"I am a permanent transient..."

Yesterday I finished my honors paper on The Zoo Story / Peter & Jerry and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (Notes toward a definition of tragedy). I can't say I'm particularly satisfied with the last 1/3 of it, the part on The Goat, because I rushed. And I'm not happy about it because I really did want to do this right. I realized at the end of the semester that I should have made my paper on Sundance for American Independent Cinema my honors paper, but of course, how was I to know that that was the better idea at the beginning of the semester when I had to hand in my contract? I labored over my Sundance paper. By which I really just mean that I took the time to revise it and refine it until I was fully satisfied. I rarely do that. I didn't do that with Edward Albee and I should have. I just ran out of time.

I think I'm going to do it anyway. Part of the reason I ran out of time is I got caught up when I was doing research. I kept finding this awesome material and trying to fit it into my outline. Fitting it into the outline wasn't the trouble, because it related nicely. The trouble was having to write a longer paper than I anticipated once I added all the stuff I wanted to add to the outline.

My thesis was that Edward Albee's plays are as socially relevant now as they first were in 1958 when he began writing. I realized that even though The Zoo Story, his first play and the first Albee I ever read, and the only I've seen performed, is my first love, I might now love The Goat better. It makes sense though: The Zoo Story was written in the context of the 1950s and it was utterly explosive.

"[Albee's theme] is the enormous and usually insuperable difficulty that human beings find in communicating with each other. More precisely, it is about the maddening effect that the enforced loneliness of the human condition has on the person who is cursed (for in our society it is undoubtedly a curse) with an infinite capacity for love."

- George Wellworth (theater scholar)

Albee addresses this through a single character, the outcast Jerry, in The Zoo Story. The beauty of The Goat is that he addresses this difficulty to communicate and the curse of the "infinite capacity to love" through three of his four characters--a husband, a wife, and their son. The fourth character is the husband and wife's supposed best friend who serves to represent conventional society and their disdain for deviance from their standards. In the same way that a thirty-year-old Albee wrote The Zoo Story within the context of his times and the society of the '50s, a seventy-something Albee--a much more mature and controlled writer by this point--wrote The Goat to reflect society today. And as a member (or outcast?) of that society, I feel like I can appreciate it that much more because it's a world I know--not one I've read about or imagined.

(Note: Quick summary. The Zoo Story is a one-act about two men, Peter and Jerry. Peter is your typical 1950s middle class guy living the American Dream. Jerry is a social outcast living in a terrible boarding house with no family and friends, who cannot get even a dog to love him. Spurned by the world around him, Jerry finds Peter sitting on a park bench one day and tries to talk to him about his isolation. Peter, like everyone else, doesn't understand, so Jerry picks a fight with him, and as Peter holds a knife, Jerry impales himself with it. Jerry's ended his own life, but completely unraveled Peter's, breaking down the pretense everything he thought he knew.

Albee later added another one-act before The Zoo Story, called Homelife, in which Peter is in his apartment with his wife Ann, who tries talking to him about how, even though they have a great, smooth life, she could use a little excitement and chaos--a little imperfection. The main goal is to flesh out Peter's character and set him up for The Zoo Story, but it's nice on its own, too.

The Goat is the story of another man with a seemingly perfect life, Martin Gray. He has a perfect marriage with a woman he loves, Stevie, and a good son, Billy. He's just won what is basically the Nobel Prize of architecture, he's been commissioned to design a $200 billion city, and it's his 50th birthday. However, he is having an affair with a goat with whom he is in love. He tells his best friend Ross in confidence, but Ross tells Stevie, and the rest of the play explores how Stevie deals with the fact that her husband accepts that he is in love with and having sex with a goat, how she deals with the fact that he doesn't understand how this has ruined her life, how Martin deals with himself, and how Billy--a seventeen-year-old gay boy--deals with all of it.)

It's not that other writers don't address how restrained polite society creates feelings of rejection and loss in those who deviate from the norm. But what I love so much about Albee is that he does it with a great appreciation for the ridiculous. It's why so many classify him as "absurdist," even though he rejects that label (he's not a label kind of guy) and, strictly speaking, his plays are much more hopeful than the "more nihilist European absurdist playwrights." Regardless, his plays certainly have absurdist qualities, and it's my kind of humor exactly. The irony and wit, the ridiculousness and absurdity that doesn't take itself too seriously, yet serves to size up the seriousness of a situation--Albee's plays are incredibly balanced in these terms, and I love it.

One critics observes a common thematic thread (well, I guess it's more of a motif) running through several of Albee's play: "the chasm between people, [and] their inability to connect except through pain." When you realize he's been writing about the disconnect between people for fifty full years now, it's daunting. In a sense, it's quite true though. I think a lot of times I've connected with people through my pain, theirs, or mutual pain. And I mean "pain" broadly. Shared frustration with other people. General feelings of loss. Nothing earth-shattering, but still. I wonder why that is. We're the most open and vulnerable when in pain? We need companionship most when we're in pain? It attracts us. It humanizes others. I suppose that try as we might to believe otherwise, in the end we can't survive completely on our own.

You really can see how Albee grew as a writer between The Zoo Story and The Goat. As brilliant as The Zoo Story is, you can see what I'm sure many would condemn as "youthful" indulgence in it--Jerry's what is it, 5 page monologue? The play is hardly 45 pages long. The Goat is much more controlled in tone, and its thematic content is like a mature version of its predecessor, and it is, truly, a tragedy. Albee takes an absurd situation, and that is the "fact" of the play, the foundation; then out of the reactions to the situation, he carefully constructs this this gorgeous family tragedy. He uses what is considered to be an inhumane act to examine the humanity, addressing a host of related themes and ideas: the American dream, marital relations, parent/child relations, a loss of identity in middle age, the way an adolescent searches for identity, the desire to be understood, the way love hurts more than hate, the way it can overcome seemingly unforgivable acts--and the way, sometimes, it seems like love is not enough to overcome.

----------------
Now playing: The Decemberists - O Valencia!