The Goat, or who is Sylvia? By Edward Albee

  

Who is Edward Albee?

Edward Albee is the author of many plays, including the award winning (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Seascape. Much can be said of his work, but the first word that comes to your mind as reader or a researcher or even if you are a theatre major is "innovative." Albee never writes the same play twice. Each new work explores different territory and his its own special incidents that takes a big spot in his work, and what I mean by that is we could tell and see how significantly any he does is absolutely different, unique and as I mentioned earlier, he never writes the same play twice. Even similarity doesn’t exist as much as how we think so!  Clearly, he’s a renewable playwright.  Although the themes can be unsettling and the format may sometimes border on avant-garde, his plays always offer new insight into the human condition.

In my personal opinion, sometimes I think reading a science book might be as less complicated as how it might sound, and that’s actually how I feel towards Albee’s play especially the one we had to study this semester in my theatre literature class, and the play called ( The Goat, or Who is Sylvia ) only because I found it a little bit strange and not quite sure if I’m understanding his main goal of the story behind it’s general theme, it’s a mix of complicated events that’s happening altogether at one time.  

According to Lee Jacobus, The controversy stimulated by this play centered naturally on the question of bestiality, sexual intercourse with an animal. It seemed to those who studied Albee that he had found a way to deal with sexuality in a fashion that would shock an otherwise unshakable audience, and it was the shock value that drove the play. In the process of developing that idea, reviewers did not emphasize the details that pointed in a s somewhat different direction.” Lee Jacobus 

The Plot of this play:

The tale of a married, middle-aged architect, Martin, his wife Stevie, and their son Billy, whose lives crumble when he falls in love with a goat, the play focuses on the limits of an ostensibly liberal society. Through showing this family in crisis, Albee challenges audience members to question their own morality in the face of other social taboos including infidelity, pedophilia, incest and, of course, bestiality.

“The play also features many language games and grammatical arguments in the middle of catastrophes and existential disputes between the characters. The name of the play refers to the song "Who is Sylvia" from Shakespeare's play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Proteus sings this song, hoping to woo Silvia. Franz Schubert's setting of the song contributed to its popularity outside Shakespeare's play. It is also referred to in an earlier work of Albee's, "Finding the Sun" (1982).Albee's play drew film stars Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl to Broadway. Ruehl was later replaced by Sally Field, and Pullman was replaced by Bill Irwin.”