Review - The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? - Soulpepper Theatre Company, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Edward Albee, directed by Alan Dilworth

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

November 7-18, 2017

“Then to Silvia let us sing,

That Silvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

Upon the dull earth dwelling”

from “Who is Sylvia?”

(Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona)

The great American playwright Edward Albee died in September last year. To honour him Soulpepper has programmed two of his works it has never stage before – The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002) and A Delicate Balance (1966). The Goat received its Toronto premiere in 2005 in a weak production from Canadian Stage. Now, at last, Soulpepper gives this brilliant play the powerful, insightful production it deserves.

The play is both a tragedy and a play about tragedy. Martin (Albert Schultz) is at the pinnacle of his career. He has just turned 50, he has just won the Pritzker Prize for architecture and he has just been assigned a multimillion dollar project to design “the city of the future” in the middle of Midwestern farmland. He and Stevie (Raquel Duffy), his wife of 22 years, are both on the same intellectual plane and still have a happy sex life and both are completely accepting of their gay 17-year-old son Billy (Paolo Santalucia). Martin’s childhood friend Ross (Derek Boyes), now in television, drops by to do a video interview with Martin about how he feels about the great milestones in his life.

When Ross says that Martin has reached the height of fame, Martin says, “You mean it’s all downhill from here?” Anyone aware of either the classical or the medieval view of tragedy will know that 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. Albee even has Martin refer to the Eumenides (the Furies who hound violators of natural law) in this scene to underscore the point.

Great as Martin may be, he is so secretly troubled that Ross has to give up the interview. Ross pries out of Martin his deepest secret on condition he tell no one. The play has been around now for 15 years so many people will already know Martin’s secret, but when the play was new it was exceedingly shocking. Martin is still completely in love with Stevie, but is also also fallen in love with another female named Sylvia. A song in Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona asks “Who is Sylvia? What is she?” The answer is that Sylvia is a goat.

For the self-righteous Ross this revelation is too much and he breaks his vow of confidentiality. The remaining two-thirds of the play show how Stevie and Billy react to Ross’s news about Martin. The Noel Coward-like humour of the first third of the play becomes darker and more biting and the tone shifts ineluctably to tragedy.

For many the main question will be why Albee has chosen bestiality as his theme. Stevie’s faith in her husband could as easily have been shaken by another woman. First of all, such a scenario would, of course, be too common and Albee wants his tragic hero to cross a line that is still socially unacceptable. In different places and times a hero’s falling in love with someone of a different class, race, religion, or too closely related, of the same gender or of an enemy clan would be the boundary that the tragic hero would break to lead to his downfall. By including a gay son accepted by his parents, Albee shows that what might have been a tragic condition at the start of the 20th century is not necessarily one at the start of the 21st.

Sylvia thus represents any love that is forbidden. Albee began writing in the mode of the Theatre of the Absurd where metaphors are often depicted literally. In Ionesco’s Amédee, ou comment s’en débarrasser (1954) the growing corpse of a man killed by Amédée symbolizes his growing guilt. In the same author’s Rhinoceros (1959), people adopting a herd mentality literally turn into the title animal. In the same way in The Goat, Sylvia simultaneously is a real goat and thus provides the play with its grotesque humour but is is also so outrageous a symbol that it asks us to look beyond the humour.

In the face of ridicule from Ross, Billy and Stevie, Martin repeatedly claims that no one will understand the nature of the love that Sylvia has inspired. Literally, this is hard to understand. Symbolically, Albee’s choice of a goat opens a wide range of interpretations. Martin’s wife has the female form of a male name. So does Sylvia, which is the female form of the male name Sylvanus. Sylvanus is sometimes viewed as a separate forest deity, but is also sometimes used as another name for the god Pan, a man human down to the waist, a goat from the waist down.

