Goat-love taboo poses profound questions
The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?
(out of 4) By Edward Albee, directed by Alan Dilworth. Until Nov. 18 at the Young Centre for the Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca and 416-866-8666 This is the late American playwright Edward Albee’s last major work: it premiered on Broadway in 2002, winning the Tony Award for Best Play, and was first produced in Toronto by Canadian Stage in 2005, starring R.H. Thomson.
As does Albee’s famed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, it presents a hyper-articulate married couple in a knock-down-drag-out verbal battle. And like many of his works, it challenges the limits of the socially acceptable — by putting taboo issues centre stage and forcing his characters, and his audiences, to face them.
The taboo this time — and given the play’s talking-point status since it premiered, this should not be much of a spoiler — is bestiality. Martin (Soulpepper’s founding artistic director Albert Schultz) is an architect at the pinnacle of his career: 50 years old, winner of the Pritzker Prize (architecture’s Pulitzer) and just chosen to design a $200-million “City of the Future” in the wheat fields of Kansas. He has a happy marriage to the loving Stevie (Raquel Duffy) and a lateadolescent son, Billy (Paolo Santalucia), whose homosexuality the family has embraced.
What could possibly go wrong? Well, it’s in the title and in Albee’s self-consciously literate sub- and sub-sub titles. Martin has fallen in love with Sylvia, who’s a goat.
The play’s published version also calls it “Notes towards the definition of tragedy”: Albee is exploring what a hero’s tragic descent might look like in a contemporary context, what passes for a tragic flaw these days, and whether catharsis — the purifying experience of pity and fear as we witness a horrible story play out — is still a possible outcome.
The play poses a profound question that has only become more topical: what does it mean to really love animals? I mean, really love them? However far we’ve come in terms of animal rights, there’s a line we still don’t cross in modern Western society, but Martin does.
His family and his best friend Ross (Derek Boyes) distance themselves by talking about it exclusively in crude sexual terms: Martin is a goatf----r (and yes, the show earns its “Mature Themes, Coarse Language and Graphic Images” warning). But Martin, while acknowledging the relationship’s carnal aspects, says it’s not really about that: “She was looking at me with . . . those eyes . . . it was like nothing I felt before . . . I melted.” Sylvia sees into his soul.
Some of my friends say that about their pets, too, but they’re not wrecking their marriages for Spot or Fluffy.
On one level, the play asks us to believe in what’s happening and buy into Martin’s struggle as real (even as everyone around him can’t handle it); on another, the characters present themselves as archetypes and the situation as metaphorical. This is complex stuff to play: the characters self-consciously cloak their feelings in wit and wordplay, but as the play goes on they have to talk about — and make us picture — very difficult images and actions.
Alan Dilworth’s Soulpepper production circles the play but it does not yet have it firmly in its sights. There’s a patrician beauty and reserve to the approach that only in its final scene gets as raw as the material calls for. Lorenzo Savoini’s set design is so spare, and the proportions of the room where the action takes place so unusual, that it comes across as the idea of a high-end urban home rather than a place that people really live.
This puts a further distance between the audience and the material, on top of Albee’s arch tone. The play’s first scene establishes Martin as off his game, pulled into focus by Stevie as they evoke an intimate world together through sophisticated inside jokes, but then increasingly distracted as Ross films him for an interview.
Those familiar with Schultz’s legendary charm and room-filling persona may initially be challenged in how to interpret his performance of uncertainty (is Martin playing at meekness for effect?). Seeing cracks in Duffy’s impeccable poise would lend more credibility to a lengthy interrogation scene in which Stevie breaks their oh-so-civilized life literally into pieces. The production blossoms from Martin’s reporting of his moment of epiphany with Sylvia onwards and barrels toward an appropriately bloody climax.
Boyes does his best with the unpleasant character of Ross, who sticks out as a plot device and symbolic representation of the evil media; and Santalucia more than holds his own in the difficult role of Billy (the kid, get it?), who has limited stage time and always appears in states of high emotion and confusion. Santalucia and Schultz play a late sequence in which father/son intimacy is foregrounded with impressive subtlety: the issues raised in those minutes push the play to new levels of complexity.
When the play was written, Albee was understood as making a caustic comment about the right’s so-called tolerance of difference (if gays and lesbians are OK, how about goat love?). In retrospect it also strikes me as a New York play of its time, asking what counts as unimaginable in the wake of Sept. 11.
Alexandra Lord’s hyper-contemporary costumes suggest the play is happening now and this brings other possible readings to the fore: Martin as a powerful man toppled by his uncontrollable desires can’t but resonate post-Weinstein, and the central characters’ conflicted relationship to the pastoral, which they at once fetishize and want to dominate, feels all the more acute in the context of climate change.
Despite flaws — sometimes clunky dramaturgy, an author a bit too in love with his own cleverness — this is a rich play that stands up to revival; with time the production may find the levels of intensity and abandon the material calls for.