Customer Reviews

The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When he accepted the Tony Award for Best Play in 2002, Edward Albee said he was grateful that there was room on Broadway for a play about love. In 2003 we can be grateful that Overlook Press has published The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?

I was fortunate to see The Goat on Broadway both with the original cast (Mercedes Ruehl and Bill Pullman) and with the replacement cast (Sally Field and Bill Irwin). While both casts were superb, what was so satisfying was that the text allowed for two very different interpretations. Having now read the play, its greatness is even more apparent.

The story is a simple, though unusual, one: Martin, a successful and famous architect lives in domestic harmony with his wife Stevie and their gay son Billy. Then one day Martin falls in love with Sylvia, who happens to be a goat. Albee uses three scenes to tell his story: 1) Martin's confession to his best friend Ross about his new love; 2) Stevie's confrontation with Martin over Sylvia (whom she finds out about in a letter from Ross); and 3) the tragic, yet also hopeful (to me at least), conclusion.

In this play Albee has harnessed the wordplay of drawing room comedy to the intense emotions of tragedy. In their confrontations, Stevie and Martin switch from emotional outbusts to clever repartee and back again. They even have the wherewithal to compliment each other on their bon mots.

The audacity of this strategy and Albee's success in bringing it off, apparent on stage, become even clearer after reading the text. His intricate constructions and verbal virtuosity lend a musical feeling to the work, as if every shift of mood and emotion were part of a larger composition. Albee rings changes not only in the lives of his characters, but also in the perceptions and emotions of his audience. With this work Albee has given us a new hybrid form of drama: the drawing room tragedy. In this respect it reminds me of an earlier work, The Lady from Dubuque, which employed a similar strategy, albeit less effectively in my opinion.

This play also marks the debut "the son" as a speaking character. Sons have been part of Albee plays before: in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf he is imaginary; in A Delicate Balance dead and buried; in Three Tall Women he is a silent witness at his dying mother's bedside; and in The Play About The Baby, while he is both born and kidnapped, he is never seen (if he even exists in the first place).

But in The Goat Stevie and Martin's son Billy is a vital presence. For the first time an Albee family feels complete. The imaginary child has been given form and voice. Billy's coming to grips both with his own homsexuality and with his father's new love leads to a moment in the last scene that sent chills of delight and terror up and down my spine each time I saw it performed. Never less than theatrically potent, Albee achieves a new intensity here that was thrilling.

With The Goat Albee has given us not only one of his best works, but also one of the best plays of recent times. I must admit that I never thought any of his works could rival my affection for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But The Goat is its equal and leaves me eagerly anticipating where Edward Albee plans on next going.

Welcome to the quagmire of human sexuality. "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" (a 2002 Tony Award winner for Best Play) places the audience in the jury box. The accused are Martin, his wife Stevie and their gay teen-aged son Billy. Albee challenges us to question the nature and meaning of love. Can love and shame coexist? Who defines normal? Who, or what, has been betrayed? Who decides which behaviors are acceptable? After the evidence has been presented and issues debated we realize that this play isn't about bestiality or infidelity, but rather intolerance, nonconformity and the arbitrariness of societal standards. Does Albee provide any answers? No, he insists, as he always has, that you find your own. A truly great play.

Edward Albee is without question the finest American playwright we've yet had, and all through The Goat, particularly in the second and third acts, he's in top form. Structurally, it's as perfect a tragedy as anything penned by Shakespeare, perhaps even by Sophocles. And structure and form are very much what seem to be at stake. What was Chagall's famous (partially correct) quote? Something like "It doesn't matter if it's a chicken or a barn door or a red blotch - just that something be there." In The Goat, Albee inserts a goat into a tragedy of marital infidelity, and manages, in spite of it's absurd nature, to be not only hilarious, but deeply moving. The oddness of it all is set off magnificently by the fact that Martin is as conscientious, rational, and aware of linguistic connotations as nearly any character you'll see upon a stage. And as always, Albee's dialogue is masterful, his touch deft, his ear damn near infallible. If I had to take one Albee play, besides V. Woolf this might be it.

