A shockingly pro-Martin crowd at the post-show discussion of The Goat at the Shotgun Players tonight. I wanted to speak up throughout, but I was slightly too sleepy and considerably too timid to give my two cents. But my loyal readers will happily receive my two cents.
The general consensus in the room was that Albee was writing a tragedy (I agree) and a parable of tolerance (I disagree). The audience was quick to condemn Stevie, Martin's wife (who in my opinion was, if anything, too reasonable), and extremely quick and decisive in its condemnation of Ross. I was shocked, because, if you'll allow me an old phrase, I looked at Stevie and Ross and thought "yeah, that's what I woulda did."
The inventive staging forced the audience to think about the play in terms of Greek tragedy. The bare stage with its cold, gray fixtures was evocative of a Greek amphitheater. The costumes were neutral in color and full of flowing, wrapped fabrics that simultaneously evoked Chitons and the idiosyncratic dress of the upper-class artistic set. The director's note at the beginning of our program reminded us that the word "tragedy" means "goat song." In short, we were all primed to, begged to, approach this piece as a Greek tragedy. Reader, the audience did not approach this as a Greek tragedy. Or rather, if they did, they did it wrong.
What makes a tragedy tragic is its inevitability. The tragic hero is doomed from the start--by his own hamartia, by fate, by the gods. There was no possible way for Oedipus to avoid killing his father and marrying his mother, no matter what he did. In Ovid's Metamorphoses Myrrha is cursed by Aphrodite with an irrepressible lust for her own father. She had no way to escape this. The way Martin describes his first encounter with the goat, it sounds as if he has been similarly cursed by his own delusion. We never really get a reason why he falls in love with the goat. He simply sees her, and it happens. Irrevocably. Inevitably. We never get the sense that Martin actively chose to fall in love with the goat. In fact, it doesn't even seem like Martin chose to have sex with the goat. It feels like there was simply no way to avoid it; a red string of fate tied them together. This is why Martin is tragic. When everything falls apart, it's not because his bad choices are coming home to roost and he's facing the consequences of his actions.
What the audience discussion got right was the fact that the fundamental conflict in the play is one of misrecognition. Billy, Stevie, and Martin each have their own unshakable views of what is right and wrong, and none of them can get through to each other. For the genre-aware spectator, though, Martin is cursed by his own delusion. He is "doomed by the narrative," so to speak, to be completely incapable of recognizing that what he did was wrong in any way.
This is why I'm shocked by the audience opinion that Ross, Martin's best friend, was evil to tell Stevie that her husband was fucking a goat. Martin, lashing out to defend himself, assures Ross that he would've been able to figure it out on his own, would have been able to stop seeing "Sylvia" before Stevie found out, or come up with some sort of solution. But we know that can't be the case. He never once even implies that he wants to stop seeing "Sylvia," or even that having sex with animals is wrong. When he goes to the bestiality support group as it were, his general impression is that he doesn't understand why all the people there are so unhappy. Of course Ross needed to tell Stevie.
And Stevie did not make one single wrong decision. The most striking moment in the whole play is the moment when Stevie realizes that Martin did not just have sex with a goat; he is in love with a goat. That realization breaks her. The actress falls to the ground and screams and wails in real anguish. Collapsing, Sarah-Palmer-screaming. And I immediately understood. If your husband has been having sex with a goat, there might be a way to get him to stop, to get him to move on. But if your husband loves a goat? Loves a goat the same way and the same amount that he loves you? There is no coming back. Martin's humanization of the goat is simultaneously a dehumanization of his wife. It fundamentally changes the way your husband sees you if you know that he is capable of seeing a farm animal the same way. We know Martin can't stop seeing the goat. We know that even if he did, things could never be the same. And yet, of course Stevie had to kill the goat. The audience was condemning her for doing it. They said she "snapped," they commented on her "villain arc." To that I say, "log off of X the Everything App and start engaging with art like an adult."
Practically speaking, killing the goat is Stevie's only chance at things possibly going back to normal, or some approximation of it. If anyone else found out about it, it would be the end of Martin's very public career, and would uproot all of their lives. Emotionally speaking, the goat is the source of all Stevie's problems. She had a perfect life, a perfect marriage before the goat. The audience phrased it as Stevie going of the rails and "killing the mistress." They said that now she is on the same level as Martin, doing something that can't be undone. I say that like an ancient Greek festival, sometimes there needs to be an animal sacrifice.
The Goat is a tragedy because every character did what they had to do. Why is Martin the only one who escaped condemnation at the post-show discussion? Martin, the only character who has objectively done something wrong? I still don't understand it. Killing a goat is arguably less of a sin than repeatedly raping one. Is Martin absolved because of the all-encompassing nature of his delusion? Are Stevie and Ross too lucid for sympathy?
When we get to the bottom of it, though, and what I think tonight's audience didn't understand, is that trying to decide which character is the antagonist is unproductive. You're starting from a flawed premise. The antagonism underpinning a tragedy isn't the characters versus one another. It's all of the characters versus the tragedy itself, trapping the characters in a narrative that can only end badly.
As always, you have perfect correct opinions! I come to OneWord knowing I’ll be reading sharp and insightful writing that helps me better understand the world around me. Today, I have learned that misogyny runs so deep that an audience in Berkeley, CA will still value the life of a goat over a woman. Crazy that no one was anti-Martin!!! (-_- )
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