A goat wreaks havoc, and boosts a career

Edward Albee is sitting in his spacious loft apartment in Lower Manhattan. With abstract paintings on the walls and the large floor space dotted with carefully placed African figures and modern sculpture, it is the stunningly attractive residence of a cultured man of refined tastes.

Who at the moment is talking about the commonality of sex between humans and animals.

"Its very interesting that it's such a taboo, because it's so frequent," says Albee, who for four decades has been in the top rank of American playwrights. Before an interviewer can interject a quizzical "It is?," Albee notes that he teaches a couple of courses at the University of Houston. "In casual conversation with professors raised on farms, I found it wasn't as uncommon as I thought - but maybe that's only Texas. Some pretty hideous things come out of there, including the present administration."

Albee's comments on this particular form of sodomy are not irrelevant to the more general topic of discussion: his play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, which the Philadelphia Theatre Company will open tomorrow at Plays & Players Theatre. In this tragicomedy, Albee details what happens to a world-renowned architect, his family, and others when it becomes known that he is conducting an affair with a goat he saw grazing in a field and immediately fell in love with.

This romantic relationship was a point of much commentary when the play debuted on Broadway two years ago, and Albee says only half jokingly that he didn't include an intermission so people who found it shocking and offensive couldn't leave easily.

"I suppose I would have been disappointed if people had just shrugged, but I didn't write the play to be shocking. I wrote the play to shock people into thinking, but not to be shocking," he says.

"What I wanted to do was to write a play about our deeply held values. I think we accept so much stuff by rote [in order] to assemble a set of values that we assume are valid. We don't think about them, we just react.

"I want people to see the play objectively, wondering, how would I react if I were the wife - how would I react if my husband were having an affair with an animal? Or, if I were the husband, how would I really feel about what was happening to me?"

The Goat won the Tony Award for best play of the 2001-02 season, and last year was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Had he won that, the 76-year-old Albee would have surpassed Eugene O'Neill to become the only four-time winner of that coveted award; he won previously for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994).

The adopted son of an heir to the country's largest vaudeville-theater organization, Albee was raised in luxury in an upper-class New York suburb. When he was in private secondary school, he decided he wanted to be a writer, but his attempts at poetry, fiction and theater were unsuccessful until he was 30 - and wrote The Zoo Story.

Produced first in Germany in 1959, and in New York the following year, the play marked Albee as a talent to watch. Just a few years later, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had critics placing him in the company of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as a treasured living American playwright.

The witty, nasty Virginia Woolf, one of the few Albee plays to be turned into a movie, is somewhat uncharacteristic in that it is, by and large, realistic and accessible, less marked by the surreal, absurdist, and evasive incident and dialogue of most of his work.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Albee battled and eventually overcame alcoholism. At the same time, his career went into eclipse with the critical and popular failures of several plays. In 1993, he made a comeback with Three Tall Women, a piece in which he came to terms with his recently deceased adoptive mother, with whom he had a mutually unloving and contentious relationship. It was a critical success and, except for Virginia Woolf, ran longer than any other Albee play.

That was followed by a major revival of A Delicate Balance (the play was also presented by two Philadelphia area theaters in 2002) and the well-received The Play About the Baby, which debuted in New York in 2001 and was produced the following year by the Philadelphia Theatre Company.

Albee's latest work, a piece that opened in Hartford, Conn., on Thursday, takes him back - 26 plays later by his own count - to his first success, the one-act Zoo Story, an extended confrontation in a park between an aggressive, troubled youth named Jerry and a middle-aged businessman named Peter.

Albee says he has thought off and on for many years about returning to the play. "The problem is that Peter is seen entirely from Jerry's point of view," he explains. "I knew there was more to Peter than what Jerry allows us to see, so when the Hartford Stage Company asked me to [write] a play to run with The Zoo Story, what popped into my mind was a play about Peter before he goes to the park."

This seems like a reasonable idea, to amend an older work. But an unusual situation may result, because if Albee decides the additional piece pairs well with the older play, he will no longer allow The Zoo Story to be presented in the form audiences have seen for almost 45 years. It will instead, he says, be one part of a new play called Peter and Jerry, which will consist of two acts: "Home Life," the new section about Peter, and "The Zoo Story."

If Peter and Jerry works in Hartford, Albee says, it will probably be produced in New York next season, during which a Broadway revival of Virginia Woolf and an Off-Broadway production of his 1979 play The Lady From Dubuque are also planned.

So, from a New York point of view, Albee is solidly back. Yet, from his own perspective, he never went away.

"You're in fashion, you're out of fashion," he says. "That comes and goes. I'll be out of fashion again."

He notes, however, that in the years the theater establishment regarded him as passe, he "was performed everywhere except in New York. I was still writing all the time. My output has always been pretty steady, a play every year and half."

He offers no opinion about why he is popular again. "I don't know what I could say that wouldn't sound egotistical. What if I said they've finally come to their right minds?" he adds with a laugh.

Albee believes in devoting his full attention to one play at a time. He also involves himself fully in the first productions of his new pieces, so he won't sit down to write again until he's finished with Peter and Jerry. When he does, he says, he has a couple of ideas to work on, and in the future there might be something inspired by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

If you look out the playwright's fifth-story window and several blocks to the south, there is a patch of sky where the twin towers stood. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Albee was returning from his beach home on Long Island and came out of the subway at the Chambers Street station. "I looked up and saw the first tower on fire and debris falling. Then I saw the second plane hit," he recalls. Hurrying the few blocks to his home, he went to his roof and watched the towers fall.

Immediately after the tragedy, Albee, like many writers, was asked for his reaction. He says he resisted participating in what he refers to as "instant journalism," but that his "complex, subtle reactions" to the event may "turn into something eventually, and I'll make a useful comment in a play."

Albee is under treatment for diabetes and two years ago had an angioplasty, but he looks fit, says he feels fine, and has no intention of quitting his career. "I'll keep on writing, and maybe I'll live a long time. Not being alive is a terrible waste of time," the playwright says, emphasizing the sentiment by paraphrasing a Woody Allen line: "I have nothing against death. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

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