The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia? At The Stratford Festival
In the spirit of full disclosure let me say at the outset that I am not an Edward Albee fan. I did not expect to like The Goat Or, Who is Sylvia? now playing at the Stratford Festival’s Studio Theatre.
Honesty compels me to record that it is receiving an absolutely smashing production under the direction of Dean Gabourie, with three astonishingly accomplished performances from Lucy Peacock, Rick Roberts, and newcomer Anthony Palermo.
I still didn’t like it.
The Goat, to use an abbreviated title, tells the story of star architect Martin (Roberts), whose life of privilege and achievement comes crashing down when he confesses to his best friend Ross (Matthew Kabwe) that he has been having sexual congress with a goat he has named Sylvia.
They met cute near a farm stand when Martin was scouting a location for the country place his wife Stevie (Peacock) longed for. It was, in his recounting, love at first sight on both their parts.
Ross feels compelled to write a letter to Stevie telling her all this. Stevie is – surprise, surprise – quite upset with this news. Albee obviously learned a lesson or two from his earlier, and far better, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and so an epic argument ensues. It doesn’t end well.
The Goat strikes me as a descendant of a trio of plays that hit Broadway in 1979: Agnes of God, Nuts, and Bent. These plays relied on lurid plots of the sort that would never be allowed on television, thus attracting audiences willing to be shocked in the interest of proving their sophistication. All were critical successes.
Albee has chosen a plot device that makes those earlier efforts look positively wimpy. The 2002 premiere production of The Goat on Broadway was rewarded with a Tony award.
Lest we think that he’s dealing in depravity for depravity’s sake, Albee appended an explanatory coda to his title: “Notes toward a definition of tragedy.” This signaled, as Gabourie says in his programme note, that “Albee looked to Greek tragedy – the founding form of our art – to draw inspiration from ancient sources as a means of exploring primal emotions.” Perhaps “exploiting” would be a better word.
Were Greek tragedies sprinkled with catty remarks and bitchy laugh lines? The Goat is full of them, even when the pain of its characters is at its most intense. Still, given the hint, it’s easy to see parallels with the ancient Greeks. The unities are observed and there is a bloody denouement that goes Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes one better.
Albee writes dialog extraordinarily well and he has created three parts that allow talented actors to chew the scenery or at least hurl elements of it around. As Stevie, Lucy Peacock makes, as acting teachers like to say, big choices. Of course many actors attempt to do that. Few of them can carry it off as well as she does. It’s worth the price of admission just to see her prodigious acting chops on full display.
Rick Roberts doesn’t have Peacock’s 37 years of Festival experience behind him, but he does a masterful job with a role that is, if anything, even more emotionally demanding than Peacock’s.
Anthony Palermo makes a most impressive Festival debut as Billy. His efforts to come to grips with the revelations of his father’s “goat f**king” are utterly believable and he navigates with great delicacy the pitfalls of an incest-adjacent encounter with his father after his mother has fled.
The Ross of Matthew Kabwe is less compelling, but then Albee has given him little to do other than act as a messenger, perhaps another nod to the devices used by the ancients.
And yet for all the considerable effort that has been lavished on The Goat from director, the cast, and the design team, I couldn’t help feeling that when you scratch the glossy surface there’s no there there.
At the end I found myself paraphrasing a line attributed to Oscar Wilde: You would have to have a heart of stone not to watch a blood-smeared Stevie lug a dead goat onto the stage without laughing.
The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia? continues at the Studio Theatre through September 29, 2024. For more information and to purchase tickets visit the Stratford Festival website.
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