Theater Review - The nanny diaries

Goat gets under your skin

Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, Edward Albee’s play The Goat or Who is Sylvia? deceptively begins with the light touch of a comedy of manners. The Actor’s Express production starts with Martin (John Alcott), a 50-year-old architect, flirting with his wife, Stevie (Tess Malis Kincaid). She tells him he smells funny, and Martin melodramatically confesses that he’s been having an affair with a goat named Sylvia. She laughs — but Martin, as we discover, is not kidding.

In The Goat, Albee tries to find words for the unspeakable, and Actor’s Express’ Jasson Minadakis takes up the writer’s challenge to direct the most gripping, emotionally charged play of the season. But The Goat requires the audience to wrestle with difficult contradictions. The play engages with realistic emotions yet goes freakily over the top, and while you admire the production’s artistic excellence, you constantly question whether the script is appropriate, or even good.

We learn more details about Martin’s life when his oldest friend, Ross (Mark Kincaid), stops by to interview the architect for his television show, “People Who Matter.” The show’s self-important title sounds too good to be true, as do Martin’s architectural triumphs: He’s been chosen to design an amusingly vague “dream city of the future.” During the interview, Martin proves unfocused and absent-minded until he confides to his friend that he’s fallen in love and, with great reluctance, explains with whom — although “with what” might be more accurate phrasing.

At first, The Goat plays Martin’s flabbergasting secret for laughs. But Albee wants to offer more than a sex comedy with a bestiality bent. Instead, he dissects the relationships between husbands, wives and their children. In the second scene, Martin explains to Stevie and their teenage son, Billy (Clifton Guterman), not just the facts of his unthinkable affair, but its emotional consequences.

Martin and Stevie’s lengthy, wrenching arguments not only provide the play’s centerpiece, but they justify Albee’s exploration of such unsavory material in close detail. Like the playwright, Minadakis, Alcott and Kincaid mercilessly dismantle the marriage to reveal what it’s made of: the depth of Stevie and Martin’s fury and misery equals the height of their prior love and happiness.

If Tennessee Williams remains American theater’s virtuoso of female sorrow, Edward Albee, who penned Three Tall Women and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, does the same for female rage. With a remarkable sensitivity to the different levels of anger, Kincaid shows how Stevie tries to process Martin’s revelations. When Martin claims to love his wife and “Sylvia” equally, Stevie responds with bitter, incredulous jokes. “You love me? But I’m a human being! I have only two breasts! I walk upright!”

The actress gradually conveys every dimension of betrayal, horror and disgust. When the enormity of her situation finally sinks in, she curls on the floor and emits a cry of despair like nothing you’ve ever heard in a play.

Chicago actor John Alcott proves cleverly cast. With his lanky, clean-cut quality, like a young Jack Lemmon or an aging Jim Carrey, he seems wholesome and boyish for a man who’s depraved. He overdoes some of the character’s moments of extremes and seems too befuddled at the beginning and too histrionic at the end. But for most of the play, Alcott comes across as unnervingly “normal,” and gives Martin the self-assurance of someone who’s found his soul mate. He takes Woody Allen’s adage “The heart wants what it wants” to absurd lengths: If loving a goat is wrong, he doesn’t want to be right.

Mark Kincaid makes Ross fittingly self-righteous, and though the character sees himself as a man of the world, he becomes the voice of social propriety. Ross proves willing to destroy Martin and Stevie’s marriage in order to save it. Guterman at first infuses gay son Billy with swishy attitude that brings the role to the point of caricature. He still makes the role’s agony at his parents’ conflict truly affecting, however, and finds the confused, scared boy beneath Billy’s worldly pose.

Minadakis and his cast elevate the play, which contains potentially disastrous fault lines. We find it completely credible when Stevie begins smashing the couple’s expensive bric-a-brac, but as a metaphor for a damaged marriage it’s a little too on-the-nose. Albee’s use of antiquated words — “crest,” “dandle,” “haberdasher” — make his characters sound less like articulate, civilized folk and more like the writer just being self-conscious. Naming the son “Billy” might be an unnecessary pun, just like the goat’s name may be a swipe at A.R. Gurney’s comedy Sylvia, about a middle-aged man who bonds — platonically, mind you — with his dog.

In The Goat’s last scene, just when Albee has convinced us of the value in his taboo-breaking subject matter, the playwright bizarrely seeks out new lines to cross, as if he can’t build to a crescendo without them. Unwilling to leave bad enough alone, near the end Albee introduces new sexual transgressions and a jaw-droppingly bloody image. The choices feel desperate and gratuitous.

The Goat leaves you uncertain if Albee seeks to challenge conventions or simply attract attention and light the fuse for post-show arguments. The intensity of Actor’s Express’ production accomplishes all that and more. The play demands to be taken seriously, even if the script can put you off your feed.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com