show and tell post #1

For my show and tell Play, I read The Goat by Edward Albee. This play, also referred to as Who is Sylvia, was published in 2000, and produced for the first time in New York City on March 10, 2002. It premiered at the Golden Theatre, was produced by Elizabeth Ireland McCann, Daryl Roth, Carole Shorenstein Hays, Terry Allen Kramer, Scott Rudin, Bob Boyett, and Scott Nederlander. This play is written and can be found in many forms. I bought the play by itself, and also have read it from the Norton Anthology of Drama.

Where is Sylvia is about the almost too good to be true marriage of Martin and Stevie, and how tragically it shattered. Martin, a politician, admits to his best friend Ross of a love affair he is currently engaged in. He claims to love, more passionately than he has ever loved anything else, a goat, named Sylvia. However, he is still in love with Stevie, and can’t fathom how no one understands his position. Ross tell Stevie of the terrible news, the majority of the play is dialogue between Stevie and Martin as she forces him to explain himself, and is enraged as Martin puts Sylvia in the same love category as she. Their homosexual son Billy, who is constantly bothered for his sexual orientation, swings in a out of the scenes usually with disdain for Martin and a deep love for his mother. At the end of the show, Ross and Martin have it out, Billy and Martin make up and get too sexually affectionate for a father and son, and Stevie leaves the house only to return with a slaughtered Sylvia. Martin sees that his behavior is wrong only because of how deeply it hurt Stevie, but he claims to love Sylvia with all his heart and wishes someone would take his side and understand where he is coming from.

The way Stevie and Martin speak with one another stood out to me. Albee interlocks their dialogue, displaying how close they by having them finish one another’s sentences, and sometimes predict what the other would say or would actually mean rather. Even in the depth of their dispair, in the midst of Stevie’s rage Albee would have one of them subtly cracks a joke or refer to an old memory or inside joke. This was what kept me rooting for the salvation of their relationship no matter how crippled it had or would become. This showed how much Martin truly did love Stevie. This made the audience believe Martin was in love with his wife, and simply confused, rather than pin him with infidelity, beastiality, and filth. Another choice that stood out to me was the way Albee wrote in stage directions and actions such as (Stevie flipped over the table, or Stevie shattered a vase) and sometimes in the place of more dialogue. I felt like I could more deeply understand the inner conflict happening within Stevie. Just like how the first choice I discussed added a sense of familiarity and comedy, making what severity of the sin diminish, Albee’s detailed stage directions do the same.