The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?

By Edward Albee

“One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.”  -  Edward Albee

The Remy Bumppo Theatre Company calls itself "Think Theater" and I can think of no better way for it to demonstrate the resolve that suggests than with their current production of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? by Edward Albee.  There is no playwright who has been better at  challenging his audiences to do just that - think - about his plays and the nature of theater than Edward Albee over the past fifty years.  Ever since The Zoo Story in the early sixties he has been stretching the bounds of theater;  all the while both honoring tradition and reinventing it.  Nowhere is that better seen than in this play.


The current Remy Bumppo production, under the direction of James Bohnen, is up to the challenge and, I hope, will draw audiences that are as well.  The cast includes strong  performances from Annabel Armour and Nick Sandys, whom I have seen on the Remy Bumppo stage before, but also from Michael Joseph Mitchell and Will Allan.  I was impressed with the ability of the ensemble to maintain the tensions and emotions that are on display from the moment that Stevie and Martin have their opening conversation.  The attention to detail of this production is noteworthy as the apparent order present at the opening is slowly turned to chaos by the tragic action of the players.  This play is tragic in a classic sense and I was reminded of this by the notion of a fall -- for in this play the characters, especially Martin, have the hubris to think they have a perfect life until, literally with a glance and a look, the perfection comes undone and they realize in some tempest-tossed scenes that it may have never been there.  Seemingly shocking, the reactions to Martin are among the most thought-provoking parts of the play.  And that is what is so great about this production, for Albee's play is brought alive on the stage and I will not be able to stop thinking about what it all means for a very long time.  

Edward Albee: A Singular Journey 

by Mel Gussow

"Like many artists, he is a figure of contradictions." (from the Prologue)




Mel Gussow's abilities as a journalist and his personal friendship with Edward Albee allow him to make this the definitive biography of a great American playwright. I came to read this as I prepared for attending a performance of The Goat or Who is Sylvia?. The theater company had recommended this as the best biography they had found.


Chronicling the life of someone who has become an icon of the American theater is difficult, but Mel Gussow is able to combine the personal, literary, and show business details in a dramatic narrative that does justice to Edward Albee. I was intrigued to discover that among Albee's partners was one of my other favorite playwrights, Terence McNally, but the biography highlights all of Albee's relationships and the importance of each to him and his friends. The difficulties Albee encountered as an adopted child were keen and exacerbated by parents who combined a daunting distance from their son with an attitude that was colder than most New England winters.


His precocity and early development of an inscrutable individuality did not serve him well in the several schools that he more visited than occupied in his youth and it took the combination of Greenwich Village in the fifties and some tentative literary efforts with friends including William Flanagan and McNally among others to bring him to the point of his first success, The Zoo Story. He never looked back and within what would be an amazingly short time for a dramatist of lesser genius he was conquering Broadway with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The rest of the story includes successful dramas (A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Women and others);  yet there was not always the appreciation his work warranted or he deserved. Published in 1999, Gussow's biography does not include the past decade and  Albee's most recent successes as he has achieved the status of America's greatest living playwright, but it provides a rich and rewarding panorama of Albee's ascent to the apex of American literature.


View all my reviews