The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia Words On Plays (2005) PDF

GOAT WOP.
qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page i
A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
PRESENTS
The Goat or,

Who is Sylvia?
by edward albee
directed by richard e. t. white
geary theater
june 10july 10, 2005
WORDS ON PLAYS prepared by

elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
jessica werner
associate publications editor
paul walsh
resident dramaturg
margot melcon
publications and literary intern
a.c.t. is supported in part by grants from the

Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund
and the National Endowment for the Arts, which
believes that a great nation deserves great art.
2005 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

GOAT WOP.qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page ii
GOAT WOP.qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page iii
table of contents
1. Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
3. Situation Tragedy: An Interview with Director Richard e. t. White

by Jessica Werner
12. About This Goat

by Edward Albee
15. Passion Plays: The Making of Edward Albee

by Larissa MacFarquhar
26. Interview with Edward Albee

by Mark Lawson
33. Why Read Plays?

by Edward Albee
35. Zoophilia: An Overview
42. Heavy Petting: A Review of Mark Dekkerss Controversial Book,

Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
by Peter Singer
46. The Ballad of the Sad Caf

Excerpted from Edward Albees stage adaptation of the novella by Carson McCullers
47. A Goat Glossary

by Margot Melcon
53. Tragedy: Definition and Analysis

From Aristotles Poetics
55. Ritual and Transcendence in the Oedipus Trilogy

by Charles and Regina Higgins
57. Questions to Consider
59. For Further Information . . .

GOAT WOP.qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page iv
GOAT WOP.qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page 1
characters, cast, and synopsis of

THE GOAT OR, WHO IS SYLVIA?
The Goat opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre on March 10, 2002.
characters and cast

martin gray Don R. McManus
stevie gray, his wife Pamela Reed
billy gray, their son Joseph Parks
ross tuttle, Martins best friend Charles Shaw Robinson
time and place

A living room. The present.
synopsis
S cene one. The living room. Stevie onstage, arranging flowers. Martin and Stevie, a hap-
pily married couple, prepare for the arrival of Ross, Martins best friend. Martin, a suc-
cessful architect at the pinnacle of his career, has achieved several milestones in the past
week: he celebrated his 50th birthday, became the youngest person ever to win the presti-
gious Pritzker Prize (architectures equivalent of the Nobel), and was asked to design The
World City, a $200 billion dollar dream city of the future in the American Midwest. A tv
journalist, Ross is coming over to interview Martin on camera for the television show
People Who Matter. Martin and Stevie banter playfully, teasing each other with affec-
tion: he is forgetful, she smells something odd on him, they joke about him having an affair
with a goat.
1
Ross arrives and Stevie leaves. As the two men begin taping the interview, Martin is still
preoccupied and unresponsive, and Ross, frustrated, stops the interview to ask Martin what
is wrong. After much equivocation, Martin admits that he is having an affair. Though he
is still in love with Stevie, and had never been unfaithful to her in their 22 years together,
he is now also inexplicably in love with Sylvia, whom he met while looking for a country
house for the family. After much prodding, Martin reluctantly shows Ross a photograph
of Sylvia. She is a goat.
cene two. The living room, a day later. Martin and Stevie are with their 17-year-old
S son, Billy. Stevie is holding a letter she received that day from Ross, in which he reveals
Martins sexual relationship with a goat. Billy and Stevie are understandably shocked and
outraged by the news and confront Martin together. When Billy objects to his fathers
unsavory sexual activities, Martin in turn brings up Billys homosexuality. Martin and
Stevie ask Billy to leave the room, and he does, visibly hurt. Stevie demands that Martin
explain, in detail, how this unbelievable situation could have come about.
Martin explains that he met Sylvia in the country while house hunting. While buying
vegetables at a roadside stand, he looked over and saw her. He looked into her eyes and
instantly experienced what he can only describe as an epiphany, an ecstasy and a purity,
and love of an unimaginable kind. He knew that they would go to bed together, and was
powerless to resist. Mystified by the power of the experience, he has even been to a
therapy group for people in similar circumstances, but didnt feel he belonged there,
because he is truly in love with Sylvia. As his story unfolds, Stevie reacts with increasing
horror and rage and slowly destroys most of the valuable art and objects in the room.
Martin insists that he loves both Stevie and Sylvia, deeply and equally. Painfully stung,
Stevie cant believe that he fails to see the enormity of the situation; he has destroyed her
and their splendid life. She storms out of the house, vowing that, since Martin has
brought her down, she will bring him down with her.
S cene three. An hour or so later. The living room is in ruins. The front door slams and
Billy enters. He demands to know from his father what happened and where Stevie is;
Martin doesnt know where she has gone, only that she has vowed to bring him down. Billy
is undone by the realization that the ideal family he has always known has disappeared.
Martin hugs Billy to comfort him, and, overwhelmed by his pain and desire for his father
to reassure him, Billy turns their embrace into a passionate, sexual kiss. At this point Ross
enters and condemns Martin for this further evidence of his perversity. Martin describes
2 the fine line between love and sex and the ways in which sexual arousal often creeps into
places we dont think it belongs. He then lets Ross have it for betraying his confidence by
writing the letter to Stevie, and thereby causing the irreparable damage done to his family.
Amid the argument between Martin and Ross, Stevie returns. She drags in the bloody
carcass of Sylvia, whom she has brutally killed. Martin, devastated, apologizes to his fam-
ily. Billy ends the play with a plea: Dad? Mom?
situation tragedy
An Interview with Director Richard e. t. White
by jessica werner
the worlds a mess; its in my kiss.

Exene Cervenka/John Doe
A stage direction from scene two of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? serves as an apt distil-
lation of the themes of domestic discord and illusory ideals that Edward Albee has
dramatized in many of his plays: There is chaos behind the civility, of course.
Ever since his career-making theatrical debut with the explosive one-act The Zoo Story
(1959)about a violent encounter between a complacent book editor and a desperate,
truth-telling lonerAlbee has been attuned to the emotional, moral, and linguistic forces
that perpetually threaten to rend the calm surface of middle-class life. Marriage itself was
recast by Albee as an epic battlefield in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), his extrava-
gant verbal duel between a husband and wife fighting to the death of their illusions. Albee
has explored this conflict between fantasy and truth in many subsequent plays, emphasiz-
ing repeatedly the importance of living an open, passionate, and courageous existence, in
defiance of the dangers inherent in fully embracing life.
Albee has always been outspoken in his belief that theater should employ imagination
in the service of challenging assumptions, rather than confirming an audiences prejudices
and beliefs. He described his play
The American Dream (1960) as
an attack on the substitution of
artificial for real values in our
3
society, a condemnation of com-
placency, cruelty and emascula-
tion and vacuity, a stand against
the fiction that everything in this
slipping land of ours is peachy-
keen. In two of his Pulitzer Prize-
winning dramasA Delicate
Director Richard E.T. White (left) with Don R. McManus in rehearsals of The Goat
Balance (1966) and Seascape (1974)
at A.C.T. Photo by Ryan Montgomery. a couples uneasy peace is again
disrupted by unexpected visitors (in this case, by two giant sea lizards). In Three Tall Women
(1990), for which Albee received his third Pulitzer, the unsettling intruder is memory itself,
dragging with it reminders of a lifes wounds and mistakes.
If there is a single theme that runs through Albees work, wrote Larissa MacFarquhar
in the New Yorker this spring (on the occasion of Virginia Woolf?s current Broadway
revival), it is the importance of being open to a full consciousness of life, with all the social
and emotional risk that entails. Dangerous is one of his highest terms of praise, and rest-
ful is one of his worst insults.
After 19 years without a new play on Broadway, during which time Albees work met
with mixed critical reception, he returned in 2002 with The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? The
Goat earned Albee his second Tony Award for best new play, while generating controversy
among critics and audiences with its frank and disturbingly humorous depiction of a man
tormented by love of an unimaginable kind.
This time it is Eross turn to wreak havoc, upending a familys happy life, as tragedy
always has, with an unthinkable betrayal. Like Oedipus and Orestes before him, Martin
Gray (the architect in The Goat) is confronted by the unsettling power of his own desires
and the throes of his fate, like any of the classic Greek heroes, says director Richard e. t.
White. White spoke with us as he began rehearsals of Albees classical tragedy for a
modern audience.
jessica werner: what interests you most about THE GOAT OR, WHO IS
SYLVIA ? are there particular challenges when directing a play
with a controversial reputation?
richard e. t. white: When I first read the play, I was immediately struck with Albees
bravery in pursuit of a rich and evocative dramatic metaphor. Ive been an Edward Albee
fan for many years, ever since my senior year in high school. There was a point in my life
where other people were writing, Clapton is God, and I was writing, Albee is God. As
4
a teenager who was falling in love with theater, I found Albee absolutely transporting and
terribly exciting and dangerous. And his work still feels absolutely that way to me.
albee has said he abhors purposeful shock, yet he obviously

relishes shaking our notions of conventionality by confronting
our boundaries and taboos.
I think his best work has always challenged accepted notions of taste and appropriateness
of style and subject matter in theater to ends that are unexpected and revelatoryconsider
the ecstatic conflation of violence and tenderness in The Zoo Story, and how extremes of
drunkenness and obscenity in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? reveal the aching heart of a
childless American family. In The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of
Tragedy, to use the full title, he is attempting to reshape the themes of classical tragedy for
a modern audienceseeking out a situation that parallels powerful mythological stories
like Leda and the swan or Pasipha and the bull, to attempt to put in a modern context
that moment when humans are shaken by desires that redefine their very humanity.
Once again, he is working in extremes: What would happen if the happiest and most
successful family in America, a family who truly, deeply loves each otherwho, like
Oedipus and Jocasta, are at the pinnacle of their livesis completely and irrevocably shat-
tered by the infidelity of the father? And its not just an affair with, as the wife puts it at
one point, some chippy, but with an almost unthinkable object of ardor and attraction?
I guess you could call The Goat a situation tragedy, because it is based on a very clear
plot point, which Albee basically lays out for the audience in the first five minutes of the
play, making it clear that this play isnt about plot. Albee doesnt want [The Goat] to be
about the shocking revelation that a man is having a love affair with a goatand I really
dont think it is meant to be taken literally, as a defense of man/animal love. He wants the
play to be about the consequences to relationships when something happens that crosses
personal boundaries in a profound and shocking way. And that is the value of the metaphor
of the play to me. Ive been struck with the power of a writer taking the most courageous
and powerful metaphor he possibly can for the kind of obsession that shatters expectations
and the consequences of such a catastrophic act.
this play highlights the degree to which albees plays have

always been seen as both realistic and absurdist.
What I love about The Goat is how Albee, ever the master of contradictory impulses, man-
ages to make the people in this play accessible, honest, engaging, funny, and deeply human,
even as all of them make choices that go terribly awry from accepted modes of behavior. I
5
think he has expertly set it up so the play shares with you the point of view of everybody
in that situation: the transgressor, the spouse, the child, and also the friend. Throughout,
the play shifts its perspective, taking the central event of the revelation of Martins affair
and turning the viewfinder from one character to another, so the audience is constantly
questioning: If I were Martin, what would I do? If I were Stevie? Billy? Ross? I think
[Albee] aims to create a complicated response.
do you expect people will have any trouble feeling empathy for
martin, in terms of understanding why he would risk everything,
and be willing to destroy the beautiful calm of his life?
Part of that is solved by the brilliance of the writing, in portraying Martin as a man who has
not made up his mind, who has that quality of living in the question. When we first see him,
his mind is looping back on itself constantly, but hes not forgetful because hes absent. Hes
forgetting things because his mind is swirling with the question of, How can he live his life
like this? How can he love both his wife, Stevie, and Sylvia? How can he be the same per-
son at home as he is in the country? Who was he for the previous 50 years of his life, that
he could be so changed now? He is living continuously in a state of questioning, and I think
that makes him empathetic to the audience, because he is not doing something blindly. He
is on a quest, and in the throes of his fate, like any of the classic Greek heroes.
I think some people will judge Martin harshly, and some people will judge the play
harshly, if they cant see beyond dismissing it as disgusting, and something they dont want
to deal with. I think Albee has intentionally structured the play so it is very friendly and
seductive in the beginning, drawing the characters virtuestheir affection for each other,
their playfulness, their warmth and comfort with each othervery quickly and skillfully, so
the audience will engage. Thats why he ordered the play as he did: the first scene is really
a comedy, the second scene is a drama, and the third is a tragedy. Hes very canny about that
[progression]. I think if he made these very sober, serious, judgmental people right at the
beginning, and attempted to delve into their predicament with great psychological acuity, it
would be a very different play. It would be a sociological play about zoophilia.
and who would want to see THAT ?

