The Goat
by Edward Albee

September 7-29, 2007

Directed by Rhonda Clark

Provocative and daring, this is the winner of the 2002 Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Albee takes the story of a mid-life crisis to a whole new level in his tale about Martin who is living the American dream. Martin’s a prize-winning architect with a loving wife and son. Then he confesses that he has fallen in love. With a blonde bimbo?  A friend of the family? No, it’s a barnyard floozie – a goat named Sylvia.

Rated R for strong language and subject matter.

Early in his career, Edward Albee was associated with the absurdist side of America's avant-garde theatre of the 1960s with such one-acts as THE ZOO STORY and THE SANDBOX. Even as he won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes in 1966 for A DELICATE BALANCE, his plays were viewed as "edgy" and ambiguous. As he approaches age 80, Albee's work has lost none of its ambiguity or its edge!

When questioned about THE GOAT in a 2002 interview, Albee explained, "Its about the limits of our tolerance; what we will permit ourselves to think about. I think the fundamental thing that runs through almost all the plays is my dislike of self-deception. [THE GOAT] doesn't advocate bestiality. I'm not suggesting that. I hope that maybe it will make a few people wonder whether some of our attitudes -- the things we think we believe -- shouldn't be re-examined. It's so dangerous to accept something as a belief and not think about it anymore."

At the time he was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 2005, Albee was asked about the writer's place in society. He responded: "Writing should be useful. If it can't instruct people a little bit more about the responsibilities of consciousness there's no point in doing it. But we all write because we don't like what we see, and we want people to be better and different. Sure, that's why we do it."

When asked to elaborate on "useful" he expressed this view: "All art is useful, because it tells us more about consciousness. It should engage us into thinking and reevaluating, re-examining our values to find out whether the stuff we think we've been believing for 20 years still has any validity. Art's got to help us understand that values change. If we stopped exploring the possibilities of our mind, then we're asleep, and why not just stay asleep? So all art has got to be utilitarian and useful."