A ‘Goat’ of a different color

The literary critic James Wood recently decreed that jokes about bestiality aren’t really funny. The reason, he says, is that they can only pretend to be realistic -- because “no one has ever actually met a person who [fornicated with] a sheep.”

Edward Albee’s shocker, “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?,” which opened Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, introduces theatergoers to just such a person. His name is Martin: an upstanding American, successful architect, loving husband and understanding father -- who also happens to be having a passionate love affair with a barnyard animal.

Martin is one of Albee’s greatest characters, a point proved by the simple fact that, despite its absurdist premise, “The Goat” actually works as a play -- and not merely a 105-minute-long sheep-shagging joke. (Although, in regard to Wood’s “bestiality + realism = comedy” axiom, there was a great deal of laughter heard on opening night.)

In many ways, Martin is a combination of the two prototypical Albee men in “The Zoo Story” (the playwright’s first produced work), as he is a happily married man with seemingly everything in the world, yet, at the same time, a man whose tortured sexual desires make him cry out: “I am alone ... all ... alone!” The crucial element of Martin’s character, however, is that he does not seem like a playwright’s creation. His inclinations toward female livestock notwithstanding, Martin looks and sounds like a regular, everyday guy.

Since “The Goat” premiered three years ago, Martin has been played by actors of no small renown: Jonathan Pryce in London and Bill Pullman and Bill Irwin on Broadway. At the Taper, Martin is performed by Brian Kerwin, who navigates slack direction and extended dialogue with some of Albee’s most poorly written characters, and for the most part finds the soul of Martin’s character.

Sadly though, Kerwin’s understated performance is lost in the first third of the play, as director Warner Shook too often goes for the easy laugh at the expense of atmosphere and character development. Not that Martin’s early interactions with his wife and best friend can’t be relaxed and amusing. The New York production pitched these scenes in much the same style as a Neil Simon comedy. Lines were played for small laughs, which worked to lull the audience into a sense of familiar complacency but also left space for the characterizations to breathe.

In this staging, however, these exposition scenes are given the broad, punchy feel of an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Shook has the actors mine the text for big laughs -- which, it must be said, they deliver -- but at the expense of nuance that the play needs to make the darker, more complex scenes pay off.

Kerwin’s meticulous performance can be seen more clearly later in the play when Shook’s direction -- and Albee’s writing -- is more assured. The confrontation scene, when Martin’s wife, Stevie, finds out about his dalliances with the goat, is signature Albee territory, and everything onstage improves dramatically after it begins.

It is here when one can feel Kerwin’s halting gestures and nervous footsteps showing emotions that Martin so wants to express, but can’t. It is also in this scene when the actress playing Stevie, Cynthia Mace, starts to steal the show.

Mace gives an admirable performance that was indeed deserving of rousing applause, but it must be said that the part of Stevie is very much a crowd-pleasing role. This is partly because she gets to destroy much of Michael Olich’s Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired set, but mostly because she represents the gut instincts of the audience. Stevie speaks for the part in all of us that has felt betrayed at some point, and the therapeutic thrill of watching her hurl insults -- as well as pottery -- at her tail-chasing husband counts as a fine spectator sport.

But because Stevie can be seen as the voice of reason, there is a temptation to make her character too sympathetic, to turn her into the play’s martyred hero. Mace’s interpretation does just this, as her Stevie is a woman who admirably keeps her wits throughout these beastly events. This is an interesting decision, one that certainly endears her to the audience, but it is one that ultimately does a disservice to the play. True, Mace lights her scenes with a slow burn as she calmly internalizes the details of her husband’s goat-loving.

But delivered without true menace, Stevie’s lines do not suggest that she’s losing her mind -- a result that Albee’s gasp-inducing finale requires.

Still, watching Mace and Kerwin go at each other as husband and wife constitute the best moments of this solid, if somewhat prosaic, production of “The Goat.” When Martin and Stevie aren’t sparring, the play drags considerably as the two supporting characters offer little to the audience and even less for the actors. The small role of Ross (James Eckhouse) is the most thankless, as his two entrances serve only to push the plot forward. And if Martin is one of Albee’s best characters, then the role of Billy (energetically played by Patrick J. Adams), Martin’s son, has to be one of his worst. Billy’s dialogue is entirely unconvincing. He rarely sounds like a 17-year-old and often doesn’t even sound like a human being. Billy is a purely artificial conceit, called on to be both the straight man for gags (example: Stevie overturns the couch in rage. Billy enters confused, asks: “Mom, what’s going on?” Stevie: “We’re redecorating, honey.”) and the gay man for an infusion of topical social commentary.

Some have said that “The Goat” is an allegory or metaphor for homosexuality -- a reductive view, but certainly a fair reading of the play. This interpretation, though, is certainly made clear without Martin’s son being gay. One suspects the only reason the character is onstage at all (instead of existing as an off-stage character or an “invented son” a la “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”) is so he can kiss one of the other characters and ratchet up the shock quotient one more level. (As if a play about a Pritz ker Prize-winning architect having sex with a farm animal needs further titillation?)

Lost amid the splattering of blood and laughter is the tragic marrow that lies deep within “The Goat” -- a problem when one considers the play’s Vonnegut-style subtitle: “Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy.” Albee has packed the play with allusions to classical drama (even the title is a play on the Greek roots of the word tragedy, which literally means “goat song”) and indeed, in its best moments, “The Goat” can evoke the primal human agonies faced by characters such as Oedipus, Electra and, of course, Medea.

This production only scratches the surface of Albee’s complex, deeply flawed, but profoundly tragic work. “The Goat” is a play certain to entertain and confound audiences for years to come but one that is still waiting for the right staging to shepherd it away from familiar comedic pastures and instead lead it toward fresh fields of human emotion that other productions and plays have yet to graze.

*

‘The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 20

Price: $34 to $52

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Cynthia Mace...Stevie

Brian Kerwin...Martin

James Eckhouse...Ross

Patrick J. Adams...Billy

Written by Edward Albee. Directed by Warner Shook. Sets by Michael Olich. Costumes by Frances Kenny. Lighting by Mary Louise Geiger. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner.