January 25, 2004: Retrospective: Albee, The Goat and Other Plays
January 25, 2004: Retrospective: Albee, The Goat and Other Plays
AA109 Heathrow to Boston
The experience of three plays to record. What comes into my head first, having calmed down after Albee’s The Goat, is that he is still the accomplished writer of good — better than good — dialogue that he always has been. My first experience of it was in the fall of 1962, when the matinee cast of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf came to Princeton, where I was a first-semester graduate student, for a couple of performances. The first words out of Martha’s mouth — “Jesus H. Christ!” — had a real shocking effect on us. We should have known what we were in for then, but we didn’t. In near-retrospect, Albee seemed to be a fearless iconoclast, but also a disturbingly frank teller of uncomfortable truths. It was not merely the profanity on stage that was disconcerting. It was the revelation of unsatisfactory, stunted lives and the link between them and the society that fostered conformity and frustrated freedom and originality that was so striking. And Albee’s dialogue, free and frank, seemingly natural and unforced, at once clear, idiomatic, and serving the larger ends of the play, served that broader general end as well.
So it was with another early play, The Zoo Story, which like Virginia Woolf also specialized in long narratives, stories that reveal the heart of the matter, the center of the malaise. And so it is with The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? This is the story, from start to finish in about ninety minutes, of a successful man, a fine husband and caring father, who reveals to his best friend of decades that he is in love not only with his wife (to whom he has been faithful for the length of their married life) but with a goat. He and the goat, whose name, yes, is Sylvia, have had an ongoing physical relationship for six months. The friend decides that out of friendship he must tell the wife about this liaison. He does so, in a letter to her. The wife confronts her husband, while the teenage son looks on in horror and dismay. The husband admits the truth and begs his wife, as he did his friend, for understanding — in vain, because he believes, correctly, that she no more than the friend will be able to accept what has happened to her. In the long scene of the confrontation, during which, I should add, Martin tells the (frequently interrupted) story of Martin and the Goat, the wife fairly trashes the living room and then leaves, beside herself with rage. She telephones the friend, telling him that her husband needs him. He arrives at the house but can do no good, steadfastly maintaining that he had no choice but to write the letter. The husband, complaining that his friend violated his confidentiality, says the letter has destroyed his marriage and insists that, if it hadn’t been written, he could have “worked it out,” could have “worked something out.” The son, who reappears, is greatly distressed by the mother’s absence and asks the father what she said as she