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by Edward Albee, directed by Lorne Pardy

Great Canadian Theatre Company, Ottawa

October 28-November 14, 2004

"A Thrilling Albee Production"

The Great Canadian Theatre Company has scored a major coup.  Its 2004-05 season opener is the Canadian premiere of Edward Albee’s 2002 Tony Award winner, “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?”  The play is brilliant, the direction is insightful and the acting is powerful.  It’s hard to imagine this controversial work could receive a better production.  This is a show no one who loves the theatre should miss.

In the space of only 90 minutes, Albee presents what is in essence a three-act tragedy.  The first act begins like a typical Broadway comedy with the banter between a successful architect Martin and Stevie, his wife of 22 years, filled with one-liners and fairly standard observations on ageing.  Ross, Martin’s childhood friend, now in television, comes by to video an interview with Martin about turning 50, winning the Pritzker Prize and being assigned to design “the city of the future”.  But Ross notices that Martin is preoccupied and has nothing to say about being at the pinnacle of his career except “You mean it’s all downhill from here?”  In fact, in terms of tragedy and the lives of everyone around Martin this is true.  In medieval terms Martin is at the peak of the wheel of fortune and it is now about to turn.  In classical terms Martin has reached a height that makes the gods envious so that nemesis strikes him down.  Martin’s reference to the Eumenides (the Furies who hound violators of natural law) very early in the Act 1 should already alert us to danger.

Ross pries out of Martin his deepest secret on condition he tell no one.  The secret is a doosey, even for Albee, but it must be revealed in order to discuss the play properly.  Martin, though still fully in love with Stevie, has fallen in love with another female named Sylvia.  “Who is Sylvia? What is she?” the song goes from Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”.  What is the catch?  Sylvia is a goat.

Ross can’t handle this revelation and is untrue to his pledge.  The remaining two acts show how Stevie and Martin’s gay son Billy react to what becomes a literally shattering experience.  The humour becomes blacker and more bitter and the tone shifts irrevocably to tragedy.

Why has Albee made Martin’s other love a goat?  Albee’s background in absurdism revels in linking the urbane, intellectual Martin with the most improbably partner imaginable.  From this contrast derives most of the play’s cringingly funny humour.  Yet, while Albee insists Sylvia’s goathood is real, Sylvia is also a symbol.  One key to this is ironically named Billy, whose gayness is fully accepted by both Martin and Stevie.  Tragedies have already been written where the “other lover” is a woman, someone from another class or race or enemy clan, or is the same sex or from the same family.  Where miscegenation, incest or homosexuality might have been the source for belief in the protagonist’s unimaginable depravity, here Albee has deliberately portrayed the ne plus ultra of taboos to which we have not yet accommodated ourselves.  Sylvia thus becomes symbolic of that boundary, whatever it may, be beyond which tragedy lies and which has tempted humankind ever since Eden.  After all, the word “tragedy’ literally means “goat song” deriving, according to some, from the sacrifice of a goat before the play.

Besides this, Martin speaks of Sylvia not as something below the human order but as something ineffably other.  He constantly claims that his love of Sylvia is something that transcends ordinary understanding.  Martin’s speaks of his relationship with Sylvia, though also sexual, as primarily mystical, as if she represented what ever is beyond the human.

All four cast members are excellent.  The role of Martin poses the major challenge of making us believe his incursion into bestiality is the transcendent experience he thinks it is.  Stewart Arnott is outstanding in keeping Martin’s humanity in the forefront of his extraordinary situation.  His poise and intensity prevent Martin from becoming a figure of ridicule in our eyes.  In fact, the more beleaguered Martin becomes the more we, in spite of ourselves, come to side with him. 

As Stevie, Dixie Seatle gives a performance of incredible power and subtlety.  Even in the midst of her justified disbelief and rage she shows Stevie secretly toying with the possibility of forgiveness, still clearly in love with a man she can no longer understand.  Peter Mooney thankfully portrays Billy as a fresh-faced young man who just happens to be gay rather than signalling gayness through clichéd gestures.  He fully brings out Billy’s confusion in Act 3 when his key encounter with Martin unexpectedly takes on homosexual overtones, reinforcing how sudden and unforeseen a slip into the forbidden can be.  Dennis Fitzgerald gives the slimy Ross an air of prurience and untrustworthiness even as he protests the opposite, helping to make him, as Albee intends, the least honest of the four characters and the greatest focus of our censure.

This is a play that juxtaposes throughout lines that make us laugh with ones that shock or sadden.  This demands and receives both great skill from the actors and great precision and insight from director Lorne Pardy.  Designer Kim Nielsen’s set has all the clean lines of modernity, but a row of simple columns separating the entryway from the living room is a subtle echo of the ancient realm of tragedy as if our modern world were merely a veneer over one more primal and dangerous.  John Munro’s lighting has the important effect of enhancing the increasingly dark tone of the play.

“The Goat” is not only a tragedy but a play about what tragedy is.  It delivers an undeniable visceral impact but at the same time so stimulates the intellect that you will feel a desperate need for a good long conversation once the play ends.  This thrilling production gets the play so right it deserves to be seen in other major cities.  But for now, any theatre-lover living near or passing through the National Capital region should head for the GCTC as soon as possible to catch this terrific show.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Peter Mooney. ©2004.