Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, left, and William Giammona in Shotgun Players’ “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?”
Ben Krantz/Shotgun Players
Not long after the audience settles in for Shotgun Players’ knife-sharp staging of “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? ,” things start to go a little squirmy.
Starchitect Martin and his wife, Stevie, a middle-aged married couple who seem to have it all — money, prestige, good sex — begin to show fissures in the facade. The spouses correct each other’s grammar, natter about a razor, idly wonder if Martin might have Alzheimer’s.
But just wait to hear what dark matter Edward Albee’s 2002 comic tragedy has in store for them.
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As is often true of an Allbee play, cracks in the veneer open into chasms of striving, desire, betrayal and raw revelation. The pattern is most familiar from the playwright’s 1962 booze-fueled brawl “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “Goat” to my mind the greater play, fuses Allbee’s psychological acuity to the surrealism of his “Seascape” and the mortal angst of “Three Tall Women.”
Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, left, and William Giammona in Shotgun Players’ “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?”
Ben Krantz/Shotgun Players
In Shotgun’s beautifully judged, starkly funny and emotionally cauterizing production, which I saw on Thursday, April 2, a terrific cast of four is supported by Kevin Clarke’s incisive direction and the cunning work of the show’s designers. Together they bring this acidulous, tender tragedy to jolting life.
“The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?”: Comic tragedy by Edward Albee. Directed by Kevin Clarke. 95 minutes. Through April 26. $23-$80. Shotgun Players at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. 510-841-6500, ext. 303. www.shotgunplayers.org
The action takes place on a bare gray set (by Liliana Dubuque-Piñeiro), the antithesis of the Broadway production’s deluxe decor. The costumes (Sharon Peng) are muted as well, with whispering tones of ecru and cream. When Stevie (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) comes onstage with a bunch of red flowers to “brighten up the place,” she drops them on the floor because there’s only an imaginary end table for them. There they stay, like an indelible bloodstain.
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At the outset, Martin (William Giammona) is as stolid as a piece of furniture, standing stock still at center stage, the black rectangle through which the other actors enter and exit like a deep void behind him. You can almost feel the heat of his secret leaking through his pores.
One effect of this austerity and repression is to focus attention on Albee’s language, with its slippery banalities and barbs.
When the couple falls into a little Noel Cowardesque riff, the play’s central confession arrives like a comic absurdity. Because it comes so early, it’s only a minor spoiler to reveal that Martin is in love with a goat. And yes, it’s sexual.
Joel Ochoa, left, and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart in Shotgun Players’ “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?”
Ben Krantz/Shotgun Players
When it dawns on Stevie that he means it, a carefully composed Mei-Ling Stuart becomes a vengeance-driven fury, a Clytemnestra in designer silks, pitching over the furniture and breaking every invisible piece of glassware in sight. Matt Stines’ perfectly timed sound design lands every shattering crash.
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“The Goat” delivers plenty more shocks, some of which audibly startled Thursday’s audience and prompted a few walkouts. But the production builds to a remarkable, resonant conclusion best experienced fresh.
What cuts most deeply are less the big gut-punching reveals than the way the characters try, fail and try again to come clean to themselves. One of the biggest comes late, when their son Billy (Joel Ochoa) confronts his father.
William Giammona, left, and Kevin Singer in Shotgun Players’ “The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?”
Ben Krantz/Shotgun Players
Giammona is pleadingly, movingly lyrical when he takes a few steps closer to the audience and rhapsodizes about his lover, the innocent-faced goat he’s named Sylvia. As Ross, Martin’s friend and confidante, Kevin Singer has the insinuating righteousness of a slinky cat, his line readings all mews and snarls. Ochoa’s snide speech about his privileged private school becomes a wrenching aria of desolation and need.
“The Goat” is about human nature stripped bare, down to our animal essences that confound, frighten and thrill us. The marvel of the play, and of this keenly staged and performed production, is its emotional volatility, the quiver of truth behind the percolating dialogue of evasion or shaming accusation.
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When Martin admits he’s “seeing” Sylvia, he means it in both the carnal and helplessly captivated senses. That’s what this sexually drenched “Goat” does, too. It sees into our deepest recesses.
Steven Winn is a freelance writer.