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(L-R) Brian Carlson as Billy, Richard Jay Sullivan as Martin, Gail Phaneuf as Stevie. Stevie reads the letter from Ross, not pictured (Terrence Keene), revealing Martin's affair. |
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What happens when love goes wrong
By Reva Blau
Banner Correspondent
The new Provincetown Players open their 2007 season with “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” a 2002 play from Edward Albee, who easily fits the bill as an American master and is one of the most interesting and influential contemporary playwrights. “The Goat,” which earned Albee a Tony award, is about a man named Martin who has fallen in love with a female goat.
Martin, played with great nuance and skill by Richard Jay Sullivan, is a world-class architect celebrating his 50th birthday and having just hit the jackpot by winning the Pritzker prize and a contract to build the billion-dollar “world-city of the future.” He is a left-leaning Democrat, affluent and modernist, and seems beleaguered by his own success. Martin does a decent job pretending that he is tolerant of his gay son, yet one senses that as a high-minded, rational and gentle sort of person, he actually will come around to align his personal feelings with his intellect.
Life is just grand, virtually wrinkle-free. That is, until the best male friend, Ross (Terrence Keene), reveals to Martin’s wife Stevie (Gail Phaneuf) that Martin has been having an affair with a goat.
The set is an upper middle-class living room filled with icons of modern design: a glass-topped sculptural coffee table next to what could easily be a Le Corbusier or Perriand sofa. Stevie and Martin have lived here together before such furniture had re-editions made of it. Two ionic columns frame the living room. This original molding suggests the history of the Upper West Side apartment building, but just as easily conjures the Greek tragedy that this play will become.
In the first scene, Phaneuf and Sullivan are self-conscious. They seem like they are performing. That is because Albee creates a world that is conscious of itself, even theatrical. What is on stage is the characters’ ability to articulate their ideas intelligently, use apt metaphors and make pithy remarks. Their marriage, by the way, is unusually good: made of mutual respect and honesty. Neither has cheated, even while most of their friends have.
The set also includes bulbous vases on the floating bookshelves and on the bar-credenza. These vases shatter satisfyingly into a million anti-minimalist pieces when Stevie learns the shocking knowledge and starts lobbing them at her husband.
A goat? Her reaction to the horrible truth does not crescendo and dissipate. Rather it climaxes repeatedly like a late Beethoven symphony as the ripple-tide effects of the goat-love spread outwards across the water. “You’re mixing your metaphors,” Martin keeps telling his wife and son as they look at him with incredulity. “A goat?!” each member of the cast repeats. The animal makes being an ordinary cuckold a slice of maraschino-topped cheesecake.
Bestiality, of course, stands for any taboo that is so unspeakable that normal words cannot contain it. Gail Phaneuf pulls off the unbelievable symphony of anger that is required without sacrificing any of Stevie’s intelligence and sophistication. She rehearses each of countless implications from the smell on her husband’s lapel, through the gag-inducing idea that she encircle the same loins as a hoofed creature, and up to the leveling of her humanness. With each realization, she roars in the basso profundo of a wronged woman. (Take notice screenwriters: women never shriek in soprano when pushed to the edge.)
Richard Sullivan matches the sheer virtuosity of Phaneuf’s performance by exaggerating the arch of his character. Through the first act, he maintains the maddening male stance of seeming baffled by his own transgressions. At times, he even seems to stare, in rather goat-like fashion, in his apprehension of what is happening around him.
As poor Martin tries to explain repeatedly to Ross and then to Stevie, it wasn’t just sex. “I am having an affair but an affair is not the right word,” he says, and it is, of course, the oldest line in the book. When Martin flinches visibly, it is not at the realization of the “horror of horrors” as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow would say, but the word “affair,” absurdly, sounds so hackneyed in comparison to his feelings.
Therefore, through Act One, it is up to Stevie to register the “horror.” Then, early in Act Two, Martin’s blood pressure spikes because he understands in very real terms what he has done to his wife and son. Sullivan’s performance, in other words, makes the audience identify with him only after we have fully digested what he has done. In identifying with him in this order, we put aside the specifics of the goat in favor of the universality of having a private, polymorphous consciousness that one cannot explain to others in any rational terms. Patrick Falco’s superior direction forces us to consider what it would be like if our best friends exposed our own deviant thoughts and acts in the living room. The only response really is to bleat softly the defense of no intent.
“We all prepare for jolts along the way,” says Stevie. “We prepare for things. We think we can handle everything. But we can’t know. Something can happen that does not relate to the way the game is played.” If, as in modern architecture, form should equal function, sex with goats shatters any known or thinkable equation. Go there with Albee in this brave and rich production.
“The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” by Edward Albee runs at The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St., Friday, Saturday, Sunday, May 18 to June 3, at 7:30 p.m., with additional 2 p.m. matinees on Sunday, May 27 and June 3, as well as evening shows on those dates. Sunday, May 27 is a half-price ($11) senior matinee for those ages 62 and over. Tickets for all other shows are $22/$19 for students, NPP members, and seniors. Please call Ptowntix at (508) 487-9793 or (800) 791-7487 or ptowntix.com.
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‘The Bitch is back…’
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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May 24th, 2007