Right [laugh]. So, instead Albee asks, What, in our modern, self-conscious lives, would be
a tragedy? And how would we respond to it? How do we live with unimaginable catastro-
phe? We can imagine a lot of catastrophic things now, because we are so saturated with
6
information and news of the outrageous. So Albee has tried to find something that is still
a secret in our society and build on that thing that is undiscussed, that youre not going to
see even on The Jerry Springer Show.
The play achieves the level of tragedy partly because, like Oedipus, Martin is a great
man, surrounded by other great people, the kind of people who in theory we would want
to beadmirable, loving, intelligent, compassionate people. Albee gives us an exceptional
relationship, the kind of relationship we would want to be in. He gives us a person at the
pinnacle of his success, who seemingly has everything one would want: a mate who loves
him in a profound and intimate way; a son whos just ambitious and rebellious enough to
be really proud of. He even gives Martin a kingdoma World City hes going to build
on the American prairiebecause tragedy requires a fall from an enormous height. That
fall propels the hero, and everyone one around him, from a state of order to one of great
chaos, which is something Ive been thinking about lately.
One of the things that attracted me to The Goat and the power of its metaphor is that
the turmoil it depicts, and the consequences of Martins act, resonated powerfully with me
because of something that happened in my own life. Reading the play, my mind flew back
to a moment when I was just out of graduate school, in the seventh year of what I thought
was a pretty happy committed relationshipand I met a young woman one day and had
that moment when I looked into her eyes and dived in, and fell in love instantly. When
Martin describes his response to Sylvia, it is almost identical to that moment when I fell
in love on that particular day. Its still one of the most vivid memories of my life. Nothing
like that had ever happened to me, and it sent my life into a tailspin. It took me from order
to chaos almost overnight.
I think that is a kind of situation many people are familiar with. People behave differ-
ently when profound things happen to them, but everybody can sympathize with that
sense of being shattered by the intrusion of the unexpected. We have all experienced catas-
trophe, or weve seen our friends or parents experience it. Living with an awareness of the
catastrophic makes you aware that you do have choice and power in those circumstances.
You might not think you do, but you are presented with choices all along. Exploring this
play is about looking for those moments of choice, where the characters either surrender
or meet the responsibility of the catastrophe head on.
our society seems to value the idea that we are in control and
able to direct our own destinies, so in that context martins
account of the moment he first saw sylvia is even more shocking.
he describes it as if a romantic possession took placea moment
7
beyond choice.
We need to keep in mind the scope of what Albee is going for. He is harkening back to
moments like those when Oedipus is confronted with a profound and horrifying revela-
tion, and yet he must go forward. Albee has captured that instant when you feel the breath
of the gods on you. There are times in peoples lives when they feel like something larger
is in control of them, something over which they have no control. The Greeks called them
the Mysteries, to capture that sense of what is mysterious in life, that there are still some
things that can come to you that are not explainable in a rational way. I think that is
another one of those things that is fundamental in Albees writing.
there are plenty of albee-isms and puns throughout the play,

something his work has been known for, ever since WHOS AFRAID OF
VIRGINIA WOOLF? characters in THE GOAT still use language to play and
spar with each other, even during an emotional crisis, when
theyre talking about the most disturbing things.
Albee is canny in making sure some of the plays appeal is its very playfulness. He is a play-
ful writer and has created playful characters who are constantly self-aware of the meta-
theatrical nature of their lives. In the middle of an argument Martin or Stevie will still say,
That was great, very clever. They play little word games and literacy games with each
other, and this kind of almost obsessive, compulsive love of words is a sort of signifier
throughout Albees work. It is also a way that some people cope, which is not that far from
real life. As conscious beings, we do listen as the tapes run in our heads. Its something I
find myself doing constantlyinterrupting myself to comment on and rearrange my
thoughts, and in a heated moment how you say something can have as much impact as the
content of what youre saying.
it raises the question of whether words can ever be adequate to

the task of describing and reckoning with the truly outrageous.
can you ever compass something you cant articulate?
This play is very much about how we cope, and language itself plays a role in how [the
familys] coping mechanisms fall apart, the challenges to the things that held them
togethertheir jokes, their affection, their love of words. These people are obsessive-
compulsive word people. Its a very interesting psychological gesture that Albee gives the
characters the sense that, as soon as a word leaves their mouths, theyre immediately
aware of it. Thats an interesting
trait to play.
Im really struck by the plays
8
subtitle, Notes Toward a Defi-
nition of Tragedy. Its an impor-
tant thing for an audience to
think about. Since its Albee,
there is wordplay under each of
these elements: There is a literal
goat; there is the goat in the sense
of the sacrificial goat, and the The Gray family at A.C.T.: (l to r) Billy (Joseph Parks) Stevie (Pamela Reed), and
scapegoat who is [blamed as] the Martin (Don R. McManus). Photo by Ryan Montgomery.
cause of everybodys problems. I think there is also the sense that these are people who are
taking notes on their own lives with a level of awareness and intelligence that is both a
blessing and a curse to them. And, because Albee is such a musical writer, there are also
musical notes in the play, and we have to respect the musical rhythms of the language.
has working on an albee play led you to reflect on your experi-

ence working on mamet? [white directed AMERICAN BUFFALO at a.c.t. in
2003.] both mamet and albee are known for the specificity of
speech they require of actors, including stresses and pauses, and
they share a philosophy about the degree to which directors and
actors should be interpretive.
I think doing American Buffalo was a great jumping-off point to come to Albee, and
Mamet doesnt even give you the degree of stage directions that Albee does. Shaw is the
only other playwright I can think of offhand who makes so many tonal demands in his
stage directions. My view is that its like receiving a score from a composer that tells you,
this passage is slow, and this passage is fast, and so on. You do your best to find the emo-
tional justification for each of those gradations.
fitting, since albee wanted to be a composer before he became a

writer.
There you go. He composes with words. And his silences and pauses are also important. I
have [directed] a tremendous amount of Shakespeare, and I think its been great training
for Albee because it tunes you into verbal conceits, as well as working on Mamet and
Martin McDonagh. I love their kind of [textual] precision. I know actors can find it con-
straining at times, if they feel theyre on a train of emotion and want to steam forward, and
are called on to stop and hold for three counts before saying the next line, it can be frus-
trating. Thats one of those things that requires careful negotiation, because you dont want
9
the actors to feel theyre in straitjackets or rein in their impulses. On the other hand, you
want to explore those truths that exist where the thing that is unsaid is more powerful even
than the thing that is said. One thing that was instructive about directing [McDonaghs]
The Beauty Queen of Leenane was realizing the degrees of laughter that came when you
played a pause correctly, which was significantly different from the degree of the laugh
when the pause was not played correctly.
i bet there will be a lot of those moments for audiences of THE

GOAT , when you laugh and then wonder whether you should be
laughing, or youre sickened by your own laughter, but it came

naturally.
With Albee, I think those little silences and beats are part of the key to the humor, as well
as to the terror of the play, and to those absolutely ripe, wonderful moments you hope to
attain where terror and humor go hand in hand, and the audience has no choice but to
laugh because the characters are feeling a kind of terror.
what kind of advice did you give the actors in preparing to work
on this play?
When we first read the play, one of the things that came to my mind was the Brecht poem
Look for the Old in the New. It is is one of my favorite pieces of direction to actors,
ever. What he asks actors to do is, when they first read a play, to look for the old in the
new. Look for the old ways of thinking and look for the new ways of thinking. Its in the
dynamic tension between the old and the new where they will find their characters. Brecht
was interested in, above all things, dynamic ambiguity. He didnt want easy answers. He
wanted to lob big questions into the audience. One of my favorite images from ancient
Greek literature (and this play is rife with Greek allusions) is the apples of discord. Those
are golden apples that you throw into a group of people who are in harmonious concord,
and then they start arguing with each other. I think this play is an apple of discord. This
play is meant to be thrown into a group of people who are sitting complacently and to start
arguments among them, to confront them with ambiguity.
That ambiguity, that tension, comes from the dissonance between the old and the new.
The new is not just good; Brecht was smart, he knew that the new is also terrifying.
Something that is new, that is remarkable, that is a revelation, that is fantastic and life
changing, can be for someone else terrifying and shattering. And the old is not bad, the old
is the structure of our lives, the thing that holds us together. The tension between the old
and the new is what we look for, and what we want to give gently, affectionately, forcefully,
10
to the audience.
how did you develop the design of this production?

When [scenic designer] Kent [Dorsey] (who has been a longtime collaborator of mine)
and I sat down to talk about the play, we asked ourselves, How do you create a space for
an intimate domestic play that also has the resonance of a Greek tragedy? That was ques-
tion number one.
Question number two was about the house, because this is about family, and therefore
the place where these people live is very important [and the entire play takes place in their
living room]. My goal is that when the curtain goes up (if we use the curtain) the audience
will think, I want to live there. I dont want them to think of it as a set. I want them to
think of it as a home, to see it and treat it as a home from the beginning. I love the fact
that the play starts with Stevie doing something as lovely and domestic as arranging flow-
ers. I wanted it to be a place where people would say, Thats the home of happy, interest-
ing people.
We went through several permutations and looked at a lot of architecture. Martin is an
architect. Hes an advanced thinker, so we had to imagine what kind of a place an advanced
thinker would live in. His wife and son are also advanced thinkers. What kind of environ-
ment would these fine, progressive, smart people live in?
I wanted their home to feel both aesthetically beautiful and comfortable at the same
time. I didnt want it to be forbidding, to be cool. I wanted it to feel like a warm, engag-
ing place, yet also a place where interesting, imaginative people live, people who view their
lives as an art form. That is important to me about Stevie, that she is as aesthetically
sophisticated as Martin. She is not an appendage, and she doesnt freak out because Martin
is the only thing shes got. She freaks out because Martin is the most important and won-
derful thing she has.
11
Set design for The Goat by

Kent Dorsey
about this goat

by edward albee (2004)
H ow The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? got to be written is both simple and complex. It is a
story of how one play didnt get written and howin its steadanother did.
Several years ago I discovered that I was thinking about writing a play about
intertwined mattersthe limits of our tolerance of the behavior of others than ourselves,
especially when such behavior ran counter to what we believed to be acceptable social and
moral boundaries, and our unwillingness to imagine ourselves behaving in such an unac-
ceptable fashionin other words our refusal to imagine ourselves subject to circumstances
outside our own comfort zones.
I came to the awareness that I was involved in such an adventure not by deciding thats
what I wanted to do, but by discovering that thats what I had begun to doby my awareness
of a play constructing itself as an idea, informing me that thats what I intended to write about.
Thats the way I worka kind of unconscious didacticism.
The play forming in my mind dealt with this: a renowned doctor of medicinehappily
married, middle aged, at the top of his careerhas come to the conclusion that he has
reached his limits, is doing nothing but good, and is a valued and deeply useful member of
society, but that this zenith leaves him feeling incomplete. He feels the need to experience
life as many of his patients dohis subjects, if you willand so (this play was planned
during the height of the aids epidemic, when even partial solutions were not available) he
injects himself with the hiv virus, to suffer as his patients do, thereby to understand
better the suffering all around him.
The playhad I written itwould have examined the hostility and condemnation this
action would have produced, and would have raised questions about tolerable behavior
the effect of his actions on family and friends andindirectlythe matter of suicide,
12
which is illegal in the United States, and which is what the doctor was, indeed, commit-
ting, however slowly.
I mentioned the idea to a number of people whose opinions I respect, and I was shocked
by the hostility and condemnation I received for even considering writing about such a
matter.
I was surprised, for I thought I was pushing the envelope in a way playwrights are sup-
posed to do.
I was completing [Occupant,] a play about the sculptor Louise Nevelson, so I put this
new idea aside for a while, planning to move it into reality right after. Imagine my surprise,
then, when a play opened in a tiny New York City theater with exactly the premise and
characters I had been considering.
While the coincidence was staggering, the playwright was someone whose work I knew
a little of and he was, as well, a reputable actor. I dismissed anything but coincidence from
my mind, and decided to see the damned doppelgnger. Alasperhapsit had immedi-
ately closed, having received deploring reviews. Naturally, I quickly decided that it was not
the premise that had been at fault, but the execution.
Stillit was a concept I wanted to explore and I put my mind to work. Within a year
(all dates approximate here as I do not keep a journal, having decided that since all writ-
ers journals are really intended for publication no matter how private they pretend to be,
and since I had not begun one at the age of 14 or so, when all really revelatory journals
begin, there would be no point in beginning later), within a year I had evolved the struc-
ture and manner of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
I mentioned the idea of the play to a number of people (though fewer this time) whose
opinions I respect, and I was shocked by the hostility and condemnation I received for even
considering writing about such a matter.
Clearly, I was on to something!either the collapse of my mind or a set of propositions
perplexing enough to demand examination. And on I went.
I showed the completed play to my United States producer, a lady wise to the ways of
theater, who decided to produce it on Broadway (of all places!) in spite of the hostility and
condemnation she received from quite a few of her confreres (or, possibly, because of it).
The play opened on Broadway in the spring of 2002 and received some very odd
reviews, indeed. Aside from hardy and rational souls who were engaged and disturbed, and
happy about that, a number of critics behaved as though the author had personally slapped
them in the face. (This is, of course, a fantasy most playwrights have enjoyed more than
once.) The Victorianism of these responses was amusing but not particularly helpful at the
box office.
13
A few of the more influential daily critics of New York City newspapers hedged their
bets orequally hackneyeddid not want to go out on a limb and wrote reviews mak-
ing it clear they were hedging their bets, not wanting to go out on a limb. Two of these
powerful critics re-reviewed the play four months into the runwhen the public response
had proven to be strong and enthusiastic. One of them discovered that the play had some-
how changed and was now far more tolerable, and the otherbless her!admitted that
shed screwed up royally the first time around and did an honest about face.
Of course, some members of the audience were deeply offended by the play and walked
out during the performance. Its kind of thrilling when that happens (and in the United
States its usually with older white couples), but we authors do not intentionally provoke
it. We desire to engage, to upset, to trouble, but we want people to stay around till the
endto see if they were right in wanting to leave.
EDWARD ALBEE was born on March 12, 1928, and began writing plays 30 years later. His
plays include The Zoo Story (1958), The American Dream (1960), Whos Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? (196162, Tony Award), Tiny Alice (1964), A Delicate Balance (1966, Pulitzer Prize;
1996, Tony Award), All Over (1971), Seascape (1974, Pulitzer Prize), The Lady from Dubuque
(197778), The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981), Finding the Sun (1982), Marriage Play
(198687), Three Tall Women (1991, Pulitzer Prize), Fragments (1993), The Lorca Plays (1995),
The Play about the Baby (1997), The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (2000, Tony Award), Occupant
(2001), and Peter and Jerry: Act I, Homelife; Act II, The Zoo Story (2004). He is a member of
the Dramatists Guild Council and president of The Edward F. Albee Foundation. Albee
was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters in 1980 and was a recipient of the 1996 Kennedy Center Honors and the
National Medal of Arts, and on June 5, 2005, was honored with a Special Tony Award for
lifetime achievement in the theater.
14
passion plays: the making of edward albee

by larissa macfarquhar
N ever trust a man who loves animals.

