The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

Edward Albee has clout. He had purpose. He juggles multiple levels of the human condition in brilliantly contrived lines. He turns tragedy into a comedic moment. With the flip of a comma, his audience realizes they stare eyeball to eyeball with an unthinkable character, an unthinkable circumstance, an unspoken horror, and it’s OK. It’s genius.

Albee has a handle on our culture the way many sociologists only dream about. He knows how to dig, when to dig, when to stop, and when the laughs might tease the mind to think.

With a stellar cast, under the direction of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Nagle Jackson, the Curious Theatre Company brings The Goat to Denver.

Happily married for 22 years, Martin, a 50-year-old world-class architect stumbles into a muddled despair. Robert Reid plays Martin with quiet confusion. Mare Trevathan plays his wife, Stevie, with gentle humor inside a steadfast marriage. Teasing is the solution to Martin’s self-imposed forgetfulness. Something is wrong. He just can’t remember what it is.

When Martin’s best and long-time friend, Ross (John Arp) arrives, Martin stumbles in verbal circles. He admits to being in love. Yes, of course, he loves Stevie, but this is different. Her name is Sylvia, and she’s a goat. Describing his encounter with this four-footed femme fatale, he knows Ross won’t understand. He doesn’t understand. He only knows he experienced new unchartered feelings. Ross reacts with chaotic hysteria, writing the details to Stevie. Reading the letter aloud to Martin and their son, Billy (Brian Watkins), Stevie calculates her confused reaction by throwing things, breaking dishes, and turning furniture over. The lines are Albee rich with verbal mastery. Humor becomes a lightening rod, as Sylvia stands apart on metaphoric hooves for concepts outside polite social consciousness. Accepting his son as being gay seems to be enough for Martin to squirm over, but now he’s in the middle of a muddled, muddied controversy.

Although the Goat opened last weekend, this production needs more attention and work. In spite of the brilliancy of the writing, the characters don’t seem to connect, remaining apart, isolated. The actors strain, keeping their characters stiff, dull, staid as though they are fearful of totally engulfing and trusting themselves to the process of discovery. Occasional isolated outbursts do not necessarily blow life into dull or vibrancy into stiff.

On a gorgeous set designed by Bill Curley, the actors seem to have put a lid on their character’s ability to expand. It is not clear whether Stevie throws and breaks things because she is confused, frustrated, angry at Martin, or simply because it will get a laugh, which it does because of the smooth calculations in which she performs.

As a one-act play, it is long, almost as long as a two act, but feels longer because it drags. It is clear Stevie intends to get even with Martin. He brought her down. She’s determined to do the same for him. It would enhance the play greatly if she just walked back in with blood on her hands and clothes, then to walk in dragging an obvious straw filled something or other that is suppose to represent Sylvia. Humor seems to be solicited where humor doesn’t apply, while brilliant lines are left dangling with the hope someone will catch them.

The most controversial of all the lines, is actually said in many different ways throughout the play, but comes home to roost at the end when Martin says, “Why does no one understand I am alone.” No one has heard him; no one stops to listen. That may be Albee’s major point. Sylvia will get the attention because it shocks the built-in social accepted value system. Martin wants to know what happened to him. He wants to know about these new feelings. No one listens.

Sylvia represents the box love builds stuffed with social acceptable and polite should’s and should not’s. Albee blows fresh air into the box to see how far it can expand. He asks the age-old what is love question wrapped in a goatskin. How far can it go? What are the limits? Are the limits real or self-imposed?

Would that the cast and director grab these characters by the throat to bring them to vibrant aliveness allowing us to laugh, allowing us to think.