With The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? by Edward Albee Post Productions opens its tenth season with an explosion. With multiple explosions. The play treats audiences to blasts of volatile emotion, combustible content, incendiary questions, and unstable characters. But that’s the surface. The foundation of this story is a multilayered cake of connection, of various forms of love between people who are deeply committed to each other. And beneath that foundation is a molten sea of subversive moral confrontation. It’s a wild mix of comedy, drama, and tenderness that exemplifies the kind of theatre Post Productions has been making for years. Yet it’s also something new.
Some philosophers and psychologists argue that conventional morality – the kind of morality that people typically learn through unreflective socialization, through the assumptions and traditions of our cultures, parents, religions, and schools – is rooted in a particularly nasty emotion: disgust. We learn early on, and through instinct, that certain things are disgusting. And those reactions are reinforced by the adults around us and the institutions in which we’re brought up. But disgust is a poor guide to morality, as history has shown us repeatedly. And it’s difficult to shake. We resist questioning whether our disgust is rational and moral, whether its foundation is secure in something beyond the childish responses from which it springs. We resist any active interrogation of our disgust. And this is where the arts can play a vital moral role, a philosophical role. The arts can use subversion and nuance and subtlety to help us undermine our irrational prejudices, biases, and taboos.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a master at subverting and exposing our moral prejudices. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) he wrote, “Are we immoralists harming virtue? Just as little as anarchists harm princes. Only since the latter are shot at do they again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: morality must be shot at”. He wrote this toward the end of his career, a career in which he shot at every moral prejudice he encountered. His point is simple: our moral beliefs and values must earn their place. If they fall apart under questioning they should be discarded. Only by surviving thorough interrogation can they become respectable and worthy of influencing our consciences.
Albee begins The Goat by introducing us to a well to-do family of three who live a good life and love each other deeply. Martin (played by Michael K. Potter) is a successful architect who has just won the Pritzker Prize and been honoured with the task of designing the World City – a two-hundred-billion-dollar project. His wife Stevie (played by Fay Lynn) is an intelligent and sophisticated woman who has been a loyal partner for twenty-two years. And their seventeen-year-old son Billy (played by Nikolas Prsa) is a precocious and popular boy who attends a posh private school – and he’s also gay, something that his parents are trying with varying degrees of success to accept. On his fiftieth birthday Martin is interviewed by his lifelong friend Ross (played by Heath Camlis), a local journalist who has long been supportive of Martin’s career, and who has been his best friend since they were ten years old. But when the interview goes awry Ross cajoles Martin into confessing something that has him distracted. And when he discovers Martin’s secret he’s so horrified and disgusted that he can’t keep the information to himself. He tells Stevie – and the revelation sends all of these beautiful relationships into chaos and despair. . . to disturbingly hilarious effect.
The Goat makes its most unsettling theme explicit by directly contradicting it, indirectly subverting it, and entangling it in a complex web of analogies that audiences gradually come to feel even if they can’t articulate them until long after the play has ended. The trick is this: Martin’s secret is disgusting. It’s obviously disgusting. Virtually no one will deny that it’s disgusting. It’s one of those secrets that we’re probably right to feel disgusted by. But that’s the surface. Albee is exploring something else by using our disgust at the obvious immorality being exposed to lead us to deeper questions about other things people of various kinds consider perverse. He’s leading us to reflect on our prejudices and taboos against things that may not be disgusting or wrong. While laughing, and after laughing, he wants the audience to feel uncomfortable. He wants us to sit in our discomfort as we consider the possibility that some of the beliefs we treat as moral truths may be something else entirely.
One of the features I love most about The Goat is how bold and radical Albee is with his intentions. He doesn’t flinch. He isn’t shy. He doesn’t hide behind euphemisms or beat around the bush. He uses a combination of literal and allegorical approaches to lay bare what he wants us to question. If we don’t notice what he’s doing it’s only because we’re too uncomfortable to uncover our eyes. Albee himself was gay. Having been born in 1928, he grew up in the 1930s and 40s in a family and culture that definitely (and deeply) marginalized him. He spent his entire life as an object of disgust, as someone consistently othered by those closest to him no less than by strangers. If you know this about Albee then one of the allegorical points he’s making is fairly obvious. But he isn’t content to stop there. He’s exploring taboos about desire and love and sexuality and identity in larger and more complicated ways. Audience members who have themselves been marginalized and othered for any reason, who have themselves been treated as objects of scorn and disgust, will see themselves represented in this play in Martin. More importantly, Albee wants all of us to see ourselves in the other characters – Stevie, Billy, and Ross – who are disgusted by Martin. It’s far too easy to accept our similarity to those who are being victimized in some way. It’s much more difficult, and therefore much more important, to see the similarities between ourselves and the victimizers. Even if, as in this story, the victimization is probably justified.
