INTRODUCTION
A funny, disturbing play from three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee. Considered as his most provocative, daring and controversial play since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat won all major awards for best new play of the year (Tony New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle).

THE STORY
Martin is a New York architect who is top of the heap - turning fifty and life couldn't be better. He leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. He has just won an international prize and the biggest contract of his life has fallen into his lap. But when he confides to his best friend Ross tha he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.

(Sources: programme & book)

ALBEE'S FAMILY (excerpts from the programme)
The theme of the family runs, obliquely for the most part, through all of Albee's plays. Adopted by unloving and aloof parents, Albee seems to search in many of his plays for the source of his family's unhappiness. [...] Albee's was one of the first American playwrights to dissect the family as an institution. [In many of his plays] Albee undermines the illusion of stability in American family life, in effect saying that it is only self-delusion and what we would now call co-dependency that maintains the family's delicate balance. The Goat uses a single stunning twist that flips all domestic clichés on their heads and extends the meaning of the play outward.

Excerpts from the reviews (about the play in general):
"Edward Albee's The Goat is an astonishing play - funny, shocking and ultimately harrowing, beginning as domestic comedy and ending as Greek tragedy.. . This is a drama about a marriage in crisis, but with an extraordinary twist... What's thrilling about the play is that Albee makes what might seem preposterous agonisingly real... This is, as Albee insists, a play about love. And love, he suggests, is more mysterious, and more powerful, than we may be prepared to accept."
(Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph)

"Albee's perversely funny send-up of a standard midlife crisis drama ... 'The Goat' dares to suggest that even the most flawed and confused human biengs deserve compassionate understanding."
(Charles Isherwood, Variety)

"Leaves you with plenty to fell and think about ... a tragedy with built-in laughs and elements of fantasy ... a brave, questioning play."
(Margo Jefferson, The New York Times)

"Unquestionably one of the wittiest and funniest plays Albee has ever written ... a truly fascinating play ... enthralling."
(Clive Barnes, New York Post)

"Powerful ... extraordinary ... Mr Albee still asks questions that no other major American dramatist dares to ask."
(Ben Brantley, The New York Times)

"As startling as it is satisfying ... Although it is often quite funny ... a serious, thoughtful, even tragic play despite the comic outrageousness of its premise. ... The dialogue is fierce, often brutal, and laced with the blackest of humor."
(Michael Kuchawara, Associated Press)

Big thanks to Debbie for graciously providing the production's programme.