I SAW THIS PLAY AND THOUGHT IT WAS NOT ONLY BRILLIANT, BUT IT WAS INCREDIBLY THOUGHT PROVOKING. IN FACT IT WAS PART OF MY 50TH BIRTHDAY PRESENT FROM MY FAMILY. IT WAS GREAT TO SEE SALLY FIELD ON BROADWAY. I AM SURE THAT THIS ONE WILL GO DOWN IN THE HISTORY BOOKS AS ONE OF THE GREATS BY ANOTHER ONE OF THE GREATS

There are quite a few playwrights today that have mastered the craft of dramaturgy, and perhaps even enhanced it through linguistic prowess and ingenious plot development. But "The Goat" does something few plays today can do: give us a sense of the ritual nature of drama and its ability to evoke catharsis by dealing with a taboo theme in such a way that allows us to stay riveted to the action despite the underlying threat to our social and personal homeostasis. Like the best of Aristolean-influenced drama, this play presents a family embroiled in a predicament that slowly and inevitably must lead to tragedy, and, although we witness an excrutiating dilemma, we stay riveted to it because the hand of fate shows itself to be the master of our lives, a master from which we cannot disengage. Just as Oedipus or Antigone is doomed by their transgressions of societal rules, the "house" of a middle class family is doomed for reasons that are all too human and all too base, but owing to the playwright's skill with tone, dialogue, dramatic structure, and character development, keeps us watching as the lamb or "goat" is led to slaughter.

The book arrived earlier than I thought it would. Was in great shape and was a good read. Like all amazon products that I have ever bought, I am impressed by their efficiency and promptness.

This is a strange, yet entertaining play. It takes you places you haven't yet thought of. I have no idea where Albee got the premise from, but from wherever it was, I'm glad...because reading this play is a real experience. I can confidently say that I've never read anything like it.

If you're an actor, playwright, producer or have a passion for theatre, you should read this play.

It's different, funny, disturbing and yet real..

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is a testament to the ethical irony that 1960's folk-singer/songwriter, Phil Ochs, expresses in the introduction to his song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal":

"In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals; an outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally..."

The sentiment expressed in Ochs' statement is an aphorism for what can be recognized as a central idea in The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?.

Varying degrees of deviance are attributed to those activities which are presented in this play as sexual perversion and marital infidelity: adultery, homosexuality, incest, and bestiality. All four of Albee's left-leaning upper-class characters allude to their perspective of the forgivable or acceptable nature of both adultery and homosexuality in them or in others. While our fifty-year-old tragic hero, Martin, and his seventeen-year-old son, Billy, struggle with their respective bents, the antagonists, (faithful wife, Stevie, and adulterous best-friend, Ross,) are unable to see either perversion as anything but morally twisted and devastating beyond comprehension.

Martin confesses to his lifelong friend, Ross, of his love for Sylvia, a young goat, including the detailed telling of how it was the moment that he stopped on the "crest" of a hill, (Albee's clever allusion to the literary device,) that he first noticed Sylvia, and sped downhill to meet, fall in love, and begin his affair with her. As New York Times critic, Ben Brantley, observed in his review of the Broadway production of the play, Ross' recognition of this hamartia in his friend is a catalyst that activates his own perverse morality and compels him to bring about the major turning point of the play by exposing Martin's betrayal to his wife and son.

"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 [Stephen] 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."

Tragedy, or "goat song", especially with respect to crises of sexual identity, is a theatrical form that continues to become increasingly relevant to members of contemporary audiences; especially those with a memory of the events of the sexual revolution in the last half of the twentieth century.

As the debate surrounding the definition of sexual identity continues, "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" is sustained as a valuable device to raise questions regarding what versions of sexuality ... and marital sanctity ... our political culture considers more or less deviant in relation to all other "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns".

There's little doubt that this is a very disturbing play. However, the writing and the dialogue are so brilliant that one finds himself transported into the realm of the author's world. Only someone with Mr. Albee's talent and flair can raise this type of theme to art in it's finest form. The characters are well drawn and well-rounded and even the most die-hard conservative will find himself feeling empathetic towards all the characters. In my opinion this play is a "must read" and a "must see." Don't miss it when it comes to your theater.

Only a master playwright can approach such a subject with the proper amount of introspection, humor and bitterness. The old fella still has it in him.