Interview: Kidding Around with the Cast of ‘The Goat’

Mandarr, why ‘The Goat’? Have you always been a fan of Albee’s writing?     

MANDARR: Well it was around the time I turned six or so that I decided to incorporate sexually investigative metaphysical tragicomedies and melodramas into my theatrical studies and we’ve sort of been bros ever since. I kid of course (ha – kid.) I read the play nearly accidentally mid-September and felt dead inside for about three hours, so I thought I’d direct it.

Apart from the controversial subject matter, what does this show have to offer? It’s been given two awards and two nominations, why?

MANDARR: I could rant all day about Albee’s writing – it is dynamic, engaging, razor sharp and sometimes surprisingly Spartan. You’ll be shocked at some of what he has to say, but what you’ll remember is how he said it. With The Goat in particular he pushed a lot of boundaries – not merely in terms of taboos, but with respect to how far he’s prepared to go to find humanity in unexpected places.

Edward Albee also wrote Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?, arguably his most famous play. Are there any similarities between this play and The Goat?

MANDARR: It’s a widely held opinion that writers generally have one story to tell, and throughout their career they tell it again and again. Thankfully Albee is among the few who can tell his story with varied mediums that run the gambit from drunken college professors to goats. Albee’s style tends to blend comic and tragic elements, and most of his significant characters have a fascination with language that allows for tight intrapersonal dynamics and manipulation. Beyond those intrinsically Albeean qualities his scope and style shifts considerably from Virginia to The Goat – there are after all about forty years of playwriting between the two.

Peter, Edie, Jamie and Joe, could you tell me about your characters and how you’ve been getting into them?

PETER: Martin is an ordinary man thrown into an extraordinary situation. He is successful and good humoured, and lives a genuinely happy and balanced life with his family and friends. There are no hints of mid-life crisis with Martin, nor lost love, nor infidelity. His life is “as perfect as you might imagine”. Martin’s story embodies the absurdist elements of the play, and is very much an experiment: what happens if you take a perfect marriage and throw something incredible, inexcusable and impossible into the middle of it? Because his situation is definitively absurd, connecting with the character is a true challenge. Ultimately, my objective is to make Martin as sympathetic as possible, even if to understand him is something we can never fully achieve. It’s been exhilarating.

EDIE: Stevie has a happy life married to a man whom she regards as an equal and loves very much. She represents to me the scary phenomenon of an intelligent, collected person being thrown into a situation beyond their control and who in doing so relinquishes all rules of social conventions. She straddles a thin line between how she knows she should act and her own carnal instincts. This, I think, is what Albee does so well: he pokes fun at how civilised people, when pushed to their limits, find they are not so civilised after all.

JAMIE: Billy is a 17 year old gay American boy who, with his parents slightly struggling to deal with his sexuality, finds himself often confused. Throughout the play he is thrown into more and more alien situations which create yet more confusion that he is too young to know how to deal with. The only difficult thing, as an actor, has been finding lots of different and interesting ways to cry.

JOE: Ross represents the ‘voice of reason’ of the show, but is unfortunately not a particularly sympathetic character. If we are inclined to side with reason, it would not make for a particularly powerful play, and Albee does such a great job of creating a strong emotional beacon in Martin that the audience can get behind. Ross’ energy is so different from the other characters because his response to the events of the play is so at odds with the others’, so it has been important to be acutely aware of the energy of those I am acting opposite to form an appropriate response.

The Goat goes up this Friday at 7.30pm, and this Saturday at 2pm and 7.30pm at the Barron theatre. Don’t miss out. That would be baa-aaa-aad.