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Stage

A different species of love

A romance with a goat is a backdrop to playwright Edward Albee's depiction of a family's loss of closeness and the social pressures pushing them apart.

By ROBERT HICKS
Published March 23, 2006

TAMPA

Edward Albee's controversial play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, gets a new look in Jobsite Theater's production, opening today.

With its themes of social tolerance, hidden desire, obsessive love, repressed sexuality and familial conflict, the play is a funny, intense drama that encourages its audience to think about the meaning of social conventions and life.

Director Karla Hartley first discovered Albee's award-winning play during its Broadway run in 2002. It won the Tony Award for best new play that year.

"I think it's extremely relevant and interesting," she says. "It has some very fascinating things to say about society and where we are headed.''

The play takes place in the home of Martin Gray (Steven Clark Pachosa) and his wife Stevie (Monica Merryman). He is a successful architect with a secret: He's in love with a goat, physically and emotionally.

His acerbic wife is a woman of immense intelligence. Their son, Billy (Eric Burgess), is a teenager struggling to come to terms with being gay. The couple's friend Ross (Ward Smith) uncovers Martin's secret, then tries to bring order to the Grays' increasingly chaotic family life.

"I think the play has some very interesting things to say about society and the limits that we have in society. The more that we keep pushing that envelope, we're soon not going to have anywhere to go,'' Hartley says.

Likewise, the play's exploration of the boundaries of acceptable behavior raises questions about the true nature of love. For Hartley, each character strongly communicates these values.

"Martin is intensely distracted,'' she says. "But he's strong enough to confess it all. . . . Despite the havoc that his actions have taken on his family, his impulse is to be honest.''

She sees Stevie as akin to heroines in Greek tragedy.

"I want to see her strength and backbone even though everything is falling apart around her ears,'' she says. "There's a civility about her that is almost desperate. She finds the anger and pain, but there is always an undercurrent of love.''

Hartley regards Billy as a sensitive young man who has been robbed of any solid grounding.

"He understands that what's happening is very destructive, but he has no idea where it is going and it rips his foundation that had been his parents' relationship and their love,'' she says. "Billy provides some comic relief in a dark, foreboding way.''

She views Ross as the judgmental voice of society.

"He clearly has his own flaws and his own hypocritical nature,'' she says.

In directing the play, Hartley wants to focus on family dynamics.

"For me, the play is much less about the physical act of bestiality than it is about how one act can wreak such havoc in people's lives,'' she says. "I also am trying to deal strongly with these familial challenges in an upper-crust, white family that has a very good life.''

What does Hartley want audiences to take away from Albee's commentary on social intolerance?

"I would like everyone to realize, whether we know it or not, that we are all on a precipice of disaster," she says. "Because of that we have to take great care in what we do and the choices that we make in life.''

[Last modified March 22, 2006, 12:27:20]