First, ask him why he loves them. If
he says that he loves them because they are
artless and innocent, or incapable of
duplicity, or because of the wholehearted
unself-ishness of their affection, or because
their souls are not tainted by envy, or
something like that, beware. It is likely that
that man is of two minds about humans.
Edward Albee, the most important liv-
ing American playwright, loves animals.
He stops and chats with dogs he meets on
the street. He likes to visit childrens zoos
where he can sit with animals close up and
talk to them and play with them. He has
always kept petschiefly cats and Irish
wolfhounds. He claims that Black Beauty is
one of his favorite movies. James Thurber,
Photograph of Edward Albee by Allan Gilmore who wrote intimately about animals, is one
of his favorite writers; another is a. a.
Milne. What do I love about Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner? Albee
muses (a love from which, take note, he excludes Christopher Robin). I think that these
people have not been destroyed by anything. The purity of them. The fact that theyre
15
always going to be that way, and nice. Theyre forever good.
The animals that appear in Albees plays are not forever good. They are not adorable or
fluffy. But they have the animal quality of being thoroughly themselves. They are what they
are, and humans feint and scheme around them. Albees first play, which opened in 1959, a
one-act called The Zoo Story, centers on a narrative about a vicious dog and a man who tries
to win him over, then tries to kill him, and then, having failed at both, resigns himself to
a wary and cold dtente. In Albees 1966 play A Delicate Balance, Tobias confesses that he
had a pet cat killed at the vets because it had started to dislike him. A character in the 1993
play Fragments relates how she decided to enlarge by several feet the grave she had dug for
her dead dog because he had been frozen at the vets and his tail was sticking straight out
and she didnt want to snap it off (this actually happened to Albee and his late Irish
wolfhound Harry).
Albee is perhaps the only playwright to write two leading roles for lizards. And it is no
accident that it was he who came up with the brilliant idea to write a play about a man
who has fallen in love with a goat. Ive never seen such an expression, Martin, the hero
of his 2002 play The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?, says of his caprine beloved. It was pure . . .
and trusting and . . . and innocent; so . . . so guileless. The poet and translator Richard
Howard, who has known Albee since he was in his 20s, once wrote a poem about Albee
and himself in which the Albee figure is named Feral. Albees plays tend to cherish, in
both their animal and their human protagonists, childlike, creaturely, feral qualities
authenticity, impulsiveness, imagination, openness to unconscious thoughts. Woe betide
any character who displays adult human virtues such as rationality, courtesy, prudence, or
restraint.
The play that made Albee famous, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which opened in 1962
and is being revived on Broadway this month, is a carnival of wit in which George, a
defeated middle-aged history professor, and his bitter, thwarted wife, Martha, use a young
couple as foils for the dazzling cruelties they practice upon each other. Right from the start,
the language is dense, complex, and spoken very fast; the cruelty is breathtaking, as is the
amount of alcohol the characters consume; and all of this, combined with the plays length
(nearly three hours) and the fact that it never leaves the living room, produces a claustro-
phobia so intense as to be nearly unbearable. There is no relief, no light entry, no gentle
fade-outit is all second act. Whereas George and Martha are brutal and abandoned and,
we are meant to see, truly in love, the young couple, an ambitious biology professor named
Nick and his idiot wife, Honey, hold their marriage together with protective lies: Nick pre-
tends to Honey that he loves her; Honey pretends to Nick that it is just bad luck that they
have not yet had children. It is a measure of Albees allegiance to feral behavior and feral
16
people that, at the end of the long, harrowing night, it is George and Marthas marriage
that is left standing. . . .
Albee does not consider directors and actors to be creative artists. Their role, in his view,
is a strictly interpretive one: they are there to realize the vision of the playwright. The
theater is not a democracy, and making people happy is not its mission: Albee will never
compromise for the sake of social harmony. His vision is comprehensive. He knows exactly
how each sentence should be enunciatedhow loudly or softly, how quickly, how emphat-
ically, at exactly what pitch and with what emotional coloring. He is reluctant to cut lines
out of a play, and he will not tolerate an actor skipping a word or accidentally paraphras-
ing. No one goes around messing with composers work the way they do with plays, he
says. Thats probably where I learned not to put up with that junk. Nobody takes three or
four measures out of one of Bachs fugues.
Albee feels that a playwright should notate his writing with the same commanding
precision as a composer notates his. To this end, he is extravagant with punctuation. (Even
in his more naturalistic plays, his punctuation tends to be absurdist: his is fond of excla-
mation points, and even more fond of multiple exclamation points followed by multiple
question marks.) His preoccupation with precision and control seems to have grown over
the years. In his more recent plays, nearly every line has an instruction attached to it, such
as these, for instance, from the first three pages of the 1991 Three Tall Women: Small smile;
Longer pause; none too pleasant; From a distance; curiously lighter, higher voice; Oddly loud,
tough; A bit as if to a child; Quick smile; Dismissive laugh; Under her breath; Shakes her
head in admiration; Ugly; suddenly; Tiny pause; Annoyance at herself; Placating;
Small, smug triumph; Dogged, but not unpleasant; Weary; Clucks; Imitation; Purrs.
Some instructions are so obvious that they seem almost paranoid: the line What an
answer! What a dumb . . . carries the direction Scoffs.
Its not just lines that Albee likes to controlhe is a theater man, and he concerns him-
self with every aspect of the production, from props and staging to costumes and lights.
. . . Albee observes theatrical protocol: he never gives notes to actors himself; he speaks only
to the director. But he can be belligerent in defense of his prerogatives. . . .
Albee often directs his own plays, though actors can be reluctant to work with him: he
can direct as though teaching cows to speak. Even when he is not directing, he is hardly a
diplomat. At the first read-through of The American Dream (1961), Albee told its female
star that her character was a tumescent monster; she quit the play that afternoon and
refused to take the directors phone calls. The actors in the film version of A Delicate
Balance found Albee so intimidating that they begged him to stop visiting the set. (It is
indeed fortunate that the character of Agnes is very much like Katherine Hepburn, he
17
observed afterward. Of course, if she played King Kong, it would still be Katherine
Hepburn.) . . .
Albee works best with actors who are humble but not needy. He doesnt like a lot of
questions about who their characters are and what theyre up tohe will say that the
answers are in the play. Lavish praise, expected in the theater, is not his style. If you get a
word from him, thats enough to live on, Marian Seldes, who has acted in many of Albees
plays and is also a friend, says. We are really the servants and he is the master. The fact
that youre you goes away and you become Edwards creature. Ive always felt shy with him,
because I dont want to waste his time.
How Albee came to be so self-possessed is a complicated story. He was adopted shortly

after his birth, in 1928, by Reed and Frances Albee, a wealthy couple who lived in
Larchmont, New York. The family money came from Reeds grandfather, who as a youth
ran away to join the circus and ended up owning a chain of vaudeville theaters. Reed him-
self was an unimpressive figure with few interests, a passive, taciturn man with a glass eye
who called his wife Mommy and spent much of his time in Manhattan having affairs with
showgirls. Before she met Reed, Frances was a shopgirl from Jersey City, but she took to
the life of a rich woman with easeshe dressed well and became an able horsewoman. She
was six feet tall, cold, and imposing. Each year, the family decamped to Palm Beach in two
private railcars. The racial restrictions of Palm Beach suited the Albees, who, like every-
body in Larchmont, refused to hire black servants. They were even anti-Irish, Albee says.
Thats carrying it pretty far.
Albee was pampered but unloved. He was sent away to boarding school and, in the
summers, to camp. He responded by conceiving of himself as completely separate from his
family: he became shy and secretive, and when he was told, at six or so, that he was
adopted, he claims to have felt only relief. (Even now, Albee refers to his adoptive parents
as those people.) The persona that Albee came up with for himself was not one to invite
intimacy. At seven, he walked around wearing a smoking jacket and carrying a cigarette
holder. He was fat and autocratic. He called his Choate roommate Caliban.
Albee figured out he was a writer when he was eight, and that he was gay when he was
twelve. I took to that like a duck to water! he says. One of the virtues of being away in
private school. He wrote poetry and, at fourteen and sixteen, what he affectionately
describes as possibly the two worst novels ever written. His poetry was not bad, he felt, but
it was imitative rather than original. He was kicked out of two schools for failing to attend
class, but he managed to graduate from Choate, and briefly attended Trinity College
before being expelled for the usual reason. One morning soon afterward, following a fight
with his parents about his coming home late, leaving the car covered in vomit, and failing
18
to turn the lights off in the driveway, he left home in a taxi and never went back. When
his father died, he didnt attend the funeral, and he didnt see his mother again for 17 years.
When Albee left home, just after the war, he moved to Greenwich Village and fell in
with a crowd that consisted mostly of composers. He began an affair with William
Flanagan, a charismatic composer several years older than he was, and they lived together
for seven years. The two of them drank a great deal and were famous for their malice and
rage. They would go to the Eighth Street bars and they would go to opposite ends of the
bar, Ned Rorem told Albees biographer Mel Gussow. They were known as the Sisters
Grimm because they wouldnt smile. They would sulk and they would swill down straight
shots of whiskey with beer. Edward was sour and mean, especially when he was drink-
ing, Richard Howard says. He was dark and passionate and difficult. When Howard
first read the acid dialogue in Virginia Woolf, it reminded him of fights between Albee and
Flanagan and himself. There was a lot of bickering about who was going to pay for what,
he says. And we all had this rivalry as to the people wed pick up and sleep with. Edward
was very attractive in those days. He was littler than the rest of us. He was like a small furry
animal. After his success, he went to the gym and really buffed himself up, and we all made
fun of him for that. Albee and Howard had a falling out in the late 50s but became friends
again. I think he learned that he was the person he wanted to be, Howard says. Hes
become nicer and nicer. Now hes always extremely friendly and gracious and funny in a
way that would have been inconceivable earlier on.
When he turned 21, Albee came into a small trust fund from his grandmother, and he
supplemented it with various odd jobs. He worked as a messenger boy for Western Union,
as a salesman at Bloomingdales, as an office boy at an ad agency, and at the luncheonette
counter of the Manhattan Towers Hotel. He went out all the time. I saw all the happen-
ings, all the small theater productions, all the early exhibitions of the Abstract
Expressionists, he says. I went to every poetry reading, all the concerts of avant-garde
music, all the dance companies. Everyone did all that stuff. We were absorbing what was
exciting and best in our culture as naturally as breathing. Thats not as easy now. Its partly
the expense, but theres something else thats getting in the way. I dont know what it is.
Its all becoming so self-conscious for people. Its not as natural as breathing anymore.
It was ten years after he left home and moved to the city that Albee wrote the play that
started his careerten years during which he was consorting with all sorts of accomplished
people. But, he says, he never doubted himself, never felt like a hanger-on or worried that
he would fail. Once, visiting Flanagan at the MacDowell Colony, he met Thornton Wilder
and showed him a few poems. Wilder suggested that he try writing plays. Albee wasnt
insultedhe simply took the suggestion at face value. He was confident that one day he
19
would write something extraordinary; so when The Zoo Story suddenly popped out of him,
in the course of three weeks in the winter of 1958, he was neither elated nor surprised. . . .
The Zoo Story had an enormous influence on younger writers. Theater for years became
littered with park benches, John Guare wrote. To show you were avant-garde, you needed
no more than a dark room and a park bench. The play was followed, in 1960, by an
uncharacteristically didactic race drama, The Death of Bessie Smith, and The Sandbox, of
which Albee is especially fonda 14-minute one-act in which a perky old woman,
Grandma, dies in a sandbox, attended by an endearingly clumsy young man who turns out
to be the Angel of Death. . . .
As these plays were being produced, Albee was talked about as part of the theater of the
absurd; he was said to be the first playwright to bring this European sensibility
epitomized by playwrights such as Beckett, Pinter, and Ionescoto America. Albee
encouraged this associationthe first scene of The American Dream is a virtual rewriting
of the first scene of Ionescos The Bald Soprano. Martin Esslin, in his 1961 book The Theatre
of the Absurd, which popularized the term, defined it as theater after the death of God:
theater that attempts to convey the situation of mankind in a universe without meaning.
To Esslin, absurdist theater was vital because, by confronting its audience with an existen-
tial vision, it forced the audience to experience and come to terms with frightening reality.
It represented, in that sense, a return to the original function of theater as a form of reli-
gious ritual. But not all absurdist theater was of this type: in his view, there was another
sort of absurdism that was satirical rather than ritualisticthe absurdism of Ionesco rather
than of Beckett, which concerned itself with parodying the pettiness of society rather than
with dramatizing the void. More often than not, Albees plays belong to this second
category. In his work, meaninglessness appears less a quality of the universe, a primary fact
of the human condition, than as a personality flaw for which particular benighted people
can be blamed and mocked.
If there is a single theme that runs through Albees work, it is the importance of being
open to a full consciousness of life, with all the social and emotional risk that entails.
Dangerous is one of his highest terms of praise, and restful is one of his worst insults.
Albee defines himself against the ONeill of The Iceman Cometh, who suggests that people
cannot survive without the comfort of their delusions. In The Iceman Cometh, the
truthteller who, with the best intentions, strips a group of failures and drunkards of their
fantasies turns out to be the most destructively deluded character of them all. In Albee
plays, though, truthtellers are brave and wise, and the damage they do is all to the good.
Jerry, in The Zoo Story, tells Peter that his life is dull and limited; George, in Virginia Woolf,
forces his wife to give up her fantasy that she has a child; Man and Woman, in The Play
20
About the Baby, destroy Girl and Boys fantasy that they have a baby; Tobias, in A Delicate
Balance, tells his best friend that he doesnt love him; the Wife, in All Over, tells her
children that she doesnt love them; Cordelia, in Finding the Sun, tells Abigail that her
husband doesnt love her; a and b, in Three Tall Women, tell c that she will not marry for
love. If you have no wounds how can you know if youre alive? says the Man in The Play
about the Baby. If you have no scar how do you know who you are? It is not surprising
that a man who has never experienced self-doubt has no respect for comfort or compro-
mise or safety.
Albee himself used to be a notorious truthteller, during the decade or so, from the late 60s
to the late 70s, when he was drinking. He abused people at dinner parties. One time, he and
a friend walked out of a play in the middle of an act, shouting insults at the cast. When I
was drinking, I would feel the need to set people straight, he told Gussow. I knew what
phonies they were, what duplicity and hypocrisy I saw. . . . I felt the need to expose people to
the world for who they really were. I did not want to let them get away with anything any-
more, even if that demanded embarrassing or humiliating them. I was a scourge.
When Albee was drinking, he lost control of his finances and found himself deeply in
debt. He even lost control of his worksometimes he would write lines and not know
what they meant. His life was saved, he says, by Jonathan Thomasa sculptor and painter
whom he met in 1971 at the University of Toronto, when Thomas was 24 and Albee was
43. Albee decided to stop drinking and smoking at the same time. He didnt go to a.a.
he did it on his own, with the help of Antabuse, a drug that, if taken in combination with
alcohol, makes you sick. I have will, he says.
Albee and Thomas [stayed] together [until Thomass death, from bladder cancer, in
May]. People who dont know Albee are often surprised by his devotion. It is a side of him
that is not always apparent. I have this list of people I call every Christmas to see how
they are, he says. And people have told me that theyre startled and happy that I seem to
care. Maybe I give the impression of being aloof and distant. Im private. Albee is known
primarily as a writer of brutal intrafamilial wars or detached absurdism, but he has also cre-
ated plays that are wonderfully moving, and characters who love each other. Seascape
involves two affectionate couplesone human, one reptile. Counting the Ways, a beautifully
wrought series of vaudeville-style short takes separated by blackouts, consists of conversa-
tions between a husband and wife about their love. In The Goat, Martin is not only in love
with the goat, Sylviahe is also in love with his wife, and runs into trouble because he
actually expects her to understand his situation. The problem with marriages in Albee
plays is usually not that the husband and wife are at odds, but that they are too little at
21
oddswith the result that, over years, they build themselves a reassuring cage of habits and
understandings and forget how to be alive. . . .
Albees reputation has been more unstable than that of perhaps any other playwright of
his stature. Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made so much money that Albee bought a house
and an old barn in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, started a foundation to benefit
young artists, and began amassing his art collection. But there was a period of about 15 bad
years in the middle of his career, from the mid 70s until the early 90s, when he was
persona non grata on Broadway.
Even at the height of his early popularity, in the 1960s, he had has his ups and downs.
His 1964 play Tiny Alice, for instancethe labored saga of a sexually repressed and
religiously obsessive young lay brother who is prostituted by the Church to a mysterious
rich woman and ultimately martyredwas derided as pompous and baffling to such a
degree that Albee felt obliged to hold a press conference to try to explain it. (He did not
succeed.) Its tediousness, its pretentiousness, its galling sophistication, its gratuitous and
easy symbolizing, its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee, an enraged Philip Roth wrote in
The New York Review of Books. Tiny Alice is so unconvincing, so remote, so obviously a
shamso much the kind of play that makes you want to rise from your seat and shout,
Baloney. The plays star, John Gielgud, was so bewildered by it that he threatened to quit
almost daily, implored Albee to cut down his nine-minute dying monologue because he
had no idea what he was talking about, and had to be sustained by brandy. (At this point,
even Albee doesnt much care for the play.)
Tiny Alice was chum to the press. A Delicate Balance, produced in 1966, won a Pulitzer,
and Seascape won him a second Pulitzer, in 1975, but he had more flops than hits. A Delicate
Balance was followed, in 1968, by the paired plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao
Tse-Tung, an unsuccessful experiment in verbal polyphonythree characters and one
disembodied voice take turns telling a story, reciting an amusingly bad 19th-century poem,
and declaiming the sayings of Chairman Mao. Between 1963 and 1981, Albee wrote a series
of adaptations for the stageof Carson McCullerss The Ballad of the Sad Caf and
Nabokovs Lolita, among othersnone of which really worked. (Nol Coward was a great
fan of Albees, but when Albee took him to see The Ballad of the Sad Caf Coward sighed
loudly throughout the performance and told him at the end, Dear boy, this is not my kind
of play.) Albee was, bizarrely, asked by the producer David Merrick to rewrite the book
for a stage-musical version of Breakfast at Tiffanys: at the first preview, as Albee put it, an
incredible wave of loathing came across the footlights, and he managed, as he said later,
in only two weeks, to turn something that would have been a six-month mediocrity into
22
an instant disaster.
The Man Who Had Three Armsa play that Albee wrote in the early 80s about a man
who grows a third arm, becomes a celebrity, and then turns bitter when the arm disappears
and he finds he is no longer desirablewas probably the nadir of his career. You owe me
something, you people! cries the man. You loved me in the good times, and youre fuck-
ing well going to love me now!! The play itself is actually quite funny, in the tradition of
Gogols The Nose, but inevitably it was interpreted by the critics as a bratty protesting
of his treatment at their hands. The Times called it a temper tantrum in two acts. Things
got so bad that, when Albee first started showing people Three Tall Women, which later
became a big hit and won him his third Pulitzer Prize, nobody in New York wanted any-
thing to do with it. It was produced first in Austria, and then by a small repertory
company upstate, and only made it to an off-Broadway theater several years later. Three Tall
Women involves a conversation between three characters, a, b, and c, who are loosely based
on Albees mother at three different ages; 92 (a), 52 (b), and 26 (c). As much as it says about
Albees caustic, unsentimental mother, the play is also about the times of life: the way that
certainties grow flaccid and doubts hard; the difference between the cruelty of the old and
the cruelty of the young.
In 1965, in the middle of the Tiny Alice fiasco, Albee received a phone call from his
parents secretary telling him that his mother was ill and lonely. (His father had died four
years earlier.) He went to see her for the first time since he left home. I hear his voice and
it all floods back, but Im formal, a, in Three Tall Women, says of this meeting. Well, hello
there, I say. Hello there to you, he says. Nothing about this shouldnt have happened.
Nothing about Ive missed you, not even that little lie. . . . There are no apologies, no
recriminations, no tears, no hugs; dry lips on dry cheeks; yes that. And we never discuss it?
Never go into why? . . . Were strangers; were curious about each other; we leave it at that.
They then saw each other regularly: she would attend his opening nights and dinner
parties in his apartment; he joined her on trips to Palm Beach. Because she couldnt toler-
ate homosexuality, Albee often sent his partner out of the house when she came over for
dinner. One evening, at a party he was giving in his loft, a tall older woman walked up to
him as he was talking to two friends. He turned to introduce her to them but couldnt quite
place her and couldnt remember her name. Luckily the friends knew that she was his
mother. . . .
Albee is an acute detector of other peoples tics, but of course he has tics of his own. His
characters are always correcting each others grammar or word usage at unlikely
momentsin the middle of emotionally damaging arguments, for instance. They talk in
baby talk or Southern accents when they mean to be sarcastic. They wryly characterize
23
their own statements (he chirped, she mimicked). And they are perpetually misunder-
standing or mishearing each other in the most improbable ways. Sometimes these misun-
derstandings serve the wrong-noun joke formula, as in this exchange from The Goat:
ross: Hello there, old man!

