The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? - Edward Albee (2000) - How is the Absurd conveyed in the play, and what is the result, especially for the audience watching the staging of the play?

Extract

[...] Then a few lines later, "what?" is repeated again and again as if nothing made sense anymore. Later on, we can notice the same repetitions in the conversation between Ross and Martin: "Martin: Anyway? Ross: Anyway. Martin: Anyway." Besides, it is interesting to note that the word "anyway" conveys some emptiness or at least some lassitude from both characters. Moreover, such a relapse of language may foretell a relapse from a human stage to an animal stage, which is a way to announce what is going to happen next: the confession of Martin about Sylvia, the goat he loves. [...]

[...] - Edward Albee (2000) - How is the Absurd conveyed in the play, and what is the result, especially for the audience watching the staging of the play? The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? Edward Albee. The 1950s embody a turning point as well as a major wind of change in literature, generally speaking. With the emergence in the USA of writers from the Beat Generation and books like On The Road, by Jack Kerouac (1957), American novelists and poets sweep all the former codes aside, rejecting war, the American Dream or the consumer society for instance. [...]

[...] And if we remember that the play is a parody of Greek tragedies, the examples of Phèdre falling in love with her step-son in Racine's play, or Médée cutting her own children's throat in Corneille's play can be considered as more monstrous or absurd than seeing Martin falling in love with a goat. Besides, in order to show that what happens to him can't be judged with the cultural and social codes created by the society, Martin often hints that there is more humanity in his behavior than in Ross's or Stevie's. Indeed, by yelling, cursing and breaking everything she has to hand, Stevie shows that she is actually closer to the state of Nature than to the state of an evolved human being. [...]

[...] Albee uses the Greek tragedy only to deconstruct and mock it: when Stevie eventually appears on stage with Sylvia's head, as the proof of her revenge, the mockery blatantly explodes, confirming the reader that this is an absurd tragedy. And all through the play, Stevie proves quite a ridiculous tragic heroine: indeed, she spends her time cursing, insulting Martin and breaking everything around her. She never proves dignified, unlike the great tragic heroines. On the contrary, instead of making great use of monologues where a refined language would compete with an understated theatricality, she just yells and curses as if she was part of a low-class vaudeville. [...]

[...] The fact that Ross's first reaction after Martin's confession is to rush and tell Stevie about it also proves, to Martin, that his "so-called" best friend does not have the human qualities he wished he had. Besides, as he mentions in the letter he writes Stevie, he seems more concerned about "Martin's public image" than about his so-called friendship with him. Actually, it is as if Martin was experiencing a kind of transformation, like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, but contrary to Gregor, Martin's return to Nature is positive. [...]