to have had a zillion
previous productions elsewhere -- the play still has some rough spots. Repetitive passages
and a lack of focus regarding the father-son relationship are the work's most significant
flaws. Albee's overuse of expletives here is also troubling because he obviously knows so
many better words. Director David Esbjornson's smart staging
supports the text very well. Designer John Arnone details the couple's elegant living room
with a mix of classic 20th-century furniture and primitive artwork that underlines the
play's fusion of modern and ancient themes. The clothes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy displays
wit, too, dressing Stevie in a long brown leather skirt that puts her on a barnyard
fashion par with her rival. Pullman's Martin, a boyish preppie-type,
literally appears to become physically diminished as he gradually realizes the damage that
he has caused. In contrast, Ruehl grows bigger in stature with Stevie's increasing anger
and desire for vengeance. Both artists ably cope with the text's tricky emotional rhythms.
Serious devotees of theater are likelier
to be intrigued by this uneven but piquant drama than people who simply want "a good
show," but whoever sees "The Goat" will spend considerable time afterward
debating its morals and merits.
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Yes, there really is a goat in
Edward Albee's new play, "The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?" which opened at the John
Golden Theatre last night, but you wouldn't want to pet it. As defiantly shocking as Albee's
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" years ago, his new show not only embraces every
four-letter word common on HBO, but takes as its subject the last taboo, bestiality.
What begins as a domestic comedy turns
into dark farce via a midlife crisis with a twist: A 50-year- old, wildly successful
architect, with a lovely wife and a pleasant, gay teenage son, is having an affair. With a goat. If this were normal farce, it would all be
a misunderstanding - there'd be an explanation as to why the hero's pants came to be
hanging over the barnyard door, and all would end happily. But Albee raises the ante, pushing farce
into the realm of tragedy. There is glib dialogue here, but no glib explanation: The man
is having sex with a goat, and that is not farcical. I suspect Albee is saying that love, even
its specific sexual expression, is a matter of the soul rather than the mechanics of the
body. But after he's announced precisely what the play is about in the first few minutes,
he hammers the theme home for the rest of the evening. Then, feeling perhaps that there are still
some in the theater he hasn't shocked, scandalized or disgusted, Albee throws in a hint of
homosexual incest and the faintest whisper of infantile abuse. That said, "The Goat" is
unquestionably one of the wittiest and funniest plays Albee has ever written - a flawed
but truly fascinating play, if at times too slickly abrasive and at least 15 minutes too
long. Even those repelled by the play will have
to admit the acting is superlative. Jeffrey Carlson is aptly ruffled and
disturbed as the pleasantly normal gay son, although Stephen Rowe does little for the
play's one ungrateful role, as the husband's Judas-like best friend. But as the husband and wife, Bill Pullman
and Mercedes Ruehl, deftly directed by David Esbjornson, are knockouts, and could well be
the two to beat at Tony time. Ruehl is wonderful as always - here, she's
as tough as sandpaper - but the surprise here is Pullman, who revs up his performance to
dizzy heights of true virtuosity and beguiling honesty. "The Goat" isn't Broadway's
first stab at bestiality. Many years ago, Bamber Gascoigne wrote a very bad play,
"Leda Had a Little Swan," which took the verb "to have" in its
biblical sense. Luckily, it never took flight on Broadway. "Goat" is a different beast.
While I don't subscribe to Albee's moral arguments - let alone to love outside one's species - I found the play enthralling, though for the weak of stomach, it could be tough going. You have been warned.
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Martin is a successful architect who is at
the top of his game so that turning fifty should cause less than the usual midlife trauma.
