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The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? book cover
The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
2003
First Published
3.92
Average Rating
110
Number of Pages
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee’s most provocative, daring, and controversial play since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Goat won every major award for best new play of the the Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards. In the play, Martin―a hugely successful architect who has just turned fifty―leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. But when he confides to his best friend that he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.The playwright himself describes it this “Every civilization sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances. The play is about a family that is deeply rocked by an unimaginable event and how they solve that problem. It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid."
Avg Rating
3.92
Number of Ratings
7,368
5 STARS
37%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
4%
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Author

Edward Albee
Edward Albee
Author · 36 books

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize. People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream . He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice—as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era. Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

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