martin: Im fifty!
ross: Its a term of endearment. Nice flowers.
martin: It is?
ross: What? What is?
martin: Hello there, old man. Ranunculi.

ross: Pardon?
martin: the flowers.
But often a character will ask another what he is talking about when only narcolepsy
would explain the confusion. What? (or, rather, What??!!) must be the most common
locution in the Albee cannon.
Writerly tics were not, however, Albees main concern. There are two ways plays get
written, he said. One is, Ive got an idea, now lets find a situation that will encompass
the idea. Those tend to be didactic plays. The other kind is what I laughingly call, about
my own process, I write my plays to find out why Im writing them. Im not saying that
one is preferable, necessarily, bus I suspect that Ibsen and Arthur Miller did the first, and
Chekhov and Tennessee Williams did the second. . . .
It [is] characteristic of Albee to identify the trouble with a play as a matter of process
rather than plot. Most people, from time to time, become aware that an idea has popped
into their heads, seemingly from nowhere. For Albee, though, this is the central experience
of his imaginative life. He never tries consciously to invent a plot or characters, nor does
he find himself thinking, as a result of some inspiring encounter, Now, that would be a
good idea for a play. Rather, one day he will discover that, without quite knowing it, he has
been thinking about a new idea for some timethe idea has been germinating somewhere
inside him and has developed without his help. When the idea presents itself to him, he
will turn it over in his mind once or twice, and think, Isnt that interesting; and then he
will push it back down whence it came, to let it grow and ripen. He will not make a note
of it. This process can go on for years. Often, it is two or three years before he will write
anything down.
If Albee feels that an idea is approaching maturity, he will test it: he will go for a long
walk, often on the beach, and introduce his characters to a situation that is not part of the
24 play. If they behave easily and naturallyif he is able to improvise dialogue for them with-
out effortthen he will decide that he and they know each other well enough, and he will
start to write. Once he has started writing, he will write one draft, read it over, make
corrections, and write out a second. Then he is finished. Very occasionally, he will make
further alterations once he sees how a play is working or not working in rehearsal. (After
watching the first run-through of his 1975 play Seascape, he went home and cut out the
entire second act.) But usually, once he has completed his second draft, thats it.
Albee feels that his imaginative powers come from his unconscious, and that they must
be protected from consciousness lest they wither and harden, like underwater plants
exposed to air. He dislikes explaining his writing process or the origin of his ideas, even to
himself. I dont consider myself an intellectual, he says. Im not sure that I think coher-
ently terribly well. He defers to his unconscious in most things, because it knows more
than he does. He has a terrible memory, he says, but finds that his characters can quote
whole passages from books he cant remember having read. You mustnt write the three-
page prcis of what the plays going to be about and whats going to happen in each scene,
he says, because youre going to find that your characters have their own ideas about it.
Youve thought about what youre doing a lot more than youre aware that you have; so if
youre tempted to say, Thats not what I meant, be carefulbecause it may be what you
meant.
Albee holds it a principle never to rewrite a play once he has lost the state of mind in
which he wrote it, because he feels as though it had been written by somebody else. He
doesnt stick quite so rigidly to this principle as he claims. He cut a large chunk out of
Jerrys dying speech in The Zoo Story some 30 years after he wrote the play, for instance,
feeling that a man discoursing for several pages with a knife in his chest was too operatic
for his taste at that point. For [Broadways currently running] production of Virginia Woolf,
he made a very significant change: he removed the implication that George had acciden-
tally killed both his parents, feeling that that distracted from what had really ruined his
lifehis failure to stand up to his father-in-law. But those are rare exceptions. I think it
would be dishonest to what caused the play, he says. I wouldnt let anyone else rewrite it,
why let me? Albee, in other words, is not only protective of the unconscious as the source
of his livelihood; he defers to it, and respects its territory. An unconscious has its own ways
and moods and thoughts, he feels, and they should be respected by its host. Albee is a
union man. The unconscious does work; therefore the unconscious has rights.
Albee is doubly removed from a sense of rootedness: he was adopted, and then he
rejected his adoptive family. Since he was about six or seven, he has felt that he invented
himself. Perhaps this is why he is so attached to the idea of his unconscious: it is the part
25
of him that he feels is given, that has always been part of him, that he has no power to con-
trol. It is, in a way, his biology. Ive had plenty of opportunity to find out who my natural
parents were, Albee says. The fact that I havent bothered indicates to me that I dont
want to go to the trouble. I know who I am. Once I figured out who I was, whatever care
or interest I may have had in where I came from vanished completelyI was indifferent
to my past.
Excerpted from The New Yorker, April 4, 2005.

interview with edward albee

bbc radio Front Row (2004)
by mark lawson
E dward Albee is one of the five great American playwrights to emerge during the 20th cen-
tury (the others being Eugene ONeill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and David
Mamet). But Albee is unique in having achieved critical and commercial success over such a long
period. Born in 1928 in Washington, but adopted at 18 days old by a rich New York couple, he
became famous in 1962 with Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a portrait of a destructive mar-
riage, later filmed with a real life notorious couple, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Albees
next major play, A Delicate Balance, in which a terrified couple seek refuge at a friends house
from a horror they cant name, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. But there followed a long series of
flops and abusive reviews. Thats common enough in American theater; it happened to Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller after their early hits. But the difference is that Albee made a remark-
able critical and commercial comeback, first with Three Tall Women, which won another
Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and now with The Goat, written at the age of 74, which won four
important theater awards and ran for two years on Broadway. This surreal tragedy about an
architect who falls in love with a goat opened in London in February 2004. While in the UK to
supervise rehearsals, Albee reflected on the period between his two spells of success.
edward albee: There was a period of about eight or ten years where I couldnt even get
arrested in New York City. Or get a play on. In New York City. Though even then I was
having productions around the world, everywhere else except New York City. It was
vaguely what you say but not down to the depths.
26
mark lawson: i understand, but if you look, say, at the career path
of american playwrights, if you look at your friend tennessee
williams, it is unusual, isnt it?
They used to say there are no second acts in American drama. A lot of our playwrights
have had problems. Tennessee with drugs and alcohol, he wasnt writing to his full skill for
the last third of his writing career. And it does happen to people. Ive been very fortunate
that I seem to be writing with the same, what, skill, perhaps? Certainly with the same
enthusiasm as I did when I started out, when I was 28.
how do you account for that period in the middle when you were
getting fantastically savage reviews on broadway?
I think it was in part because I have never learned that you arent supposed to talk back to
critics. And when I thought they were being particularly obtuse, or vengeful perhaps, Id
make a public statement about the fact. And I dont think they liked that. But maybe the
plays that I was writing then were not accessible, but after you write a play like Virginia
Woolf, which was my fifth play after four short ones, everybody wanted me to write Son of
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Virginia Woolf, Part 2. And I came up with Tiny Alice, this
metaphysical melodrama which so puzzled those who wanted me to keep writing the same
thing over and over again, and I wasnt writing what I was supposed to write. I was writ-
ing what wanted to come out, and so my career wasnt following the dictates of those who
thought they were making my career. And these things happen. The thing you mustnt do
is get terribly upset by it. Yes is better than no anytime, but if theyre going to be attack-
ing you theyre going to be attacking you, and eventually theyll go away.
and it might be pertinent to remind people at this point about

some of the original reviews of WHOS AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, now
regarded, and rightly, as one of the great theatrical classics. a
sick play for sick people was how it was described by one of the
earlier reviews . . .
Well, that helped, that helped.
john chaplain of the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS said it was three and a
half hours long, four characters wide, and a cesspool deep and
suggested someone should have taken young albee out behind the
metaphorical woodshed and spanked him with a sheaf of hickory
switches. some review.
27
But there was one review that you didnt quote that probably added half a year to the run
of the play. One critic said it was a play that should be seen only by dirty-minded women.
That probably helped a lot, all those reviews helped. The scandal of it helped a lot.
well talk more about VIRGINIA WOOLF later, but i happened to be at

the first night of THE GOAT on broadway, and a number of people
walked out apparently in disgust. no critic and no playwright
would want the whole audience to walk out, but presumably
there is some satisfaction in producing that kind of reaction to

your play.
I remember when we did Tiny Alice originally in the middle 60s on Broadway and people
were setting off smoke bombs in the theater. When we did Quotations from Chairman Mao
Tse-Tung, there were protests and people making riots both outside and in the theater. Its
nice when people are alive. And if somebody was deeply offended by something in The
Goatthere are a couple of areas that might offend a few people in The Goat: a religious
comment in the third scene which suggests there was a certain amount of sexual hysteria
in St. Sebastians reaction to having the arrow shot into him, and a couple of people walked
out there; a couple of people walked out occasionally when the gay son in the play kisses
his father sexually, yes, a few people walked out there. But, odd places to walk out. Nobody
seemed to be walking out over the so-called subject of the play, bestiality, which wasnt the
subject of the play anyway.
what was provoking them was that they took it as, we need to be
frank, it is a love story about a man who is in love with a goat.
That is something that happens during the course of it, but it is basically a story about how
we face chaos and crisis, and do we face it with resolve and intelligence, or do we become
hysterical and fall apart. Thats really basically what the play is about. Its not about inci-
dents that occur in the play.
it s also, isnt it, at least about the idea of tolerance as to what

people will . . .
The limits of our tolerance, what we are willing to tolerate. That which we have decided
that we believe, and we are unwilling to ever reexamine that.
which is why the son is gay. because it s asking some of the

28
members of the audience that . . .
No, actually, the son is gay because he is gay. In other words, I didnt make him gay, con-
sciously make him gay, to test the audience: Wow, this will be fun, Ill put a gay son in
here. Im not that manipulative.
no, but it deepens the themes of the play, doesnt it?

