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by Edward Albee, directed by Dean Gabourie

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 9-September 29, 2024

Stevie: “You have brought me down, and I will bring you down with me”

In 2004 I was lucky enough to see the Canadian premiere of what was then Edward Albee’s latest play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? I was bowled over by it. Since then, I have seen three more productions of the play, the most recent being the current production at the Stratford Festival. A first viewing of the play inevitably brings with it an element of shock. By the fourth viewing the shock has worn off and it becomes clear that Albee’s intent is much greater than merely disturbing the audience. The current production at Stratford is the best I have seen since 2004 and in many ways even better. Director Dean Gabourie understands the greater implications of Albee’s off-putting choice of subject and has beautifully shaped the play in its radical transformation from comedy to tragedy. Of all the plays I’ve seen at Stratford so far, this one stands out as the play that theatre-lovers must not miss.

In my review of Soulpepper’s production in 2017, I analyzed the play itself at length. I could simply refer people to that review, but for the sake of convenience, I will quote excerpts of my analysis here: “The play is both a tragedy and a play about tragedy. Martin 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, his wife of 22 years, are both on the same intellectual plane and still have a happy sex life”. Both tolerate their gay 17-year-old son Billy – Stevie with more acceptance than Martin, who calls Billie a “faggot” when angry.

“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 …. Martin is still completely in love with Stevie but is 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 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 the same way in The Goat, Sylvia simultaneously is a real goat and thus provides the play with its grotesque humour but it is also so outrageous a symbol that it asks us to look beyond the humour ….

“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 loath 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 ….

“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”.

Of the four productions I’ve seen, Stratford’s has the most insightful design. Shawn Kerwin has emphasized that Martin’s living room where the action takes place is rigorously symmetrical and antiseptically white. There are four cube-like chairs arranged to form an X surrounding a round coffee table. The back wall of the thrust stage at the Studio Theatre is covered with all-white shelves on which are carefully arranged mementos – old cameras, vases, photos, crystals, shells. The only bright colours, especially red, are the cut flowers Stevie is seen arranging when the action begins. Cut flowers are, of course, already dead, suggesting that nature is allowed inside this home only when dead. In a small but telling detail, Gabourie has Ross move one of the chairs before the interview. Soon, Stevie, noticing it, moves it exactly back where it was as if she were the enforcer of order inside the house. Suitably, Kerwin has clad her all in off-white.

One of the many subtleties that Gabourie has brought out in this production is how as soon as Martin names the object of his affection as a goat, Ross and Stevie no longer listen. Stevie in particular asks Martin to tell her everything but in fact mocks every detail he mentions. Stevie takes everything that Martin says as a personal insult. Unlike Ross, she doesn’t care how Martin’s new love is affecting him now or will affect his reputation. Gabourie demonstrates clearly how Albee shows that prejudice begins with a failure to listen to others. For Ross and Stevie, the name of Martin’s crime blots out everything he subsequently says.

The play has been especially well cast, but Rick Roberts and Lucy Peacock are the best embodiments of their characters I have seen. Roberts gives his best-ever performance as Martin. From his first entrance Roberts plays Martin as a man caught up in a state of wonder. Martin and Stevie may joke about dementia but Martin is not demented. He is mentally not there when Ross tries to interview him. Seeing the play for the first time a person might not know what is happening. Seeing for the fourth time it is clear that Martin is caught up in a reverie about Stevie. Martin is in a state of rapture, a word which literally means “carried off”.

First with Ross, then with Stevie, Martin tries to explain the state he is in and how Sylvia has caused it, and when they mock him, he repeatedly says “You don’t understand”. Martin’s union with Sylvia has given him a spiritual epiphany that no one else can understand and that Martin himself cannot express. Roberts is magnificent in conveying Martin’s rapture and his frustration at trying to find words that fit the experience to make others understand. Roberts so well expresses this acute mingling of joy and pain that he wins our sympathy, in spite of everything, while Ross and Stevie heap him with abuse and ridicule.

