Celebrated architect Martin is in a position similar to Proteus, Shakespeare's gentleman of Verona, who's betraying the woman who loves him and whom he's promised to, by falling for his best friend's love, Silvia. The difference is that Martin and his wife Stevie supposedly have an ideal marriage and "who is Sylvia?" - a goat! When his randy best friend Ross interviews him for the TV show, "People Who Matter," Martin, a grand prize-winner for his World City, confesses to his commitment in the country. (Note: love vs. honor and city vs. country are two major themes of Restoration drama.) It seems that, as with courtly love in romances of the middle ages, love entered through the eyes (in this case, to Martin via the goat's). For six months he's been convinced that Sylvia "excels each mortal thing / Upon the dull earth dwelling."
Domestic comedy remains in some of the dialogue and recounting of Martin's attempts at therapy, but tragic drama remains in the fore after Ross sends a letter telling all to Stevie. The absurdity, "the awfulness of it" wrenches tears and desperation from her. (Kate Alexander makes her disgust magnificent, even as she breaks artifacts, upends a designer chair, trashes a table.) Condemnation by son Billy, whose homosexuality they'd always accepted, prods Martin to condemn him as a "faggot" -- or had Martin always regarded him so? As Stevie declares, when Martin promises an end to his affair, "You have brought us down." She promises to do the same to him. Hardly has she gone when Billy poses the problem of another kind of forbidden love. Blood, it appears, will out...and blood, in fact, is soon spilled. Nothing funny about it this time!
Not since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has Albee interwoven so many classical allusions, and here they extend to dramatic types from drawing room comedy to domestic tragedy. There's even a scapegoat. In this production, however, it is what happens to Stevie that seems to matter, since Kate Alexander is so splendid. John Wojda, on the other hand, acts so phlegmatic that Martin never seems like a character grand enough to make his fall significant. Instead of hubris, he shows hesitation. Drew Foster makes Billy nobler than his father, in fact. Jason O'Connell is a sturdy contrast with them, as Ross should be. All benefit from the atmosphere provided by Marcella Beckwith's slick set. As the first of FST's Stage III series of edgier than usual offerings, The Goat makes auspicious use of the new Gompertz stage.