Pan represents humankind’s duality. In the play Albee emphasizes the ability of Martin, Ross, Stevie and Billy to make clever plays on words and show off their intellectual prowess. But humans do not merely have an intellectual nature but also an animal nature, which they may be loth to admit yet which is dangerous to suppress as Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae (405 bc) makes clear. In having sex with Sylvia, Martin is literally uniting the human with the animal and thus becomes a whole being. Yet, the way Martin speaks of his love of Sylvia goes far beyond that. He speaks as if he has had a revelation, an ineffable mystic experience. He says his relationship with Sylvia is the uniting of souls more than of bodies. As lines in the song Albee quotes in his subtitle proclaim of Sylvia, “She excels each mortal thing / Upon the dull earth dwelling”.

Another male name for Pan is Faunus, whose female counterpart is Fauna. as in the goddess of all wild nature including animal life. Symbolically, Sylvia offers Martin the possibility of becoming one with all of nature. Ross wonders that Martin does not seem excited to have been chosen to design “the city of the future”. Martin’s apparent disgust at the idea makes sense since doing so would destroy nature to create a symbol of humanity.

Albee’s choice of a goat for Martin’s forbidden love is astute in two more symbolic ways. First, the word “tragedy” itself means “goat song” (from τραγῳδία combining τραγος “goat” with ᾠδή “song” ), likely because of the sacrifice of a goat before an ancient tragedy was performed. This is fitting since one of the subjects of Albee’s play is tragedy itself. Second, Albee is quite familiar with biblical imagery and Sylvia literally becomes a scapegoat as in (Leviticus 16:10) for his family’s rage at Martin’s infraction of ethical boundaries.

While The Goat can only be fully understood symbolically, its success on stage has to be through the naturalism of its acting. Albee basically taunts the audience with its own duality of emotion versus intellect. Director Alan Dilworth not only has an excellent cast but he pushes them to give especially fine performances. It would be easy to allow The Goat to descend into a shouting match between Martin and the other characters, but Dilworth understands the play better than that. He has Ross, Billy and Stevie become vociferously upset but Martin remain almost eerily calm. Albert Schultz plays Martin with wonderful control. Once he conjures up his first meeting with Sylvia for Ross, Schultz has Martin remain in what seems an altered state of consciousness. His relationship with Sylvia has

given him a mystical experience, he knows no one else will understand it and he is irritated only when others try to belittle it as he knows they will. It is because of how Schultz seems to radiate an enlightened mind that we know Albee’s play is about much more than the base facts of this subject matter.

For her part Raquel Duffy gives a more impassioned performance than she has ever given before. Duffy is quite at home in the easy comic banter of the first third of the play, but the rage she unleashes in the second two thirds is a revelation. Duffy shows us that Stevie is struggling between an intellectual and an emotional response to Martin’s relationship. On the one hand, Stevie is still caught up in disbelief and tries to satirize the situation. On the other, she is deeply hurt and disgusted by Martin’s form of unfaithfulness. Duffy powerfully depicts Stevie’s predicament in that the more Stevie tries to control herself, even giving herself the outlet of breaking things, the less she finds she can tolerate what has happened.

Paolo Santalucia avoids any clichés of gayness that might be associated with Billy. Santalucia’s Billy is simply as emotional and distraught as any teenager would be at learning of his father’s unfaithfulness. At the same time, Billy, accepted though he is by his family, knows he is still an outsider in the world at large and is therefore in more of a position to understand his father’s desire that has made him a pariah. In a surprising scene which I will not describe, Albee demonstrates how easily one form of love can “click” as he puts it into another form. Santalucia makes this scene perfectly believable and yet as troubling to his character as it is to us. This is necessary because the scene is in itself a microcosm of the play as a whole.

Derek Boyes has so often been cast as the jolly companion or good-humoured friend that it is great to see him take that kind of character to a darker place. Boyes chillingly demonstrates that beneath the supportive friend’s concern and encouragement lies prurience, judgmentalism and intolerance. When Martin late in the play calls Ross “Judas”, our view of the characters has so shifted that we find, perhaps to our surprise, we have to side with Martin against Ross.

The Goat is one of Albee’s late masterpieces – funny and disturbing, grotesque and transcendent in equal measure. After the play’s superb Canadian premiere in Ottawa in 2004 it is a relief that a Toronto company has managed to convey the full measure of the work. No one who loves challenging subject matter or fine acting and direction should miss this play.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit https://soulpepper.ca.

2017-11-08

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?