In the play’s first scene, Lucy Peacock shows Stevie as easy-going and playful. Stevie and Martin can joke about dementia, play-act as Noël Coward characters and pick out grammatical flaws in each other’s speech. Once Scene 2 begins and Stevie has read the letter from Ross about Martin’s “friend”, Peacock’s face becomes frozen in anger and she makes Stevie implacable. Stevie still jokes, but every word drips with bitterness. Maintaining a state of rage for a half hour is difficult, but Peacock knows how to gradate Stevie’s expression of rage from disbelief to utter despair to a craving for revenge. This progression is frightening to watch. The more vulnerability Roberts lends Martin, the more defiance Peacock ends Stevie.

As Ross, Martin’s very best friend, Matthew Kabwe, initially glows with good-will toward Martin for his many successes. But Ross knows Martin well enough he can tellMartin’s mind is elsewhere during the interview. Martin’s talk of Sylvia horrifies Ross but, unlike Stevie, Ross is worried more about Martin’s mind and especially how this proclivity, if it is ever known, will affect Martin’s reputation. Ross’s rationale in writing to Stevie about Sylvia may have been well intended, but it unleashes a tragedy. Kabwe makes Ross’s actions believable in playing Ross as a caring person but one who is not as deep a thinker as Martin, not a person who can think through the consequences of his action. Kabwe makes this painfully evident in playing Ross as completely lost when he discovers the effect his letter has had.

Albee includes the character of Billy for many reasons. One has to do with society’s changing view of sexual mores. The term “crimes against nature” used to bundle homosexual acts and bestiality in the same statutes and it still does in certain US states. In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a breakthrough that led to the overturning of laws criminalizing homosexuality. Albee shows Martin and Stevie as liberal, enlightened parents who accept Billy’s gayness.

Anthony Palermo plays the 17-year-old Billy as a typical teenager who is angry when his parents still treat him as a child. Palermo does not have as resonant a voice as the other three cast members and so Billy comes off as weaker than he should be. Kerwin has strangely dressed Palermo more as a hustler than the private school youth his is meant to be. Palermo's best scene, one of the most important in the play, occurs when Billy begins kissing his father in sympathy for him and his kissing slips from being filial to sexual. Palermo registers Billy’s utter shock at what has happened. As much as Martin tries to say that these things just happen, Palermo powerfully shows that Billy remains stunned by his confusion over what his actions might mean until near the end of the play. All through the action Albee has suggested that types of love cannot be as rigorously separated as they were for ancient Greek philosophers. One type as here, στοργή (“storgē”), between children and parents, can easily slip into ἔρως (“eros’).

People may be satisfied to think that the point of the play is to make people question how the boundaries are determined for ethical behaviour in a liberal society. The family name for Martin, Stevie and Billy is “Gray”, after all. The play, however, poses many more questions than that. The play itself in an inquiry into the nature of tragedy. The structure of the play itself slips easily from comedy into tragedy which should make us wonder how two genres that are supposed opposites are so similar. 

The play is also about the nature of prejudice and how labelling people becomes an excuse for disregarding anything they say. Ross fears that if news of Martin’s new love gets out it will ruin his reputation. “Should it?” we should ask. “How egregious must a crime be before it erases the importance of an artist’s work?” is a question we are still grappling with. 

The play also explores the unwillingness and even hostility that people have towards others who claim to have had revelations and epiphanies. Albee makes it hard considering the cause of Martin’s epiphany but it is still an epiphany nonetheless. Finally, the play is about humankind’s strange desire to separate itself from nature as if human beings were not also a part of nature. Every time I have seen the play I see more in it. The current Stratford production provides audiences with the most insightful presentation yet of this modern classic.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Rick Roberts as Martin; Anthony Palermo as Billy, Rick Roberts as Martin and Lucy Peacock as Stevie; Rick Roberts as Martin and Matthew Kabwe as Ross; Anthony Palermo as Billy. © 2024 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.