Grazing a point

Tragedy, we are often told, is dead — an impossibility in an age that believes all problems are socially remediable. But Edward Albee has boldly defied convention by writing an Oedipus Rex for an affluent society that thrives on extremes.

His play, The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?, presented by the Philadelphia Theatre Company, is a deeply serious exploration of the confounding complexities of love and sex, and the limits of human compassion. It is, in fact, a black comedy.

Like A Delicate Balance, one of Albee’s three Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas, The Goat tears down the boundaries between realism and absurdism.

In it, the playwright poses questions that few other dramatists would dare to and, true to form, he refuses to provide answers. This play, performed in a swift 95 minutes without an intermission, examines the mysterious nature of love, the explosiveness of spontaneous sexual desire and the sheer unpredictability of human behavior.

Except for the whys and what-ifs and what’s next, this play is no more a mystery than it is a frothy comedy. The question, Who is Sylvia? is answered early on.

Yet The Goat is puzzling, powerful, bawdy, disturbing and very weird. It challenges a viewer to decide whether what he believes is happening on stage is indeed the reality. Then, the challenge becomes fathoming how many ways the play can be experienced or understood. The audience must take it all home and wrestle with it, knowing that, as in most of Albee’s work, it might never become completely clear.

The play unfolds in the stylishly appointed living room of a comfortable home shared by Martin (John Glover), a successful architect; his wife Stevie (Elizabeth Norment) and their teenage son Billy. Martin has just turned 50 and is the youngest architect to ever win the prestigious Pritzker Prize. He would seem to be at the pinnacle of his career, with a loving wife and a gay son whose orientation seems to be accepted by both parents.

Martin, of course, has a secret, which he confides to Ross, his friend of 40 years. He’s having a most unorthodox affair. He is, he says, in love with a goat. A goat named Sylvia. Ross is flabbergasted and blows the whistle, which leads to a lengthy confessional in which Martin describes as best he can, in exacting detail, the emotional and physical nature of his relationship with his four-legged lover.

Stevie’s response is to systematically upend furniture, smash decorative ceramics and destroy a painting. Her ultimate response is much graver and the play concludes on a disturbing note.

While exploring the irrational and inexplicable nature of love, Albee is centrally focused on the idea of a limit surpassed, of characters fumbling with the reality of the heretofore impossible. Albee does not answer many questions here, but once you get his drift, the questions jump out on their own. For example, when is Martin’s life actually ruined? When he falls in love with the goat, or when his family learns his secret?

As Martin, Glover struggles for stretches to portray the emotional impact of the revelations, employing a jitteriness that comes across as superficial. He occasionally succeeds in making this twitchy, obsessed character believable and sympathetic.

Albee raises big questions that are left unanswered. As in all his best work, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? onwards, he implies a malaise is affecting American society, but he never exactly defines the source of the unhappiness.

Martin’s love for the goat does ultimately take on a more than literal significance. It stands for the secret failings, weaknesses, moments of shame and embarrassing indulgences that mark many lives and are usually carefully guarded from the scorn of public exposure.

The Goat seems to suggest that even the most flawed and confused human beings deserve understanding, and that the failure to proffer it is a species of bestiality far more abhorrent than the sexual kind.

Judging from Albee’s biography, the immense conflict in his own family seems at the root of almost everything he has written. It shows again in The Goat with a family that is living a near-perfect life. There are the devoted and successful husband and wife. They have a gay son whom they accept and love — the very antithesis of the playwright’s tormented relationship with his parents.

What Albee has created in this play is a metaphor for redemption, a metaphor that makes us feel the shock of what sin really is. And the sin is not about a goat. It’s about a man who broke his own world and hurt those he loved by indulging his will.

The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
Through June 20
Plays & Players Theatre
1714 Delancey St.
Tickets: $30-$45
215-569-9700
ww.phillytheatreco.com