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Provincetown :: Friday, May 16th 2008
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Players Start Season with Albee
The Goat or Who is Sylvia?
By Kahrin Deines
May 5th, 2007
Jim loved Pat. Heather loved Sam. Martin loved Sylvia. Sounds like a series of prototypical pairings. But what if Pat is short for a man named Patrick, Sam for a woman named Samantha, and Sylvia is a goat? Do you think this might make many Americans pause mid-swoon, maybe even swerve breakneck from a good old heart-warmed reaction to romance into uncontained expressions of outrage?
| Albee shows that the world leaves room for all of us to be bigots, accepting of some things and not of others, and usually drawing our lines of acceptance near what we have experienced or accepted in our own sexuality. |
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More to the point, are you bristling at the way that the above pairings link homosexuality and bestiality? Then you can say thank you to Edward Albee, master American playwright and absurdist provocateur. There is not a Jim, Pat, Heather or Sam in his Tony-award winning play “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?,” which will be performed by the New Provincetown Players between May 18 and June 3. But there is a Martin who loves a goat named Sylvia and he does have a gay son that he kisses lustfully at one point in the tale’s unfolding.
And now we have incest, homosexuality, and bestiality – Albee lays them all side by side, but not for the purpose of condemning homosexuality. He is, after all, and not that this should matter, a gay man himself. His purpose is rather to explore the nature of condemnation. As Albee explained in a 2002 conversation with Steven Drukman that was published in Interview, “It’s about the limits of our tolerance; what we will permit ourselves to think about.”
In this play, which the New Provincetown Players will present with direction by Patrick Falco, Albee shows that the world leaves room for all of us to be bigots, accepting of some things and not of others, and usually drawing our lines of acceptance near what we have experienced or accepted in our own sexuality. Leave it to Albee, the maker of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The American Dream” and numerous other provocative plays, to find a way to make anyone who lives in a liberal society feel at once righteous and unenlightened, and with enough wit and warmth to make us stay through painful growth.
“The Goat or Who is Sylvia” drew the ire of many American critics when it debuted on Broadway in 2002, but it also earned Albee another Tony to line up next to his three Pulitzers and elicited wide praise when it hit European stages. His is theater that will make you think, without shortchanging on the entertainment.
The New Provincetown Players will perform “The Goat or Who is Sylvia” between May 18 and June 3 at the Provincetown Theater, which is located at 238 Bradford Street. To buy tickets or find out more about play times and dates, go to www.ptowntix.com or www.newprovincetownplayers.org, or call 508.487.9793.
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