I think it probably does, and Im grateful that Billy turned out to be gay. Yes, Im very
grateful that he did. . . .
the connection between THE GOAT and, say, VIRGINIA WOOLF , DELICATE
BALANCE , also marriage plays, is an obvious one, even THE PLAY ABOUT
THE BABY, as well, which is the theme of the marriage, and it does
recur. but the other link is the theme of keeping up appearances,
as you say, how you deal with chaos, how you deal with crisis,
because these marriages which appear on the surface very conven-
tional, there is usually quite a major twist in them. in VIRGINIA
WOOLF , theyre pretending that they have a son, in THE GOAT , the
husband is involved with a goat . . .
The something under the settee.
the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

You cant write a very interesting play about a bunch of people who are getting on terribly
well who dont have any serious problems. The weasel has got to get under the table. It has
to or you dont have any drama. You have television.
your biographer and some critics have made a point of the fact
that you were adopted. they see this as significant in writing
about marriage.
I dont know why it is that even as good a biographer as Mel Gussow, even he like all
people who are writing biographies insist that we writers dont have any creative imagina-
tion at all, that everything in our work comes from our experience. No. I do not appear in
my plays; let me put it that way. Im a mute character in Three Tall Women. No, the notion
that our creative imagination is limited to that which we have experienced is preposterous.
No good work would ever be written if that were true.
no, i understand that. the argument is, which ill at least put, is
29
that it could be psychologically significant to what you write
that you were adopted. i mean that is a significant fact in some-
ones life.
It may well be. But I dont know that Ive written about adopted people.
you havent, but im going to have one more go at this, which is . . .

Im not saying youre not right. But I think it is . . . whether facts have led to the creative
imagination is less important than what the creative imagination does with facts and how
it distorts them into something interesting.
i understand that, but again, just for the sake of argument, [for]
someone who is adopted, there is the mystery, first of all, of the
relationship they come from, but theyre also, and perhaps this is
arguable, perhaps more of an outsider in the family into which
theyre adopted.
I think that being adoptedthough Ive never not been adoptedI suspect that having
been adopted gave me a kind of objectivity. I had no great interest in my natural parents,
since they didnt seem to want to have anything to do with me, and I didnt get along with
my adoptive parents at all, and so I think I developed quite early an objectivity about the
people I was with and why I was with them, and who I was. I think I was maybe able to
develop more of a sense of self earlier than I would have had I had either a happy or an
unhappy natural home. But I cant be sure.
...
in your biography, mel gussow suggests that [your mother]

changed her will after being told that you were gay. is that
true?
Yes. I was told she finally changed it down to practically exclusion from the will because
she didnt approve of my being gay. Eh, tough.
...
beckett is an obvious influence, youve mentioned, and thurber,

james thurber is another one.
There are so many influences. I think of the 20th-century playwrights, I find the three
most important to be Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett. Thats the essence of our theater,
30
really the possibilities of it so far. But James Thurber is a wonderfully funny and sad, deeply
unappreciated American humorist-slash-serious writer. I loved his work greatly, and
admired it in its way as much as I admire Becketts work or anybody elses work. But that
which influences us, you know, is not necessarily that which we ultimately think is the
greatest.
the relationship with beckett interests me, and this is a critics

opinion, which you can dismiss, but to some extent what you are
doing is youre taking, the influence of beckett is there, but
youre taking his surrealism or absurdism, whatever, and putting

it into a more concrete domestic setting.
I talk about what I think I have learned technically from Beckett more than anything else.
I hate to talk about relativity of ideas and similarities or dissimilarities of philosophy, or
whatever. I dont like to talk about that stuff. But I think I learned from Beckett a great
deal about clarity and accuracy, specificity and essencing. Those are the things I have
learned from Beckett.
what is essencing?
To bring things to their essence. Did I invent a word?
you may [have]. i just wondered what you meant by that.

Oh, thats nice. I think I have. Gee.
but whereas beckett s plays will be set in dustbins or a heap of

sand, yours are, very often they are in a drawing room.
Same thing. Im convinced, by the way, that Becketts plays . . . You see, Beckett is the most
clear playwright. There is nothing obscure in any of Becketts plays. Absolute clarity. If his
plays, if Endgame was set in a drawing room, nobody would have any problem with it.
People suddenly decide they cant understand what is going on . . .
because it s dustbins.
Thats right. Yes. But Beckett wants them set in dustbins, so theyre going to be set in dust-
bins, as long as his estate has any control over anything. Once its in the public domain they
can start setting it in a Nol Coward setting.
that d be a fascinating thing to do, wouldnt it? you would

31
clearly like to do it as a director.
I would love to, yes. Privately.
you talked about tennessee williams and the effect that

drink/drugs had on his writing. yours is the opposite because
you stopped drinking, which must have some relevance to what
happened.
I cant think of very many American writers who havent had problems with alcohol at one
time in their life or another. So, I had about a seven- or eight-year period there where I
drank a great deal. I think everybody has a certain amount that they are supposed to drink
in the course of their life, and most sensible people start when they are 15 and stop when
they are 80. But some of us concentrate it into a seven- or eight-year period, drink it all
then. And then we stop.
but to go back to what i suggested at the beginning, we talked

about the many hits and the flops, this is . . . it s antihistorical
in theater terms, what s happened to you. there must be a
pleasure in this.
Just wait. Five or six years from now Ill probably be out of fashion again, and everybody
will hate my new work. But, of course, by the time I hit my mid 80s I might be senile. Is
it true, I read somewhere, that when he was in his 90s, Bernard Shaw started rewriting his
plays to simplify them so he could understand them.
i did read that somewhere, yes.

I hope its true. And they had to take them away from him to stop him. But, I think its
such a delightful thought.
you would like to do that, would you?

Well, I hope theyll take them away from me if I ever start. But I hope I live long enough
so that Ill want to do that.
Excerpted from the transcript of an interview broadcast on January 29, 2004. The interview can be heard at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/frontrow_20040413.shtml.
32
why read plays?

by edward albee
T he question is so absurd that we need not only answer it but find out why its being
asked as well. Most simply put: playsthe good ones, at any rate, the only ones that
matterare literature, and while they are accessible to most people through performance,
they are complete experiences without it.
Adjunctively, I was talking to a young conductor the other year whose orchestra was
shortly to give the world premiere performance of a piece by a young composer whose
work I admired. Oh, I cant wait to hear it! I said, and the conductor replied, Well, why
dont you? Why dont you read it? And he offered to give me the orchestral scoreto read
and thereby hear. Alas, I do not read music. Music is a language, but it is foreign to me and
I cannot translate. If I did know how to read music, however, I would be able to hear the
piece before it was performedmoreover, in a performance uncolored, uninterpreted by
the whims of performance. This is an extreme case, perhaps, for few nonmusicians can read
music well enough to hear a score, but it raises provocative issues, including some paral-
lelisms. Succinctly, anyone who knows how to read a play can see and hear a performance
of it exactly as the playwright saw and heard it as he wrote it down, without the help of
actors and director.
Knowing how to read a playlearning how to read oneis not a complex or daunting
matter. When you read a novel and the novelist describes a sunset to you, you do not
merely read the words; you see what the words describe, and when the novelist puts down
conversation, you silently hear what you read . . . automatically, without thinking about
it. Why, then, should it be assumed that a play text presents problems far more difficult for
the reader? Beyond the peculiar typesetting particular to a play, the procedures are the
same; the acrobatics the mind performs are identical; the results need be no different. I was
33
reading playsShakespeare, Chekhovlong before I began writing them; indeed, long
before I saw my first serious play in performance. Was seeing these plays in performance a
different experience than seeing them through reading them? Of course. Was it a more
complete, more fulfilling experience? No, I dont think so.
Naturally, the more I have seen and read plays over the years, the more adept I have
become at translating the text into performance as I read. Still, I am convinced that the
following is true: no performance can make a great play any better than it is, and most per-
formances are inadequate either in that the minds at work are just not up to the task no
matter how sincerely they try, or the stagers are aggressively interested in interpretation
or concept with the result that our experience of the play, as an audience, is limited, is
only partial.
Furtherand not oddlyperformance can make a minor (or terrible) play seem a lot
better than it is. Performance can also, of course, make a bad play seem even worse than it
is. God help us all! When I am a judge of a playwriting contest I insist that I and the other
judges read the plays in the contest even (especially!) if we have seen a performance. And
how often my insistence results in the following: either Wow! That plays a lot better than
the performance I saw! or Wow! The director sure made that play seem a lot better than
it is!
The problem is further compounded by the kind of theater we have today for the most
parta directors theater, where interpretation, rethinking, cutting, pasting, and even the
rewriting of the authors text, often without the authors permission, are considered accept-
able behavior. While we playwrights are delighted that our craft and art allows us double
access to people interested in theaterthrough both text and performancewe become
upset when that becomes a double-edged sword. I am convinced that in proper perform-
ance all should vanishacting, direction, design, even writingand we should be left with
the authors intention uncluttered. The killer is the assumption that interpretation is on a
level with creation.
Im not suggesting you should not see plays. There are a lot of swell productions, but
keep in mind that production is an opinion, an interpretation, and unless you know the
play on the page, the interpretation youre getting is secondhand and may differ signifi-
cantly from the authors intentions. Of course, your reading of a play is also an opinion, an
interpretation, but there are fewer hands (and minds) in the way of your engagement with
the author.
Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 4, Winter 2000: The One-Act Play Issue. 2005 AZX LLC.
34
zoophilia
An Overview
Z oophilia (from the Greek zoon, animal, and philia, friendship or love) is a para-
philia, defined as an affinity or sexual attraction by a human to nonhuman animals.
The more recent terms zoosexual and zoosexuality also describe the full spectrum of
human/animal attraction. A separate term, bestiality (more common in mainstream usage),
refers to human/animal sexual activity. The two terms are independent: not all sexual acts
with animals are performed by zoophiles, and not all zoophiles engage in sexual activity.
Zoophilia is usually considered to be unnatural, and sexual acts with animals are usually
condemned as animal abuse and/or outlawed as a crime against nature. Clinically, the
activity or desire itself is no longer classified as a pathology under the dsm-iv (Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association) unless accompanied by dis-
tress or interference with normal functioning. Defenders of zoophilia claim that a
human/animal relationship can go far beyond sexuality, and that animals are (if allowed)
capable of forming a loving relationship that can last for years, and that they do not con-
sider it functionally different from any other love/sex relationship.
extent of occurrence
The extent to which zoophilia occurs is not known with any certainty. Scientific surveys
estimating the frequency of zoosexuality, as well as anecdotal evidence and informal sur-
veys, suggest that more than 12%and perhaps as many as 810%of sexually active
adults have had significant sexual experience with an animal at some point in their lives.
Studies suggest that a larger number (perhaps 1030% depending on area) have fantasized
or had some form of brief encounter. Larger figures such as 50% for rural teenagers (living
on or near livestock farms) have been cited in some surveys, but these statistics are uncer-
tain. Anecdotally, Nancy Fridays 1973 book on female sexuality, My Secret Garden, is com- 35
prised of around 180 womens contributions; of these, some 10% volunteered a serious
interest or active participation in zoophilia.
legal status
No jurisdiction is known to recognize zoophilic relationships, as such. They are legally no
different from that of a person who keeps a pet or owns livestock.
Zoosexual acts are illegal in many jurisdictions, while others generally outlaw the mis-
treatment of animals without specifically mentioning sexuality. Because it is unresolved
under the law whether sexual relations with an animal are inherently abusive or mis-
treatment, this leaves the status of zoosexuality unclear in some jurisdictions.
Just over half of the states in the United States explicitly outlaw sex with animals (some-
times under the term sodomy). Sex with an animal is a felony in five states and a misde-
meanor in nineteen (including California). Maximum penalties go as high as $50,000 in
Montana; Massachusetts and Rhode Island may imprison offenders for up to 20 years
(source: Vermont Animal Cruelty Task Force). Since 2000, six states have adopted new leg-
islation against it: Oregon, Maine, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. An anomaly that
arose in many states was that when laws outlawing sodomy (generally in the context of
male homosexuality) were repealed or struck down by the courts, some people thought sex
with animals would no longer be outlawed. But the 2004 conviction of a man in Florida
demonstrated that even in states with no specific laws against zoosexual acts animal cruelty
statutes can be applied (e.g., State vs. Mitchell, http://pet-abuse.com/cases/2206/fl/us/1).
As of May 17, 2005, Pet-Abuse.com lists 71 cases of animal abuse involving bestiality
in the United States (66, including one involving a goat), Canada (1), the United Kingdom
(4, including one involving a goat), and New Zealand (1, a goat). (See http://www.pet-
abuse.com/database/.)
In the United Kingdom, human penile penetration of or by an animal is illegal; section
69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 reduced the sentence to a maximum of two years
imprisonment. Zoosexual acts are illegal in Canada (section 160 forbids bestiality; note
that the term is not defined further, so it is not quite clear what it might cover).
zoophilia as a lifestyle
Separate from those whose interest is curiosity, pornography, or sexual novelty, are those
for whom zoophilia might be called a lifestyle or orientation. Zoophiles tend to perceive
differences between animals and human beings as less significant than others do, and view
animals as having positive traits (e.g., honesty) that humans often lack. Although some feel
36
guilty about their feelings and view them as a problem, others do not feel a need to be
constrained by traditional standards in their private relationships.
The biggest difficulties many zoophiles report are the inability to be accepted or open
about their animal relationships and feelings with friends and family, and the fear of harm,
rejection, or loss of companions if it became known. Other major issues are hidden lone-
liness and isolation (due to lack of contact with others who share this attraction or a belief
they are alone), and the repeated deaths of animals they consider lifelong soulmates
(because most species have far shorter lifespans than humans and they cannot openly
grieve or talk about feelings of loss).
Zoophilic sexual relationships vary, and may be based upon variations of human-style rela-
tionships (in particular, remaining monogamous), animal-style relationships (both participants
making their own sexual choices, human as protector), or blending the two in various ways.
Zoophiles may or may not have human partners and families. Some zoophiles have an
affinity or attraction to animals secondary to human attraction; others have a primary pref-
erence for animal companions. In some cases human family or friends are aware of the rela-
tionship with the animal and its nature, in others it is hidden. This can sometimes give rise
to issues of guilt (re: divided loyalties and concealment) or jealousy within human relation-
ships. Zoophiles sometimes enter human relationships to deflect suspicions of zoophilia, or
due to growing up within traditional expectations. Others may choose looser forms of human
relationship as companions or housemates, live alone, or choose other zoophiles to live with.
psychological and research perspectives