As he prepares for a television interview in connection with his winning the prestigious
Pritzker Prize, he and Stevie banter back and forth like characters who've wandered in
from a Noel Coward play. But don't be fooled by that opening scene. Mr. Albee has not
turned over a new leaf to write drawing room comedies and relinquish his role as a
provocateur. Stevie and Martin's twenty-two happy,
loving years together differentiate them sharply from Agnes and Tobias (Delicate Balance)
or George and Martha (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf). They have a good relationship with
their gay son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson). But they too are crisis prone. Instead of the undefined fear of the
neighbors that causes havoc in A Delicate Balance and the imaginary baby and disastrous
visit from the young couple in Virginia Woolf, we now have the revelation of a shocking
transgression on Martin's part to turn this tranquil home into a battlefield from which no
winners may emerge. The secret is, to put it mildly, dramatic and understandably
threatening to Martin's family and his career. Stevie's reaction when the secret comes out
leads to the play's fiercest and funniest middle scene. Given the terrific performances of its two
leads, Albee's as always wickedly funny and full of sly word play script and David
Esbjornson's well-paced direction, The Goat, though not on a par with the above mentioned
plays, makes for a stimulating evening. You may walk out of the theater feeling that the
playwright has taxed your credulity and with a sense of being left stranded. But that's
Albee's own secret -- even when he's at less than his best, you find yourself thinking
about what you saw and beginning to see through the surface layers. Except for the whys and what ifs and
what's nexts, this play is no more a mystery than it is a frothy comedy. And while the
question "Who is Sylvia?" is answered early on, the less you know about what to
expect, the more open you'll be to what takes place. Those who like their plot details
immediately can satisfy their curiosity by going here. In the meantime, I'll let this
summary from an author interview in Playbill suffice:
"It's about four human beings and a goat . . . and it involves
relationships." Whether the
premise for exploring his theme strikes you as silly or inspired, you won't be bored, nor
will you have to struggle to understand what's going on. This is Albee at his most
accessible. John Arnone's set, with its
African art objects, walls of books and Eames leather chairs, immediately establishes the
upper-middle class suburban environment. The opening scenario builds on this picture of an
American family reaping the rewards of talent and hard work. It also hints at the
precariousness of their (and our) routine patterns. Martin seems inordinately forgetful;
Stevie's comment that "the sense that everything's going right is a sure sense that
everything's going wrong." The allusion-filled opening interchange between husband
and wife ends with the arrival of Martin's old school chum Ross (Stephen Rowe), who will
conduct the interview. That interview leads to the opening of Albee's Pandora's box:
Martin tells Ross what he's been unable to tell his wife. The revelation is a bombshell, the
author's way of testing the audience's tolerance. It may bewilder and offend, but if you
take the leap into his mindset, you will eventually come to realize that tolerance is the
key to the play's meaning. In a world where the borders between what is "sick"
and what is "normal" are constantly eroding, our capacity for tolerance is
constantly being tested. Modern, intelligent liberals like Stevie and Martin accept their
son's homosexuality (something still classified as sick in the seventy-year-old Albee's
youth). However, as they grapple with a still closeted taboo, their tolerance of Billy's
sexuality proves itself to be still fraught with reservations. The taboo used to explode
the surface of this family's contentment may also be seen as Albee's attack on a society
so bland that it fosters extreme behavior. It is during the battle royal that Albee's
dialogue is at its most incisive. Mercedes Ruehl brilliantly conveys Stevie's rage and
pain, a pain so intense that it prompts several primal screams and the breaking of some of
the carefully arranged, costly art objects. She intersperses these outbursts with cannily
timed, laugh out loud lines, laced with allusions that include a paraphrase of the
Shakespeare song of the secondary title. At one point The Goat inadvertently links itself
to The Guys , Ann Nelson's dramatized response to the intolerable events of 9/11. As the
woman in that play talks about her unwillingness to accept the tragedy of that day and
wishes for some magic camera trick to take us back to happier times, so Ruehl declares
she'll never be really ready to understand what has happened: "I want the whole day
to rewind -- start over. I want the reel to reverse." Pullman is a fine foil for Ruehl's
flamboyance, more low key and ordinary but that very ordinariness suits the concept that
strange things befall ordinary people and our response as humans (as opposed to beasts)
should be compassionate. While Ruehl gets the play's best lines, Pullman isn't
short-changed. His humor is more likely to pass unnoticed, like a reference to that
absurdist Arthur Kopit title Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm
Feelin' So Sad. Unlike Ruehl, he doesn't raise his voice but his despair is unmistakable,
as when he tries to explain himself with " . . .don't you see the 'thing' that
happened to me? What nobody understands? Why I can't feel what I'm supposed to!? Because
it relates to nothing? It can't have happened! It did, but it can't have!" His
anguished " I am alone. . . all
alone" seems written in blood. The Goat's weakest link is the hateful
Ross. Stephen Rowe is woefully miscast and does little to make his character anything more
than a plot device. Having him just happen to walk into the room during an emotional
moment between father and son is unworthy of either or both playwright and director -- the
dollop of incest in that scene also seems superfluous. Jeffrey Carlson gives an endearing
portrayal of Billy (that's as in billy goat, another bit of Albee playfulness). As for the goat, it's a she and some may connect her with some not atypical Albeeian religious symbolism. That's not to say that she's fictitious. She does make an appearance -- though one that's unlikely to win a Tony nomination. |
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