Mar 25, 2005   | COMMENTS     

WHEN A WOMAN catches her husband with another man, she may find it difficult to compete, but just imagine how she’d feel if her husband were stepping out with a farm animal? In “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” famed gay playwright Edward Albee unapologetically explores taboo romance.

Of course, Albee is too smart to simply mine a tale of interspecies barnyard sex for cheap laughs (although he does a lot of that and it’s scathingly funny). His play tests the boundaries of fidelity and what society is willing to accept where love is concerned.

Directed with great perception by Wendy C. Goldberg, Arena Stage’s terrific production of “Goat” is a shoo-in for Best of Show.

The action is set in Martin and Stevie’s too perfect living room, designed by Neil Patel. With soaring ceiling, sleek furniture and discreet art, it’s the sort of space that reeks of culture, accomplishment and good taste. The last spot in the world you’d expect to get a whiff of bestiality.

At 50, Martin (superb Stephen Schnetzer) seems at the top of his game. He’s just won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for architecture, and is set to plan a super city somewhere in the Midwest. He’s in love with his longtime wife Stevie (Kate Levy), a witty social X-ray in beige, and he’s proud of his gay teenage son, Billy (Bradford William Anderson).

Still, Martin is incredibly preoccupied, sometimes even forgetting why he’s entered a room.

When his best friend Ross (Rick Foucheux), a talk-show host, pays a visit to tape an interview, Martin unloads his brooding secret, off camera.

HE EXPLAINS THAT he was innocently house hunting for a place in the country, not cruising barnyards, when he locked eyes with a nanny goat named Sylvia. For Martin, the connection was magical, and the physical consummation that followed soon after, completely organic.

Nobody knows how Sylvia felt about it. But Ross is not sympathetic. He fires off a letter to Stevie detailing Martin’s indiscretion.

Not surprising, their splendid home is shaken at its foundation. Billy gags, disillusioned by his father’s creepy affair. Likewise, sophisticated Stevie is freaked out.

In the play’s glorious central act, a gripping knockdown, drag-out, yet somehow, civil fight, Stevie lets Martin have it. Here, Albee, the master of the domestic quarrel (no one fights better or dirtier than George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”), is at his best.

LEVY IS SUPERB as Stevie, delighting in each carefully dropped bomb: “You love me? But I’m a human being; I have only two breasts; I walk upright; I give milk only on special occasions; I use the toilet. How can you love me when you love so much less?”

Later, when Martin is comforting his distraught son, a filial kiss becomes infused with passion as Albee further blurs the boundaries of what is acceptable in love.

Schnetzer’s Martin is a sympathetic character. He doesn’t want to hurt his family, yet he’d like for them to understand his feelings for Sylvia.

It becomes clear that to set things right, he must deny his goat and choose his family. Ultimately, he’s given no choice.