dsm-iii-r (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, 1987)
stated that sexual contact with animals is almost never a clinically significant problem by
itself, and therefore both this and the later dsm-iv (apa, 1994) subsumed it under the resid-
ual classification paraphilias not otherwise specified.
The first detailed studies which included zoophilia date from prior to 1910. Research
into zoophilia in its own right has happened since around 1960. Each significant study
from Masters (1962) to Beetz (2002) has drawn and agreed on several broad conclusions:
The critical aspect to study was emotion, relationship, and motive, not just
assess or judge the sexual act alone, in isolation, or as an act (Masters,
Miletski, Beetz).
Most zoophiles do have human relationships (Masters, Beetz).
Society in general at present is misinformed about zoophilia (Masters,
Miletski, Weinberg, Beetz).
Zoophiles emotions and care to animals can be real, relational, authentic 37
and (within animals abilities) reciprocal (Masters, Miletski, Weinberg, Beetz).
Contrary to popular belief, there is in fact significant popular or latent interest
in zoophilia, either in fantasy, animal mating, or reality (Friday, Massen, Masters).
The distinction between zoophilia and zoosadism is highlighted by each of
these studies, in whatever terms they use.
Masters (1962), Miletski (1999), and Weinberg (2003) each comment signif-
icantly on the social harm caused by these, and other misunderstandings: This
destroy[s] the lives of many citizens.
religious perspectives
Most organized religions take a critical or sometimes condemnatory view of zoophilia or
zoosexuality, with some variation and exceptions.
Passages in Leviticus 18:23 (And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with
it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it: it is a perversion.) and
20:1516 (If a man lies with a beast, he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the beast.
If a woman approaches any beast and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the beast;
they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.) are cited by Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim theologians as categorical denunciation of zoosexuality. Although condemned in
Islam, views of its seriousness seem to cover a wide spectrum. Some sources claim that sex
with animals is abhorrent, others state that while condemned, it is treated with relative
indulgence and in a similar category to masturbation and lesbianism.
There are several references in Hindu scriptures to religious figures engaging in sexual
activity with animals (e.g., the god Brahma lusting after and having sex with a bear; a
humanlike sage being born to a deer mother), and actual Vedic rituals involving zoophilia
(see Ashvamedha). However, Hindu doctrine holds that sex should be restricted to mar-
ried couples, thereby forbidding zoosexual acts. A greater punishment is attached to sex-
ual relations with a sacred cow than with other animals. The Tantric sect of Hinduism
makes use of ritual sexual practices, which could include sexual contact with animals.
Buddhism addresses sexual conduct primarily in terms of what brings harm to oneself or
to others, and the admonition against sexual misconduct is generally interpreted in modern
times to prohibit zoosexual acts, as well as pederasty, adultery, rape, or prostitution.
animal rights and welfare concerns

One of the primary critiques of zoophilia is the argument that zoosexuality is harmful to
animals. Some state this categorically; that any sexual activity is necessarily abuse. Critics
also point to examples in which animals were clearly abused, having been tied up,
38
assaulted, or injured. Defenders of zoophilia argue that animal abuse is neither typical of
nor commonplace within zoophilia, and that just as sexual activity with humans can be
both abusive and not, so can sexual activity with animals.
cultural perspectives
Among the Masai, it was customary for older boys to have sexual relations with she-asses.
Young Riffian boys also had sexual liaisons with female asses (Ford and Beach, 1951).
Among the Tswana of Africa, boys assigned to the care of cattle frequently engaged in zoo-
sexual activity. It was also common in the Gusti tribes and considered rather harmless, but
boys were reprimanded and warned against this activity. Miner and DeVos (1960) comment
that amongst Arab tribal cultures, Bestiality with goats, sheep, or camels provides another
outlet. These practices are not approved but they are recognized as common among boys.
arguments about zoophilia or zoosexuality

Platonic love for animals is usually viewed positively, but most people express concern or
disapproval of sexual interest. Criticisms come from a variety of sources, including moral,
ethical, psychological, and social arguments. They include:
Sexual activity between species is unnatural.

Animals are not sentient, and are therefore unable to consent (similar to argu-
ments against sex with human minors).
Animals are incapable of relating to or forming relationships with humans.
Zoosexuality is simply for those unable/unwilling to find human partners.
Sexual acts with animals by humans constitute physical abuse.
Zoosexuality is profoundly disturbed behavior.
It offends human dignity or is forbidden by religious law.
Defenders of zoophilia or zoosexuality counterargue that:
Natural is debatable, and not necessarily relevant.

Animals are capable of sexual consentand even initiationin their own way.
Both male and female domestic animals of several species can experience the
physical sensation of orgasm, and can strongly solicit and demonstrate appre-
ciation for it in their body language, similarly to humans.
Animals do form mutual relationships with humans.
Most zoophiles appear to have human partners and relationships; equally
many are simply not attracted to humans sexually.
It is inaccurate to state that zoosexual activity is inherently harmful/abusive. 39
The psychological profession consensus does not consider it intrinsically
pathological and has tended on the whole to substantiate rather than rebut
zoophiles claims.
Perspectives on human dignity and religious viewpoints differ and a large
number of people do not consider them important factors.
They also assert that some of these arguments rely on double standards, such as expecting
informed consent from animals for sexual activity (and not accepting consent given in their
own manner), but not for surgical procedures, aesthetic mutilation, castration, experimen-
tation, hazardous activities, euthanasia, and slaughter. Likewise if animals cannot give
consent, then it follows that they must not have sex with each other (amongst themselves).
mythology and fantasy literature

Zoophilia has been a recurring subject in art, literature, and fantasy. In Ugaritic mythol-
ogy, the god Baal is said to have impregnated a heifer to sire a young bull god. In Greek
mythology, Zeus (himself suckled as an infant by the divine goat Amaltheia, according to
one version of the legend) appeared to Leda in the form of a swan, and her children Helen
(of Troy), Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux (Polydeuces) hatched from egss resulting from
that sexual union. Ledas fate provided a popular motif for the visual arts into the 20th cen-
tury, inspiring powerfully sensual works by Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Rubens, Veronese,
Correggio, Tintoretto, Boucher, Moreau, Masson, and Botero, to name a few.
Zeus seduced the Phoenician princess Europa in the form of a bull, then carried her off
to the island of Crete, where she bore three sons, including King Minos. Minos later
offended the sea god Poseidon, who in punishment sent a white bull to seduce Minoss
wife, Queen Pasipha, who gave birth to the half-human/half-bull Minotaur. Zeus also
abducted the Trojan prince Ganymede in the form of an eagle. King Peleus continued to
seduce the nymph Thetis despite her transforming into (among other forms) a lion, a bird,
and a snake. The god Pan, often depicted with goatlike features, has also been frequently
associated with animal sex. As with other subjects of classical mythology, many of these
tales have been depicted over the centuries since, in western painting and sculpture.
Fantasy literature has included a variety of seemingly zoophilic examples, often involv-
ing human characters enchanted into animal forms: Beauty and the Beast (a young woman
falls in love with a physically beastlike man), William Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights
Dream (Queen Titania falls in love with a character transformed into a donkey), The Book
of One Thousand and One Nights (a princess champions a man enchanted into ape form),
the Roman Lucius Apuleius The Golden Ass (explicit sexuality between a man transformed
40
into a donkey and a woman), and Balzacs A Passion in the Desert (a love affair between a
soldier and a panther). In more modern times, zoosexuality of a sort has been a theme in
science fiction and horror fiction, with the giant ape King Kong fixating on a human
woman, alien monsters groping human females in pulp novels and comics, and depictions
of tentacle rape in Japanese manga and anime.
Excerpted and adapted from Zoophilia, Wikipedia.org; an extensive bibliography follows the article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoophilia#Legal_status.
leda and the swan

by william butler yeats (1924)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
41
Leda and the Swan, after Michelangelo. National Gallery Collection; by kind permission of
the Trustees of the National Gallery, London/CORBIS.
heavy petting
A Review of Midas Dekkerss Controversial Book, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
by peter singer (2001)
N ot so long ago, any form of sexuality not leading to the conception of children was
seen as, at best, wanton lust, or worse, a perversion. One by one, the taboos have
fallen. The idea that it could be wrong to use contraception in order to separate sex from
reproduction is now merely quaint. If some religions still teach that masturbation is self-
abuse, that just shows how out of touch they have become. Sodomy? Thats all part of the
joy of sex, recommended for couples seeking erotic variety. In many of the worlds great
cities, gays and lesbians can be open about their sexual preferences to an extent unimagin-
able a century ago. You can even do it in the u.s. Armed Forces, as long as you dont talk
about it. Oral sex? Some objected to President Clintons choice of place and partner, and
others thought he should have been more honest about what he had done, but no one
dared suggest that he was unfit to be president simply because he had taken part in a sex-
ual activity that was, in many jurisdictions, a crime.
But not every taboo has crumbled. Heard anyone chatting at parties lately about how
good it is having sex with their dog? Probably not. Sex with animals is still definitely taboo.
If Midas Dekkers, author of Dearest Pet, has got it right, this is not because of its rarity.
Dekkers, a Dutch biologist and popular naturalist, has assembled a substantial body of evi-
dence to show that humans have often
thought of love for animals in ways that go
beyond a pat and a hug, or a proper concern
for the welfare of members of other species.
His book has a wide range of illustrations,
going back to a Swedish rock drawing from
42
the Bronze Age of a man fucking a large
quadruped of indeterminate species. There
is a Greek vase from 520 b.c.e. showing a
male figure having sex with a stag; a 17th-
century Indian miniature of a deer mount-
ing a woman; an 18th-century European
Marble Statue of Satyr Mating with Female Goat, second cen-

tury C.E., recovered from the Herculaneum in Pompeii (now in
the Naples Archaeology Museum). Araldo de Luca/CORBIS.
engraving of an ecstatic nun coupling with a donkey, while other nuns look on, smiling; a
19th-century Persian painting of a soldier, also with a donkey; and, from the same period,
a Japanese drawing of a woman enveloped by a giant octopus who appears to be sucking
her cunt, as well as caressing her body with its many limbs.
How much of this is fantasy, the King Kong-
ish archetypes of an earlier age? In the 1940s,
Kinsey asked 20,000 Americans about their sex-
It may be this love is a debt
ual behavior, and found that 8 percent of males
I am paying, due to the
and 3.5 percent of females stated that they had, at
destiny of my line, and that
some time, had a sexual encounter with an ani-
Aphrodite is exacting a
mal. Among men living in rural areas, the figure
tribute of me for all my race.
shot up to 50 percent. Dekkers suggests that for
Europathis is the first
young male farm hands, animals provided an
beginning of our linewas
outlet for sexual desires that could not be satis-
loved of Zeus; a bull s form
fied when girls were less willing to have sex
disguised the god, Pasipha,
before marriage. Based on 20th-century court
my mother, a victim of the
records in Austria where bestiality was regularly
deluded bull, brought forth in
prosecuted, rural men are most likely to have
travail her reproach and
vaginal intercourse with cows and calves, less fre-
burden.
quently with mares, foals, and goats and only
Ovid, Heroides
rarely with sheep or pigs. They may also take
advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get
them to do a blowjob.
Women having sex with bulls or rams, on the other hand, seems to be more a matter of
myth than reality. For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sex-
ual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse
was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating
43
the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.
Much depends, of course, on how the notion of a sexual relationship is defined.
Zoologist Desmond Morris has carried out research confirming the commonplace obser-
vation that girls are far more likely to be attracted to horses than boys, and he has
suggested that sitting with legs astride a rhythmically moving horse undoubtedly has a
sexual undertone. Dekkers agrees, adding that the horse is the ideal consolation for the
great injustice done to girls by nature, of awakening sexually years before the boys in their
class, who are still playing with their train sets . . .
The existence of sexual contact between humans and animals, and the potency of the
taboo against it, displays the ambivalence of our relationship with animals. On the one
hand, especially in the Judeo-Christian traditionless so in the Eastwe have always
seen ourselves as distinct from animals, and imagined that a wide, unbridgeable gulf sep-
arates us from them. Humans alone are made in the image of God. Only human beings
have an immortal soul. In Genesis, God gives humans dominion over the animals. In the
Renaissance idea of the Great Chain of Being, humans are halfway between the beasts and
the angels. We are spiritual beings as well as physical beings. For Kant, humans have an
inherent dignity that makes them ends in themselves, whereas animals are mere means to
our ends. Today the language of human rightsrights that we attribute to all human
beings but deny to all nonhuman animalsmaintains this separation.
On the other hand there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as
animals door mammals, anywayand sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate,
as they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf
can be sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are. The taboo on sex
with animals may, as I have already suggested, have originated as part of a broader rejec-
tion of nonreproductive sex. But the vehemence with which this prohibition continues to
be held, its persistence while other nonreproductive sexual acts have become acceptable,
suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves,
erotically and in every other way, from animals. Almost a century ago, when Freud had just
published his groundbreaking Three Essays on Sexuality, the Viennese writer Otto Soyka
published a fiery little volume called Beyond the Boundary of Morals. Never widely known,
and now entirely forgotten, it was a polemic directed against the prohibition of unnatu-
ral sex like bestiality, homosexuality, fetishism, and other nonreproductive acts. Soyka saw
these prohibitions as futile and misguided attempts to limit the inexhaustible variety of
human sexual desire. Only bestiality, he argued, should be illegal, and even then, only in so
far as it shows cruelty towards an animal. Soykas suggestion indicates one good reason why
44
some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes.
Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose
channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in
some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify
the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the
hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage
so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be
taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then
it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)
But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occa-
sion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing
its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not
everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually sat-
isfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have thought this within the range
of human sexual variety.
At a conference on great apes a few years ago, I spoke to a woman who had visited
Camp Leakey, a rehabilitation center for captured orangutans in Borneo run by Birute
Galdikas, sometimes referred to as the Jane Goodall of orangutans and the worlds fore-
most authority on these great apes. At Camp Leakey, the orangutans are gradually accli-
matised to the jungle, and as they get closer to complete independence, they are able to
come and go as they please. While walking through the camp with Galdikas, my inform-
ant was suddenly seized by a large male orangutan, his intentions made obvious by his erect
penis. Fighting off so powerful an animal was not an option, but Galdikas called to her
companion not to be concerned, because the orangutan would not harm her, and adding,
as further reassurance, that they have a very small penis. As it happened, the orangutan
lost interest before penetration took place, but the aspect of the story that struck me most
forcefully was that in the eyes of someone who has lived much of her life with orangutans,
to be seen by one of them as an object of sexual interest is not a cause for shock or horror.
The potential violence of the orangutans come-on may have been disturbing, but the fact
that it was an orangutan making the advances was not. That may be because Galdikas
understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This
does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-mis-
used words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and
dignity as human beings.
This article was originally posted on Nerve.com March 1, 2001. http://www.nerve.com/Opinions/Singer/HeavyPetting/main.asp.

