In witty contrast, Phaethon is here a sulky adolescent lounging in the pool on a rubber raft while being analysed by his therapist. In the story of Myrrha's incestuous love for her father it becomes a source of liquid sensuousness, with the two of them coupling furiously in the water before the heroine's avian transformation. Zimmerman's text may not possess the poetic fire of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid recently staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but what it does have is the ability to move one deeply through the power of classical myth.ĭaniel Ostling's swimming-pool set is also inspired. Written and directed by Mary Zimmerman of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, this is a richly inventive production that combines love and loss, spirit and flesh, an American wit and a European sensibility. If it's astonishing to find it on Broadway, it's equally astonishing to find Ovid's Metamorphoses set in a 30ft swimming pool at the Circle in the Square. The Goat is an Oedipus Rex for the age of affluence. In David Esbjornson's production, Bill Pullman plays the goat-obsessed Martin and Mercedes Ruehl plays his shocked wife with courage and passion. "It's whom."įorty years after Who's Afraid of Viriginia Woolf? Albee has returned to Broadway with an equally disruptive play about the violent destruction of the household gods. When Ross scathingly refers to the goat "who you're fucking" Martin looks pained.
As his play builds to a scorching standoff between Martin and his wife, it's full of Albee's characteristic semantic comedy. But what is remarkable is Albee's candour in admitting that love takes many strange, destructive, socially unacceptable forms. We simply suspect he is being punished for his hubristic material success. Albee's honest answer is: "No."Īdmittedly there is a puzzle at the heart of his play: if bestial fixation is a symptom of unhappiness, we never learn the source of Martin's misery. "Is there anything we don't get off on?" Ross disgustedly asks. And, more identifiably, he describes a married friend who admits to sexual arousal when handling his baby. Martin may be tragic but he certainly isn't alone: he makes it clear, from descriptions of his weekly encounter group, that there are many others who find physical solace in animals. But The Goat strikes me as a deeply serious and disquieting play about the vagaries of human passion. But bestiality on Broadway? There are those who think Albee has gone doolally. I vividly remember New York's La Mama importing, in the late 1960s, a carnivalesque play by Rochelle Owens called Futz, about a farm worker enthralled by a pig. Or perhaps he is - since Sylvia is a goat.īestiality isn't new in American drama.
When Martin shows Ross a picture of his adored, we realise he's not kidding. When his oldest friend Ross remarks that he's at the pinnacle of his success, Martin replies: "You mean it's all downhill from here on?" Indeed it is, since Martin is the victim of a doomed, obsessive and profoundly physical love for the unseen Sylvia. Albee has written a modern classical tragedy: his hero Martin is a happily married architect who has just won his profession's equivalent of the Nobel prize, and is designing a $27 billion city. The boldest, bravest and most controversial is undeniably Edward Albee's The Goat or Who is Sylvia? at the Golden Theatre. Astonishingly, there are no fewer than eight new plays by living American writers in the commercial heartland. And the major breakthrough this year is that the straight play, long given up for dead, is back with a vengeance. Something of the old vaudevillian bounce returned to Broadway last season with Mel Brooks's The Producers. And the striking fact about Broadway, despite the odd co-existence of shows directed by the past, present and future of our National Theatre - Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner - is that it is slowly shedding its slavish dependence on British talent. Bars, restaurants and even theatres are packed. Life in the city, after the trauma of 9/11, seems to have resumed its frenzied normality. But even those of us who don't share Hunsecker's sentiments have to admire the resilience of New York.
I love this dirty city." So, speaking of New York, says JJ Hunsecker, the scabrous gossip columnist in Sweet Smell of Success, which has recently made the transition from admired movie to Broadway musical.