>>REVIEW
THE GOAT, OR, WHO IS SYLVIA?
Runs until November 4
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Edward Albee’s most recent play, The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia? has been excoriated by some for making "adult content" seem like the understatement of the century and hailed by a great many more as a masterpiece. Hedge your bets and go prepared to be shocked. It won’t disappoint.
Though its structure is simple – a man’s unthinkable secret is revealed to three people – The Goat is a complex, masterful blend of warring takes and tones. Well, "blend" is too peaceful a word. But what begins as a witty drawing-room farce (the characters later refer to one bit as their "Noel Coward routine") quickly crosses over into something much darker. In the opening third, on the night that I saw it, the audience laughter was so persistently raucous that some lines were lost. (One sensed the hilarity was to some extent driven by a powerful collective need to shout, "We’re sophisticates, dammit, and we won’t take offence!" But the writing is really funny, as well.) By the play’s midpoint, however, when the characters have been screaming at each other, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style, for some time, the merely outrageous has become unabashedly tragic. Without, of course, ever losing its absurdist edge. Or its wit. This is Albee, you know.
To those of you who’ve managed to keep yourselves ignorant of the play’s "twist" so far, congratulations. Please go away now. To the rest: don’t you worry. The suspense of the play lies not in what has been done, and with whom (or with what). Martin, the successful architect hero, is indeed fucking a goat (I’m quoting). What the drama is concerned with is how the people in Martin’s life – his wife, his best friend and his gay teenaged son – absorb, react to and even exploit this information when they get it.
One of the many smart things Albee does with this play is to make the family in question intelligent, loving and humane. We like them. We may even, in our vanity, see ourselves in them. Despite the yelling, this is not Virginia Woolf. Martin’s marriage, in particular, is fulfilling and happy in a refreshingly un-Cleaveresque way. He and wife Stevie’s sex life, so they say, is better than good. Their friendship is solid. And their affectionate wordplay (that they can’t quite abandon even in their most miserable throes) would make Oscar Wilde cheer.
All the more terrible, then, especially for Stevie, that Martin has fallen in love with a goat. "Oh, Sylvia," he croons, as he tries to convey the soulful "epiphany" of their first tender scene. It’s embarrassing, yes, and outrageous. But it’s also deeply unsettling – and even moving. Certainly one of the play’s themes can be found in this line of Martin’s: "Is there anything anybody doesn't find arousing, whether we admit it or not, whether we know it or not?'' But I think a deeper, more persistent theme is sounded by his anguish at the failure of everyone around him – including the members of a hilariously-described bestiality support group – to understand his new love. "I am alone!" he yells in frustration, and indeed he is. Nothing, The Goat seems to say, isolates us more from the easy camaraderie of our fellows than the deeply individual, not always palatable nature of our sexual loves.
The cast does this complex play wonderful justice. David McNally brings just the right mix of soulfulness, intelligent decency and aloofness to Martin. As Stevie, Jennifer Morehouse is a font of ballsy wit and raw emotion. Scenes that might become shrill in the hands (and lungs) of another actress are never less than riveting when she’s on stage. In fact, McNally and Morehouse work so perfectly as a pair that it’s nearly impossible to imagine them played by anyone else. Christopher Duthie is pitch-perfect as Billy, their son. He conveys Billy’s awkward adolescent vulnerability with such skill that he becomes what Albee perhaps intended Billy to be: the empathetic eyes of the play.
As Ross, the "friend" who precipitates the mayhem by writing a letter to Stevie divulging the nature of Martin’s new "country needs," Paul Cowling, though solid, has a more thankless role. His character is by far the play’s weakest link. Despite his much-avowed love for the couple, he seems concerned only with Martin’s imminent loss of face. Moreover, he’s constantly reminding Martin (and the audience) of prep-school days involving such savoury interludes as the two of them "banging away" with girls on their adjacent dorm beds. "Why, exactly, are these people still friends?" we ask, and Ross might be one of Albee’s clues that not all was unrotten here before Sylvia ambled up to that fence. However, as a character, Ross isn’t developed beyond a certain gape-mouthed judgmentalism that is probably meant to stand in for "the world."
This is a play in no need of pyrotechnics beyond what’s going on in the script, and Kate Newby’s direction is wisely restrained. Even the most emotional scenes between Stevie and Martin are played with a chilly, elegant physical poise that only intensifies the drama. (Sure, things are thrown, but they’re thrown very precisely.) David Fraser’s minimal set and lighting design, too, extend this restraint. Bravo, Alberta Theatre Projects. This is an exceptional production of a play that deserves nothing less. |
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