2001 Peter Singer and Nerve.com, Inc. 45
THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAF

Excerpted from Edward Albees stage adaptation of the novella by Carson McCullers
T he narrator: The time has come to speak about love. Now consider three people
who were subject to that condition. Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy.
But what sort of thing is love? First of all, it is a joint experience between two persons,
but that fact does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There
are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the
beloved is only the stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover
for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his
love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description: the most outlandish people can be
stimulus for love. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone elsebut that does
not affect the evolution of his love one whit. Therefore, the quality and value of any love
is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved; and the curt truth
is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many; for the lover
craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause them both
only pain.
But though the outward faces of love are often sad and ridiculous, it must be remem-
bered that no one can know what really takes place in the soul of the lover himself. So, who
but God can be the final judge of any love? But one thing can be said about these three
peopleall of whom, Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy, all of whom were
subject to the condition of love. The thing that can be said is this: No good will come of it.
Excerpted from The Ballad of the Sad Caf: Carson McCullers' Novella Adapted for the Stage (Scribner, 2001).
46
a GOAT glossary
by margot melcon
notes toward a definition of tragedy

Albee added this subtitle to the published version of The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? Tragedy is
traditionally defined as a form of drama characterized by seriousness and dignity, usually
involving a conflict between a character and some higher power, such as the law, the gods,
fate, or society. Its origins are obscure, but it is certainly derived from the rich poetic and
religious traditions of ancient Greece. According to Aristotle, tragedys roots may be traced
specifically to dithyrambs, chants and dances that honored the Greek god Dionysus. These
drunken, ecstatic performances were said to have been created by satyrs, half-goat beings
who surrounded Dionysus in his revelry; the Greek words tragos, meaning goat, and aei-
dein, to sing, were combined in the word tragoidia, goat-songs, from which the word
tragedy is derived. The term may have also referred originally to the sacrifice of a goat in
the vegetation and fertility rituals associated with Dionysus.
Greek literature boasts three great writers of tragedy whose works are extant: Sophocles,
Euripides, and Aeschylus. The largest festival for Greek tragedy was the Dionysia, for
which competition prominent playwrights usually submitted three tragedies and one satyr
play (an early form of comedy) each.
Aristotle theorized in his Poetics (350 b.c.e.) that tragedy results in catharsis (emotional
cleansing) for the audience and that this explains why humans enjoy seeing dramatized
pain. The starkly universal themes of tragedy, the problems and conditions of life lived
under the shadow of death and disaster, may be connected with the seasonal rhythms of
life, decay, death, and rebirth. To begin with, it seems, these mysteries were celebrated in
movement and song by a chorus. Later an individual emerged from the chorus to engage
in dialogue with it. Aeschylus is credited with the innovation of isolating a second speaker 47
so that dialogue between characters became possible. By the time of Sophocles and
Euripides it had become customary for up to three characters to appear onstage at once.
A favorite theatrical device of many ancient Greek tragedians was the ekkyklma, a cart hid-
den behind the scenery which could be rolled out to display the aftermath of some event which
had happened out of sight of the audience. This event was frequently a brutal murder of some
sort, an act of violence which could not be effectively portrayed visually, but an action of which
the other characters must see the effects in order for it to have meaning and emotional reso-
nance. A prime example of the use of the ekkyklma is after the murder of Agamemnon in the
first play of Aeschylus Oresteia, when the kings butchered body is wheeled out in a grand dis-
play for all to see. Variations on the ekkyklma are used in tragedies and other forms to this day,
as writers still find it a useful and often powerful device for showing the consequences of
extreme human actions. (Excerpted and adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy
and http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9073148.)
real cute kid, billy, bright as youd ever want, gay as the nineties.
Martin is referring to his homosexual son, Billy, using a play on the phrase Gay Nineties,
typically used to describe the 1890s, a period in American history marked by unprece-
dented prosperity and economic expansion, as well as a rise in industry and the boom of
the social classes. (Under then-current usage, the word gay referred simply to merri-
ment and frivolity, with no connotation of homosexuality.)
i hear a kind of . . . rushing sound, like a . . . wooooosh!, or . . . wings,

or something. / it s probably the eumenides. / more like the dish-
washer. there; it stopped. / then it probably wasnt the eumenides:
they dont stop.
The three daughters of Gaia, created from the blood of Uranus when he was castrated by
Cronus, the Erinyes (or Furies) of Greek myth were the female personifications of con-
science, punishment, and retribution. They are often represented as winged goddesses of
vengeance with serpent hair and eyes dripping blood, their appearance terrific and
appalling. The Eumenides relentlessly pursue their victims until the guilty die in a furor of
madness and remorse. They generally stand for the rightness of things within the standard
order; for the most part they are understood as the persecutors of mortal men and women
who break natural laws. In particular, those who broke ties of kinship through patricide,
murdering a brother (parricide), or other such familial killings brought special attention
from the Erinyes. In The Eumenides, the third part of Aeschylus trilogy The Oresteia, a
48
chorus of Eumenides relentlessly pursues and tortures Orestes for the crime of matricide.
Athena intervened and the Erinyes turned into the Eumenides (kindly ones). Many
scholars believe, however, that they were originally referred to as the Eumenides not to ref-
erence their good sides but as a euphemism to avoid their wrath by calling them by their
true name. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eumenides.)
you became the youngest person ever to win the pritzker prize.
Sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation of Los Angeles, the Pritzker Architecture Prize is
considered architectures most prestigious award, a kind of Nobel for architecture (one of
the art forms not recognized by the Nobel Prize). The annual prize was established in 1979
to honor a living architect who has produced a consistent and significant body of work that
demonstrates talent, vision, and commitment and contributes to humanity and the built
environment through the art of architecture. Winners have included such internationally
renowned figures as i.m. Pei (1983), Frank Gehry (1989), Aldo Rossi (1990), Robert Venturi
(1991), Tadao Ando (1995), Rem Koolhaas (2000), and Zaha Hadid (2004), the first female
recipient. This years winner is maverick Los Angelesbased architect Thom Mayne, the
first American to win the award in 14 years.
what were their names? / mine was alice. / big girl. / large alice.
This is a playful reference to Edward Albees play Tiny Alice, which first opened to New
York audiences in 1964. Following on the heels of the enormous success of Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, the play immediately spurred intense controversy. a.c.t. Founding Artistic
Director Bill Ball directed Tiny Alice in 1975, infamously re-ordering some scenes and
re-imagining the ending of the play, much to Albees chagrin. Balls production sparked a
dramatic controversy, played out in the press, over the scope of a directors artistic license
to interpret a playwrights vision. The Goat is the first Albee play to be seen on a.c.t.s
mainstage since that production.
Tiny Alice concerns the worlds richest woman, whose two billion dollar donation to the
Catholic Church is contingent on the seduction and murder of the lay brother whom she
invites to pick up the money. In this play, characters are symbols, words and actions have
multiple dimensions, and religious expression mixes with sexual fantasy. Audiences con-
tinue to find the play baffling, and critics are divided concerning its merits.
daisy mae! blonde hair to her shoulders, big tits in the calico
blouse, bare midriff, blonde down at the navel, piece of straw in
her teeth
49
Beautiful Daisy Mae Scragg was hopelessly in love with Lil Abner through the entire
course of the 43-year run of Al Capps popular comic strip. Abner generally took Daisy for
granted, however, and exhibited little romantic interest in her voluptuous charms. In 1952
Abner reluctantly proposed to Daisy Mae to emulate the wedding of his comic-strip ideal,
Fearless Fosdick. Fosdicks wedding turned out to be fake, but Abner and Daisys was real.
Once married, Abner became relatively domesticated and the two produced their only
child, Honest Abe, in 1953. Like Abners Mammy Yokum and other wimmenfolk in
Dogpatch, Daisy Mae did all the work while the men generally did nothing whatsoever.
Despite this slavish role, Daisy Mae seldom complained, one of her countless virtues. Her
kin, on the other hand, were as evil as could be. Wild plot twists often took Daisy Mae to
exotic locales, and she was frequently wooed by rich and handsome men, but she always
returned to Dogpatch and her true, if worthless, love.
as im sure youd rather hear it all from a dear friend /

as opposed to what! the aspca?!
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (aspca) is a nonprofit
organization committed to alleviating pain, fear, and suffering in all animals. The oldest
humane organization in America, it was founded by Henry Bergh on April 10, 1866. Today
more than 300 aspca employees in seven offices nationwide help further the cause of ani-
mal welfare. Encouraging the public to recognize and report instances of animal cruelty is
a fundamental element of the aspcas campaign. See http://www.aspca.org.
oh, dad! / poor dad? / what? / nothing.

Martin makes reference to Arthur Kopits 1960 absurdist comedy Oh, Dad, Poor Dad,
Mommas Hung You in the Closet and Im Feeling So Sad. Subtitled a pseudoclassical tragi-
farce in a bastard French tradition, the play parodies the Theater of the Absurd, the
Oedipus complex, and the conventions of avant-garde drama.
but if theres one thing you dont put on your plate, no matter
how exotic your tastes may be it s . . . bestiality.
Bestiality is defined as sexual relations between a human and a lower animal. The 17th-
century English word bestiality derives from the Latin bestialitas, referring to primitive
behavior, to human-animal sexual intercourse, and to the way in which animals copulate.
Until the mid-19th century, the term referred broadly to the beastlike, earthy, and savage
qualities allegedly inhering in nonhuman animals. Modern usage tends exclusively to
denote sexual relations between humans and animals. Though bestiality is the more com-
50
mon term in mainstream usage, the term zoophilia is also used, with specific distinctions.
Zoophilia (from the Greek zoon, animal, and philia, friendship or love) is a paraphilia,
defined as an affinity or sexual attraction by a human to nonhuman animals.
no, that s one thing you havent thought about, one thing youve
overlooked as a byway on the road of life, as the old soap has it.
The Road of Life was a short-lived Procter and Gamble tv soap opera, broadcast on the
cbs network 195455. It was based on the very successful radio series of the same name,
which aired on nbc and cbs 193759. Don McLaughlin and Virginia Dwyer played the
same roles on both versions of the show. Virginia Dwyer, lead actress of the series, and
Walter Gorman, one of the directors, were married to each other in real life. Both the radio
drama and the television show were produced and written by Irna Phillips, one of the orig-
inal creators of the genre of daytime drama.
why do you call her sylvia, by the way? did she have a tag, or
something? or, was it more: who is sylvia, fair is she that all our
goats commend her
From Shakespeares The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act iv: ii, a song in which Proteus pro-
fesses his love for Silvia, to the dismay of his promised Julia:
Who is Silvia? what is she,

That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.
Is she kind as she is fair?

For beauty lives with kindness.
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness,
And, being helpd, inhabits there.
Then to Silvia let us sing,

That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling:
To her let us garlands bring.
51
goat-fuckers anonymous?
Stevie sarcastically refers to such rehabilitation organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous,
Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, etc., which seek to cure addictions by
engaging the subject in a supportive group therapy environment. Although no equivalent
organization exists for zoophiles, therapy groups have formed via postings in Internet chat
rooms and anonymous bulletin boards in an effort to connect people with similar situa-
tions. Psychiatrists and psychologists specializing in paraphilia (nonnormative sexual
behavior) have documented varying levels of success in treating such persons, in both indi-
vidual and group sessions. (See http://www.drmiletski.com/ prolog.html.)
and there was a connection there a communication that, well

. . . an epiphany, i guess comes closest, and i knew what was going
to happen.
From the Greek epiphaneia, for manifestation or the appearance of a miraculous phe-
nomenon. An epiphany is a sudden intuitive realization or comprehension of the essence
or meaning of something or a revelatory manifestation, especially of a divine being.
right! now shut the fuck up! . . . semanticist!

