In Berkeley, Things You Should Not Do With a Goat

How does one explain the ability of a fellow human to wake up each day with a burning desire to make sweet, sweet love to a goat?

This is just one of the many questions in absurdian master Edward Albee’s highly decorated play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, running through April 26 in a stunning production at Berkeley’s Shotgun Players.

The Goat boasts a finalist designation for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Drama along with a 2002 Tony Award for best play, and this production is a marvel under Kevin Clarke’s astute and pensive direction. The subject matter, equal parts disturbing, crude and utterly brilliant, will leave audiences chewing on the play’s themes the way a starved goat consumes weeds.

Martin (William Giammona) is a rock star of an architect, the latest winner of the most prestigious commendation of his field, the Pritzker Prize for architecture. With this new and shiny crown comes a stamp of approval on the perfect life he occupies, starting with his house, a chilly stone-walled space that resembles a mausoleum more than a loving household (the brilliant scenic design is by Liliana Duque Piñeiro).

Sharing the house are his daintily perfect wife Stevie (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) and his 17-year-old gay son Billy (Joel Ochoa). In the opening scene, Martin is interviewed in his living room — dotted with perfectly sumptuous vases and a dazzling piano — by his close childhood friend Ross (Kevin Singer) for a television show titled People Who Matter.

That this perfection comes crashing down, in some very literal ways, is not entirely surprising. Yet for all the pinnacles of success Martin has reached, and his living room surrounded by opulence, having sex with an actual goat is his perceived nirvana of pure bliss.

Martin knows what’s at stake here. His love for Stevie teeters on the brink of extinction. And his promise to stop the affair doesn’t help: “Stopping has nothing to do with how it started!,” Stevie thunders.

The performances here take “visceral” to another level. Giammona’s Martin is a charming oaf whose gait isn’t completely confident. He also seems to not know exactly why his passions have led him toward an animal.

Mei-Ling Stuart operates on a level that screams command performance. It’s not just her emotional reckoning with a shattered home life; physically, she is a marvel, and brilliant in her most angered and peeved moments, such as her pristine destruction of vases (paired with a fantastic soundscape by designer Matt Stines).

But Stuart also displays phenomenal Meisnerian sensibilities as a listener, pushing her reactions to the most organic of places. Take note of her horror at learning about support groups for those in lust with animals, and her disgust at discovering the man she shares a bed with is a participant.

What just might be the play’s biggest achievement is how funny it is. Albee’s humor is on par with humorists such as Coward, Stoppard and Simon. Hilarious moments underscoring the follies of humanity appear throughout the production, buoyed by the comic timing of the cast, and especially slimeball Ross, who prances all over the stage. Singer delights in these moments of joviality, ultimately imbuing his Ross with a dark side as he sets the plot in motion that ends up ruining Martin and his family.

That collateral damage does not spare son Billy in any way. He is 17, but constantly reminded to go to his room or play outside as if he were a small child. Ochoa is a charmer, and his arc leads to a heartbreaking moment that feels straight out of the Greeks, where much of Albee’s script is rooted.

The play’s greatest surprise is saved for the final denouement, which will not be spoiled here. It is a moment jaw-dropping in its scope, thrusting the set into the narrative as its own character. Combined with the play’s brutality in the final horrid tableau, it ends the play with a collection of imagery that sears into the brain.

On the surface, this is a play about bestiality, and a human finding carnal connection with an animal that, while displaying human characteristics, has no capacity for greater yearning. But that’s not all the play is trying to convey. Ultimately, The Goat is about societal taboos, many of them centered on human sexuality — but who determines those, where is the line, and who has the right to draw that line?

Albee asked profound questions in his work, and was thrilled by the absurdity of life, and the mental destruction of human beings toward each other. What exactly is “normal,” anyway? Do affairs occupy different tiers, based on who the affair is with? Is there such thing as perfection in a family?

The legacy of Albee’s masterful text is that there are no easy answers. As The Goat questions every aspect of human sexuality, it also pierces the heart, and forces profound questions that just might destroy one’s sense of what normal really is.

‘The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?’ runs through April 26 at Shotgun Players at the Ashby Stage (1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley). Tickets and more information here.