‘The Goat’ marks another triumph for director, actors, Playhouse

July 16, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

When Gene Wilder romanced a comely sheep named Daisy in Woody Allen’s 1972 comedy, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* [*But Were Afraid to Ask],” bestiality was played for laughs. But in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?,” middle-aged architect Martin’s love affair with the titular goat becomes the stuff of grand opera: a tragedy of heartbreaking proportions.

Of course, a case could be made — and many have tried — that Sylvia is more metaphor than barnyard animal. And that 50-year-old Martin’s l’amour fou was really just Albee goofing on the boilerplate clich s of a standard midlife crisis.

Yet the lack of irony in Albee’s terse, stripped-to-the-bone one-act play would seem to indicate otherwise. Instead, I prefer to think of “The Goat” as the Pulitzer-winning dramatist’s plea for unconditional human compassion. Even for the most confused, or fatally damaged, of souls.

Certainly John Cox’s lead performance in the John Pecano-directed production of Albee’s 2002 Tony winner that opened Thursday night at the Youngstown Playhouse evinces no trace of spoofery or condescension.

In fact, Cox’s turn as the anguished, hopelessly besotted Martin is a masterpiece of thesping empathy. He makes us feel not only Martin’s anguish — over destroying his marriage, wrecking his career and alienating his friends — but the crazy ecstasy of an interspecies affair that he knows will prove his downfall.

Cox has already had a spectacular career on area stages (“Speed-the-Plow,” “The Pillowman,” et al.), but Martin could well be this reliably strong actor’s crowning achievement to date. Bravo.

As Ross, the artsy-boho college chum responsible for spilling the beans to Martin’s wife, David El’Hatton gives a determinedly quirky, intermittently amusing reading of his reconstituted hippie-artiste character. Curiously, some of the more heated dialogue exchanges between Ross and Martin gave me flashbacks to El’Hatton and Cox’s dueling Hollywood honchos from last fall’s acclaimed Oakland Center for the Arts production of “Speed-the-Plow.” The community-theater echo-chamber effect strikes again.

I also liked Paul Sauline as Billy, Martin’s gay teenage son, who takes the news of his dad’s extra-marital dalliance about as badly as one might expect.

Kris Harrington brings a coiled intensity and steely intelligence to the incredibly tough/tricky role of Stevie, Martin’s betrayed and beleaguered spouse (“You have broken something and it can’t be fixed”). If Harrington occasionally sounds as though she’s reading lines rather than interpreting (and inhabiting) her character, it’s a familiar faux pas for a first-time actor.

The uber-chic living-room set by Pecano and Jim Lybarger looks like something you’d find in the pages of Architectural Digest. It’s the best set design I’ve seen yet in the Playhouse’s Moyer Room

For Pecano, “The Goat” marks another Albee triumph (he previously directed a stunning revival of the playwright’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the New Castle Playhouse four summers ago). Let’s hope he doesn’t wait such an unconscionably long time between directing gigs in the future.

“The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” runs through Sunday at the Youngstown Playhouse. For tickets, call 330-788-8739.