In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from
sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. Semantics is often
opposed to syntax, in which case the former pertains to what something means while the
latter pertains to the formal structure/patterns in which something is expressed (for exam-
ple written or spoken). Semantics is distinguished from ontology (knowledge of existence)
in being about the use of a word more than the nature of the entity referenced by the word.
This is reflected in the argument, Thats only semantics when someone trys to draw con-
clusions about what is true about the world based on what is true about a word.
is there anything anyone doesnt get off on, whether we admit

it or not whether we know it or not? remember saint sebastian
with all the arrows shot into him? he probably came! god knows
the faithful did!
Saint Sebastian was a Christian saint and martyr who died in the third century c.e., a vic-
tim of the persecution of Christians by Roman Emperor Diocletian. An officer in the
imperial Roman army who was discovered showing kindness to Christians in jail, Saint
52
Sebastian was sentenced by Diocletian to execution. He was tied to a tree and shot with
numerous arrows. Though he was left for dead, not a single arrow pierced his vital organs
and he survived and later returned to the emperor to reproach him for the continued per-
secution of Christians. Saint Sebastian was then stoned to death. He remains a popular
subject for artists for his youth and reputed beauty, as well as for his passionate faith and
willingness to die for his beliefs.
tragedy: definition and analysis

From Aristotles Poetics (350 b.c.e.)
T ragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain

magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several
kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
By language embellished, I mean language into which rhythm, harmony, and song
enter. By the several kinds in separate parts, I mean, that some parts are rendered through
the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song.
Now as tragic imitation implies persons acting, it necessarily follows in the first place,
that spectacular equipment will be a part of tragedy. Next, song and diction, for these are
the media of imitation. By diction I mean the mere metrical arrangement of the words;
as for song, it is a term whose sense everyone understands.
Again, tragedy is the imitation of an action; and an action implies personal agents, who
necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought; for it is by
these that we qualify actions themselves, and thesethought and characterare the two
natural causes from which actions spring, and on actions again all success or failure
depends. Hence, the plot is the imitation of the actionfor by plot I here mean the
arrangement of the incidents. By character I mean that in virtue of which we ascribe
certain qualities to the agents. Thought is required wherever a statement is proved, or, it
may be, a general truth enunciated. Every tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which
parts determine its qualitynamely, plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, song. Two
of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of
imitation. And these complete the list.
These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every
play contains spectacular elements as well as character, plot, diction, song, and thought. But 53
most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation, not of
men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action,
not a quality. Now character determines mens qualities, but it is by their actions that they
are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representa-
tion of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and
the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.
Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. The
tragedies of most of our modern poets fail in the rendering of character; and of poets in
general this is often true. It is the same in painting; and here lies the difference between
Zeuxis and Polygnotus. Polygnotus delineates character well; the style of Zeuxis is devoid
of ethical quality.
Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well
finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect
nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and
artistically constructed incidents. Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional
interest in tragedyreversal and recognition scenesare parts of the plot. A further proof
is, that novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they
can construct the plot. It is the same with almost all the early poets.
The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character holds
the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colors, laid on con-
fusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus tragedy is
the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.
Third in order is thoughtthat is, the faculty of saying what is possible and pertinent in
given circumstances. In the case of oratory, this is the function of the political art and of the
art of rhetoric: and so indeed the older poets make their characters speak the language of
civic life; the poets of our time, the language of the rhetoricians. Character is that which
reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches,
therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or
avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character. Thought, on the other hand, is
found where something is proved to be or not to be, or a general maxim is enunciated.
Fourth among the elements enumerated comes diction; by which I mean, as has been
already said, the expression of the meaning in words; and its essence is the same both in
verse and prose.
Of the remaining elements song holds the chief place among the embellishments.
The spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is
54
the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of tragedy, we
may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of
spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.
Excerpted from The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by S. H. Butcher (18501910). Available from Project Gutenberg,
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=11&fk_files=39506.
ritual and transcendence in the oedipus

trilogy
by charles and regina higgins
I n the great amphitheater of Athens, curious tourists can see an inscription on each of
the marble seats of honor near the stage: Reserved for the priest of Dionysus. The carved
letters, still readable after 2,500 years, attest to the religious significance of the theater in
the culture of ancient Greece.
For the Greeks of the fifth century b.c.e., the theater represented a sacramental place,
where the actors and audience joined together to worship. The dramawhatever its
subjectwas an offering to the gods, a ritual that might bring blessing to the city.
The stage itself, actually a dancing area in the style of a threshing floor, recalled the most
ancient forms of communal worship. At harvest, people traditionally celebrated the culmi-
nation of the growing season by worshipping the god of vegetation in wild, frenzied
dances. At the festival of Dionysus, the stage became a more sophisticated platform for a
similar experiencethe masked actors loss of self in music and art for the creation of an
emotional closeness with divine power. And the chorus, while chanting their poetry, main-
tained the simplicity of the older tradition in their obligatory dancing.
Sophocles underscores the connections between drama and the traditions of the fertil-
ity god in Oedipus the King. Evidence of the trouble in Thebes emerges as a plague, a blight
on the land that ruins crops and causes women to miscarry. The close association of human
and vegetative fertilityand the connection of both to the capability of the king
represents one of the earliest forms of religious belief. In Sophocles time, the mysterious
but vital union of humans and nature still informed the culture. Accordingly, Oedipus
immoralityhowever unconsciouspollutes the land, and only his removal and punish-
ment will bring back life to Thebes. In this context, Sophocles offers a ritual of death and 55
rebirth, as well as a formal tragedy in Oedipus the King.
In Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, Sophocles refers to a particular ritual that inspired and
uplifted many of his contemporaries, the Eleusinian Mysteries, a rite that offered its initiates
the assurance of eternal life. In Antigone, when Creon decides to honor the gods laws by
burying Polynices and freeing Antigone, the chorus rejoices with a triumphal paean (joyful
song) to Dionysus, calling him King of the Mysteries! The evocation of the god and the
mention of the rites at Eleusis underscore Antigones premature burial and the expected joy
of her return to life, the promise offered to the initiates of the Mysteries themselves. . . .
Of the Eleusinian Mysteries itself, modern readers know very little, since those who
celebrated were sworn to secrecy. But the ritual represented a powerful, transforming expe-
rience for many, including the great Roman orator and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero
(10443 b.c.e.), who praised the Eleusinian Mysteries as the source of civilization itself.
The Mysteries recreated in imagination the search of the goddess Demeter for her
daughter Persephone (also called Kore), and so demanded a form of personal identifica-
tion with a divine figure, culminating in an intense religious (and dramatic) experience.
The rite began with a procession from Athens to Eleusis, where initiates fasted, sacrificed
offerings, and drank a special potion made from barley. At some later time, the initiates
were blindfolded and led in darkness to an underground cave wherein some unknown
mannerthey experienced a kind of death, terrifying beyond words.
Afterwards, standing together in the darkness of an underground chamber, the initiates
saw a vision of Kore herself, rising glorious from the depths of the underworld. As fires
illuminated the chamber, the ritual celebrant held up a single stalk of wheat, proof of the
gods blessings and the regeneration of life. The initiates rejoiced ecstatically, purged of
fear, and confident, as they attested, that eternal life was theirs.
Sophocles himself, in a fragment from Triptolemus, wrote of the blessings of life after
death granted to those who had experienced the transforming dread and glory of the
Eleusinian Mysteries. And in his plays, as Aristotle explains, Sophocles proved to be a
master in evoking the pity and terror and producing the emotional catharsis that defines
tragedy. Like the Eleusinian Mysteries, Sophocles tragedies create a powerful emotional
even religiousexperience: The terror of a heroic self crumbling under the blows of Fate,
followed by the purging of fear and the coming of wisdom.
Sophocles continued references to the Eleusinian Mysteries indicate his high regard for
their power. It may be that in his drama, Sophocles was striving to capture a comparable
intense experience of dread relieved by hope and wisdom in an open, public context. For
the original audience and centuries of readers, the experience of the tragedies of the
56
Oedipus trilogy, like a mystical ritual, gives a new birth to the human spirit and, perhaps,
makes possible civilization itself.
Excerpted from CliffsNotes on Oedipus Trilogy, http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-100.html.

questions to consider
1. With which of the four characters do you find you identify the most? Why do you find
that character particularly appealing? How do your feelings for that character affect your
feelings for the other characters in the play?
2. What kind of husband is Martin? What kind of father is he? What kind of friend? How
do your answers to these questions change over the course of the play?
3. What was the familys life like before the beginning of the play? How do you think it
will be different after the end of the play?
4. Is Martins infidelity a greater betrayal in this circumstance than if he were having an
affair with another woman? Another man? Why? Why not?
5. Does Ross do the right thing in writing the letter to Stevie revealing Martins affair with
Sylvia? Would it have been the right thing to do if Martins lover were a woman? If it were
a man? What would you do if you were in Rosss position? Is his intervention a betrayal or
an act of true friendship?
6. What do you think of Stevies reaction to the letter? How would you react?
7. Why does Martin feel that he does not belong in the support group for zoophiles? How
does he consider himself different from the other members of the group?
8. Stevie accuses Martin of having broken something and it cant be fixed. What does she
mean by that?
9. Martin insists that his relationship with Sylvia is based on love, not sex. Does that make
his actions more forgivable, or less? What is more objectionable to Stevie (and to you): that
Martin is in love with an animal, or that he is having sex with an animal?
10. What is Billys role in this play? How does he react to the revelation of his fathers 57
affair? How do you think you would react if you were Billy? How does his relationship to
his father change?
11. In Greek tragedy, only the gods can reinstate order and administer justice after a crime
has been committed. Often, a sacrifice must be made to regain balance between earth and
the heavens. Do you think Stevies action at the end of the play will restore balance to their
world? What other dramatic heroines can you think of who have taken similar action?
12. How does The Goat fulfill Aristotles requirements for tragedy? What is the moral of
its story? Is there one?
13. Edward Albee has said that The Goat is the most political play he has ever written.
What do you think he means by that? How is The Goat political?
14. The definition of acceptable behavior varies among cultures, and the limits of what is
tolerated, and even embraced, change and evolve over time. Attitudes toward sex, particu-
larly homosexuality, have grown increasingly accepting over the last half century. Do you
think Martins behavior might be viewed with greater tolerance in the future? Why or why
not?
58
for further information . . .
on and by edward albee

Albee, Edward. The American Dream and The Zoo Story: Two Plays. New York: Plume, 1997.
. The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? (Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy). Woodstock, ny:
Overlook Press, 2003.
. The Play about the Baby. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002.
. Seascape: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1975.
. Three Tall Women: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Dutton, 1994.
. Tiny Alice. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2001.
. Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: A Play. New York: Signet, 1983.
. Interview by Mark Lawson. Front Row. bbc, January 29, 2004.
Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
Edemariam, Aida. Whistling in the Dark, The Guardian, January 10, 2004.
Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Kolin, Philip C., ed. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1988.
Kuhn, John. Getting Albees Goat: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy. American Drama,
summer 2004. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4129/is_200407/ai_n9409176.
MacFarquhar, Larissa. Passion Plays. The New Yorker, April 4, 2005.
Mann, Bruce, ed. Edward Albee: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2001.
59
Mayberry, Bob. Theatre of Discord: Dissonance in Beckett, Albee, and Pinter. Rutherford, nj:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989.
OToole, Fintan. These Illusions Are Real. The New York Review of Books, September 23,
2004. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17398.
Shakespeare, William. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. New York: Washington Square Press, 1999.
Shewey, Don. Edward Albee: Sordid, Sick, and Cesspool Deep! American Theatre, 1992.
http://www.donshewey.com/theater_articles/edward_albee.htm.
on paraphilia
Beetz, Andrea. Love, Violence, and Sexuality in Relationships between Humans and Animals.
Aachen, Germany: Shaker Verlag GmbH, 2002.
Bullough, Vern L. Sexual Attitudes: Myths & Realities. Amherst, ny: Prometheus Books, 1995.
Dekkers, Midas. Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. London, New York: Verso, 2000.
DuBois-Desaulle, Gaston. Bestiality: An Historical, Medical, Legal, and Literary Study.
University Press of the Pacific, 2003.
Institute for Sex Research (Alfred C. Kinsey, et al.). Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
1953. Reprint, Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male. 1948. Reprint, Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Masters, Robert e. l. Forbidden Sexual Behaviour and Morality: An Objective Examination
of Perverse Sex Practices in Different Cultures. New York: Julian Press, 1962.
Mathis, James L. Clear Thinking about Sexual Deviations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Co., 1972.
Matthews, M. The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile. Amherst, ny: Prometheus Books, 1994.
Miletski, Hana. Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia. San Francisco: East-West
Publishing, 1999.
Pet-Abuse.com. Bestiality. http://www.pet-abuse.com/cruelty/bestiality.php.
Roberts, Paul. Forbidden Thinking. Psychology Today (MayJune 1995).
http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-1325.html.
Singer, Peter. Review of Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, by Midas Dekkers. Nerve.com, March 1,
2001. http://www.nerve.com/Opinions/Singer/heavyPetting/main.asp.
60 Tabori, Paul. Secret and Forbidden: The Moral History of the Passions of Mankind. New York:
New American Library, 1966.
Vermont Animal Cruelty Task Force. Animal Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet.
http://www.vactf.org/pdfs/bestiality-factsheet.pdf.
Williams, Colin J., and Martin S. Weinberg. Zoophilia in Men: A Study of Sexual
Interest in Animals. Archives of Sexual Behavior 32, no.6 (December 2003): 52335.
Zoophilia.net. http://www.zoophilia.net.

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia Words On Plays (2005) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia Words On Plays (2005) PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia Words On Plays (2005) PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is the play The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? about?

What is the play The Goat or, Who is Sylvia? about?

What are some of the themes explored in the play?

What are some of the themes explored in the play?

GOAT WOP.

qxd 5/27/05 1:14 PM Page i

The Goat or,

WORDS ON PLAYS prepared by

a.c.t. is supported in part by grants from the

2005 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. Situation Tragedy: An Interview with Director Richard e. t. White

12. About This Goat

15. Passion Plays: The Making of Edward Albee

26. Interview with Edward Albee

33. Why Read Plays?

35. Zoophilia: An Overview

42. Heavy Petting: A Review of Mark Dekkerss Controversial Book,

46. The Ballad of the Sad Caf

47. A Goat Glossary

53. Tragedy: Definition and Analysis

55. Ritual and Transcendence in the Oedipus Trilogy

57. Questions to Consider

59. For Further Information . . .

characters, cast, and synopsis of

characters and cast

time and place

the worlds a mess; its in my kiss.

albee has said he abhors purposeful shock, yet he obviously

this play highlights the degree to which albees plays have

and who would want to see THAT ?

there are plenty of albee-isms and puns throughout the play,

it raises the question of whether words can ever be adequate to

has working on an albee play led you to reflect on your experi-

fitting, since albee wanted to be a composer before he became a

i bet there will be a lot of those moments for audiences of THE

laughing, or youre sickened by your own laughter, but it came

how did you develop the design of this production?

Set design for The Goat by

about this goat

passion plays: the making of edward albee

N ever trust a man who loves animals.

How Albee came to be so self-possessed is a complicated story. He was adopted shortly

ross: Hello there, old man!

martin: Hello there, old man. Ranunculi.

Excerpted from The New Yorker, April 4, 2005.

interview with edward albee

and it might be pertinent to remind people at this point about

well talk more about VIRGINIA WOOLF later, but i happened to be at

there is some satisfaction in producing that kind of reaction to

it s also, isnt it, at least about the idea of tolerance as to what

which is why the son is gay. because it s asking some of the

no, but it deepens the themes of the play, doesnt it?

the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

you havent, but im going to have one more go at this, which is . . .

in your biography, mel gussow suggests that [your mother]

beckett is an obvious influence, youve mentioned, and thurber,

the relationship with beckett interests me, and this is a critics

youre taking his surrealism or absurdism, whatever, and putting

you may [have]. i just wondered what you meant by that.