Laura Turnbull & Bob Rogerson

In Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, which swept all the major theatrical awards for best new play in New York last year and which kicks off the 2003 – 2004 season at GableStage, we come upon Martin, a just-turned-50 architect who seems to have it all: fame and phenomenal success within his field, a great marriage, a bright kid in a good school. Ah, the rub. He’s fallen in a love with a she-goat (the “Sylvia” of the title) with whom he’s having a torrid sexual affair. No kid-in. He spills the beans to his pal Ross, who spills the beans to Martin’s wife, Stevie, who tips off their son, Billy. Hoo! What a mess. This all goes down in dead seriousness, albeit with considerable caustic humor relative to the proprieties of syntax and goat-fucking.

Bob Rogerson plays Martin, and it’s surely the most challenging role of one of South Florida’s most consummate actor’s career. He’s excelled in playing forceful, controlling characters, often with a sinister edge. Here he assays a part of tremendous vulnerability, and it’s not to be missed by admirers of Rogerson’s craft. The endearing humanity that Laura Turnbull brings to any part imparts considerable depth to Stevie, although the hard edge of her character’s anger is a stretch for her as well. As Billy, young Ryan Capiro is engaging and sure. Stephen Neal gives us a nuanced and subtly rendered Ross. 

All in all, director Joseph Adler’s staging eschews over-the-top emotionality (the prop-smashing and screaming is a tad tentative and underpowered, for example) for smooth lucidity and intelligence. But quite aside from this particular production’s numerous strong suits (including a stunning set by Rich Simone) is the obvious question of what the heck it’s all in aid of.

Why would America’s preeminent living playwright – in the fullness of his maturity – pen a play about a goat-fucker of all things?

The Goat, it seems to me, is a reductio ad absurdum of the largely French critical theory-derived postmodern ethos currently holding sway in the hothouse unreality of academia: Foucault’s glorification of everything deviant/criminal/insane in the face of “repressive” Western rationality, Barthes’ jousissance, consciousness-addling, orgasmic pleasure, as a model for liberation, etc. Goat-fucker as hero anyone… really? That’s the point.

In a palpable way, Albee’s The Goat embodies a coming full circle for our dramatic literature – and Western culture – from The Bacchae of Euripides. After a lifetime of skewering Athenian culture with his rationalist critique, Euripides’ great late-life coda warns of the dire consequences of underestimating the power of the orgiastic/ irrational. Albee’s great, long-lived Absurdist critique of American culture – now, with the irrational poised for possible ascendancy – also devolves at last into a cautionary tale, but from the other direction: the untenable monstrosities that the sleep of reason gives rise to are exorcised and the offending irrationalist is brought low.

Martin’s goat-lover becomes the sacrificial victim (pharmakos, “scapegoat,” literally,) who must be destroyed so that humankind as a viable social order can survive. Albee’s The Goat straightforwardly dramatizes the ultimate import and implication of the deconstructionist agenda were it to be put into actual effect. Harkening back to drama’s roots in religious ritual, it’s a sacrament for our times, such as they are.