All three of the other characters in The Goat react to Martin’s secret in their own way. Stevie is angry about being betrayed, about Martin’s unfaithfulness and adultery, and she’s disgusted by the details of his indiscretion. Yet, because she is in love with this man, she’s also struggling with despair and the implications Martin’s actions have for the identity she’s spent decades building – who she is and who her family is. Ultimately, she takes the sort of realpolitik approach that Henry Kissinger might recommend: she perceives the situation as a competition. Billy is disgusted, of course, but also cast adrift. He was raised by good people in a good family. His entire life has been good and privileged and comfortable up to this point. His family – and through his family, his world – has been completely flipped upside down and ripped apart. The effects on his mind and his heart are unbearable. Ross, too, is disgusted but his most pressing concern is about the possible social consequences and ramifications of Martin’s secret. As a devoted friend he worries about the consequences for Martin. As someone whose life is tied to Martin’s in various ways, he’s also deeply worried about the effect Martin’s secret could have on him, for the backwash on his own reputation. None of these people can understand Martin’s position at all. Even Martin struggles to understand it.
Martin has had a truly singular experience, something that nothing in his decades of life has prepared him to comprehend. He tries, over and over, to explain what happened to him. And over and over he fails. When attempting to explain the situation to Stevie he’s aware that it doesn’t make sense because “it related to nothing whatever, to nothing that can be related to”. There are no analogies in his life to help him make sense of, much less communicate, what he’s going through. Think of how dependant we are on analogies to understand and explain our experiences. They’re absolutely fundamental to our minds from infancy onward. Babies learn by making analogies between what they’ve already experienced and whatever new thing confronts them – a process that continues until death. We use analogies to explain things to children, to other adults, and to ourselves. There’s often no other tool available to us. People who lack certain kinds of experiences are unable to understand vast portions of human life because the necessary analogies aren’t available to them. Martin also says “it can’t have happened. It did but it can’t have” and “it wasn’t happening. . . but it was” because he can’t make sense of what’s occurred. He feels what he feels. He experienced something that profoundly affected him. But he lacks the ability to understand it – and is completely helpless when trying to explain it to others who are judging him for how he feels and what he experienced. What a terrible state to be in, for all involved.
The closest Martin comes to being able to help anyone else in this story understand his experience occurs toward the end of the play, when he relates something that happened to a “friend” involving a baby – something that was completely out of his control. It was disturbing, but innocent. “Then the moment passed and he knew it had all been an accident, that it meant. . . nothing,” Martin says, “that nothing was connected to anything else.” This is the closest he comes. And it doesn’t help. Martin is truly alone.
What I’ve presented so far is just a small sample of the themes explored in Albee’s unusually subtle and nuanced play. The Goat explores the nature of love itself, the relationship between love and sex, the responsibilities and obligations of love, the similarities and differences between different forms of love, what we owe to those we love and what they owe us, and the more disturbing aspects of love that we tend to ignore. He guides us into questioning the connections between reality and fantasy – and what happens when the boundaries between them are blurred. He pushes us to ask questions about society’s expectations and norms, how the mainstream of society defines what constitutes acceptable behaviour and what is considered taboo or perverse, the hypocrisy of societal norms and standard judgments, and the implications of the power we give mainstream society to set and enforce boundaries.
This all sounds pretty heavy doesn’t it? Maybe it sounds too heavy. But it works because Albee approaches all of this with subversively bold and dark humour. The Goat works because it’s funny – ridiculously funny, absurdly funny, flat-out hilarious. It isn’t easy to create a comedy that tackles these kinds of themes. Most attempts would be clumsy, superficial, and let’s face it: stupid. Albee is too smart to fall into those kinds of traps. He’s too sincere and too clever to write something self-consciously edgy and offensive. He was a genius – and we’re lucky to be able to take in what his mind could create.
The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia is being performed at The Shadowbox Theatre (1501 Howard ave., corner of Howard & Shepherd, Windsor, Ont.) March 19, 20, 21, 26, 27 & 28. Showtime 8:00 PM (doors open 7:30). Tickets can be purchased for $25 for the second weekend (March 19, 20 & 21) and $30 for the third and final weekend (March 26, 27 & 28) via postproductionswindsor.ca or at the door (cash, debit, or credit card) if seats are still available. Starring Michael K. Potter, Fay Lynn, Nikolas Prsa, and Heath Camlis. Written by Edward Albee. Directed and produced by Michael K. Potter and Fay Lynn. Lighting and Sound Operation by Ezra Poku-Christian. Promotional photography by Anthony Sheardown Photography. Posters and programs designed by Kris Simic. Presented by Post Productions.