By Adam Chambers
The Goat. new.oberlin.edu
This Thursday at 8:00 p.m. in the Little Theater, the Oberlin Theater Department will kick off its new semester with Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning play from 2002, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia. The play is directed by Ben Ferber ’11 and features a four person cast: Moze Halperin ’11, Jenny Gaeng ’11, Jake Myers ’12 10 and Jeremiah Pearse ’11. They portray a family and close friend reeling from the discovery that Martin, the father, is having an affair with a goat, the eponymous Sylvia.
I met up with Ben at Fourth Meal after his Monday night rehearsal. We sat down in the marginally quieter Dascomb lounge to talk about his upcoming play. Piano music started in the background as I asked him why he had chosen this particular play. He said that while writing his proposal last semester, he had read all of Edward Albee’s plays in reverse order, as well as work by other playwrights. The Goat, one of the author’s most recent plays, was the second one he read and the work by which he judged all the others. In the end, none excited him quite as much. “I would keep thinking to myself,” Ben said, “I like this one, but it’s not as good as The Goat.”
According to Ben, one of the things Albee is doing is commenting on the nature of tragedy. “The full title is The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy),” he informed me. “Greek tragedy was about those in the highest rungs of society falling. Arthur Miller’s idea was to make a tragedy of the common man, to tell the story of those on the bottom rung falling even lower. This is basically Edward Albee’s interpretation of Arthur Miller’s interpretation of tragedy. The people he’s talking about are either really high upper middle class or maybe even the lower part of the upper class. It’s not a place where tragedy usually touches. In a way, it’s more like the Greek.”
One of the salient issues the play deals with is exploring the line between what society will accept and what it won’t. Ben thinks that this is where people here at Oberlin will really relate to it. “This is about a family that is very liberal, and very proud of their liberal values and how tolerant they are. They’ve got a son who’s openly gay–they’re not quite okay with it, but they’re trying really hard.”
He explained that for him, the crux of the story is the exploration of the things people can’t finally tolerate, one clear example being, of course, bestiality. “One of reasons you can’t do it is that it’s rape; the goat can’t consent because, well, it’s a goat; it can’t speak, and this is something that’s raised in the play. But to Martin, he feels like he understands her and that it’s not rape. A lot of the play is about how he has a kind of spiritual epiphany about it, but he can’t express that to the other characters.”
The play has a small cast: only four actors, each of whom Ben thinks brings his or her own personal touch to the roles. “Jenny’s character Stevie is in a scenario where she has been wronged on the deepest level by being put on the same level as a goat. Jenny has been really fantastic as an actress and really been able to personalize that and make it very believable and powerful.”
Moze plays Martin, the goat-singing protagonist. “He can do characters which are so disturbing in many ways, but make them likable,” Ben said. “I really like Moze’s Martin; I really feel for Moze’s Martin, and that is something that can not be said for every Martin in a production of The Goat.” Ben also told me as a point of interest that Moze had been in France during the auditions and had done his audition over Skype.
When I asked the obvious question, “Well, who is Sylvia?” he mentioned that there would be a goat, presumably played by someone, but he refused to elaborate.
Ben said that the most challenging scene to stage was one in particular where a lot of things are supposed to be broken. “We were ultimately able to choreograph that so that the audience members won’t be injured,” he said. “We’re basically throwing everything into a corner and there’s some great loud shattering.
For a taste of the show, I asked him for a line from the play. He said one of his favorites was “No, I mean… ‘in love.’ Ficky-fack! Humpty-doodle!” So there you have it, straight from the Goat’s mouth. Ficky-fack. Humpty-doodle.
Tickets are $3 in advance and $5 at the door at the Little Theater, running from the 24th to the 26th at 8 p.m. and the 27th at 2 p.m.
