By Adam Chambers
Moze Halperin, Jake Myers, and Jenny Gaeng in The Goat. Courtesy of Marley Zeno in Theater Publicity.
“Is there anything ‘we people’ don’t get off on? Is there anything anyone doesn’t get off on, whether we admit it or not—whether we know it or not?” -Martin
The Little Theater was packed on Saturday night for the Oberlin Theater Department’s first production of the year, Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia. The show, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, was directed by College junior Ben Ferber. A defiant expedition to the very edge of what society will tolerate and beyond, it was most effective in showing the places where that border blurs and breaks down. The play attacks not societal rules themselves, but the arbitrariness of how we create and apply them.
The most disturbing thing about The Goat, if I had to pick one, is that it reveals the similarity of those things that we get off on to those things that we love. We are loathe to call what Martin feels for Sylvia love, and yet what else is there to call it? What word do we have to describe such a feeling? Delusion? But that does not exactly solve the problem.
The second most disturbing thing about the play is a reasonably convincing, blood-soaked, life-sized goat sopping with blood being dragged–or rather smeared–across the floor by a bespattered, visibly unhinged Jenny Gaeng ‘11.
Now that I’ve got your attention, the play follows Martin (Moze Halperin ’11), an architect who, on his 50th birthday, is at the very top of his field, the recipient of prestigious awards and lucrative contracts. He has a savvy, rapacious wife, Stevie (Jenny Gaeng ’11), with whom he’s been happy married for 22 years, and a gay son, Billy (Jake Myers ’12), variously described as funny and worrisome, but always in the most endearing manner possible. The only problem is that he’s having a midlife crisis, except his midlife crisis is an affair with a goat. Martin tells his best friend Ross (Jeremiah Pearse ’11), who promptly informs Martin’s wife and son via letter of the strange, irreparable infidelity. The play deals with working out the issues that come along with this situation, some of which are obvious, but many not as much as one would assume.
Moze Halperin and Jenny Gaeng in The Goat. Courtesy of Marley Zeno in Theater Publicity.
The easiest mistake to make about this show is to assume that it’s about bestiality. Even though the sexual relationship with livestock gets the plot started, the actual ethical discussion is conspicuously sparse. Far more important to the characters are concepts of love, fidelity, and spiritual loneliness. One of the great strengths of the play and a constant source of narrative tension is its unrelenting insistence on ignoring the elephant in the room. The play instead explores quotidian issues through this skewed, broken lens.
The whole thing would be more believable if Ross had been more likeable. Perhaps Jeremiah could have done something to this end, but in reality, Albee didn’t give him much material to work with on the empathy front. Ross therefore comes off as a crude caricature, though I’m not entirely sure of what. Nevertheless, Jeremiah’s delivery of the Ross’s on-camera lines was about as close to perfect as anyone could expect. Off-camera, he was exactly the same, a point I felt both Jeremiah and Albee may have been trying to make too explicitly.
Believability was not a problem for Billy. Jake played him with a kind of melodramatic panache that always stopped just short of being over the top. When he began to kiss his father, I started thinking about why Albee had made that decision, but Jake radiated such an effusive sincerity that I was willing to overlook it. The third act, in which Billy and his father are finally given the chance to talk, is by far the most moving in the play. Billy’s explosive, indignant goodness is the light that I think shines out of the play and offers a necessary, though undeserved, sliver of hope.
Stevie is definitely the character in the play who most thoroughly represents Albee’s modus operandi. Probably smarter than her husband and certainly funnier, Jenny nailed these two aspects beyond a doubt. It was from a third aspect that she seemed to shy away: emotional energy. It wasn’t that she wasn’t intense–the room throbbed with her intensity even after she left the stage. It’s that the energy I saw in the dress rehearsal seemed desiccated somehow. Her plate-smashing was not done with nearly as much gusto, which made her character’s most attractive trait, namely her restraint, seem diminished in comparison.
Moze Halperin in The Goat. Courtesy of Marley Zeno in Theater Publicity.
Moze’s Martin would have stolen the show except it was his from the beginning. Granted, there seemed to be a snag at the start of the third scene in which the intensity dropped inexplicably when Moze and Jake seemed oddly out of sync. This was rectified, though, and everything before and after really shone. I wondered at points whether he was, in fact, too empathetic for someone who had been engaging unapologetically in intercourse with an animal, but I decided that this could not really be called a failure on the part of the actor. Although Albee isn’t trying to justify bestiality at all, I can’t think of a point when I felt really angry at Martin for his transgression.
Oddly, I often didn’t think The Goat was pushing boundaries enough. Perhaps it was because the play was so short, almost amputated at the end by the traumatic realization of what Jenny was dragging. Perhaps it was this refusal to complete a denouement that left the play stimulating and coyly enigmatic, but at the same time bewildering and un-cathartic. Perhaps it was partly Ben’s fault for staging it so close to the script instead of exploring postures deeper than Albee’s archetypes.
For all this, I liked the play immensely and thought it handled with humor ideas which would seem repulsive or indulgent in any other context. Perhaps I like the play because it is so easy to criticize, because it invites criticism in some sense, because it is born out of criticism and would die without it.
At its worst, The Goat is lazy and self-referential, Albee seeming to cruise along in his comfort zone of absurdity and wordplay, neglecting to color in all the complexities of his characters or his plot. But at its best and far more often, it is a provocative exploration of the inimical effect of a society that has forgotten the reasons behind the moral code it so brutally and unquestioningly enforces. The play is not an attempt to challenge society’s values as much as it is a way to ask questions, questions that are perceived as so impermissible that they are rarely asked about what makes a person feel alienated, questions that insist emphatically that people feel and show how this feeling mitigates and redeems them.