Animal House

The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia? will be no less than Susan FitzGerald’s 80th play. Of course, FitzGerald has also diversified expertly into other media, making countless appearances in films (including the recent Bite), TV shows like Proof, The Big Bow Wow and Bachelor’s Walk, plus radio productions such as Nights In The Gardens Of Spain and Hotel Du Lac for RTE. So whatever way you look at it, Susan has had a remarkable career since she started acting with the Trinity Players circa 1970. But what’s really inspiring about talking to the woman, who is widely regarded as one of Ireland’s most accomplished actors, is the fact that she seems no less passionate today when speaking about her art than she undoubtedly was half a lifetime ago.

FitzGerald is most definitely supremely enthusiastic about the Landmark Productions Irish premiere of Edward Albee’s The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia?, a play which has been hailed as “bracingly provocative”, “intelligent, superbly written, tragicomic and brilliant”, and “a major work by one of America’s greatest living dramatists.” Then again, another reviewer said, “some theatre-goers will hate this play”, though he did add the caveat “many more will love it. None, I suspect, will ever forget it.” Its genesis, according to Susan, certainly is fascinating.
“Edward Albee originally wanted to write a play about a doctor who was at the peak of his success,” she explains. “He was handling everything the right way in his life but somehow didn’t feel he had achieved his final goal. Often, if you haven’t reached a point where you’ve identified your true self, you do find when you reach the goal you’ve been seeking, maybe all your life, you feel like, ‘Is that it?’ So this doctor was going to inject himself with AIDS to see what it was like to suffer like his patients did. But then all of Albee’s friends said, ‘don’t go there, man’, so he said ‘right’, and in the end someone else got there before him and wrote such a play.
“But then Albee realised, ‘God, these are some of my most liberal friends so obviously there are areas even they won’t go.’ So he decided, ‘What if I write a play about a man who falls in love with a goat?’ and his friends had exactly the same reaction and told him, 'It’s crazy, you cannot even begin to go there!’ which provoked his thoughts even further along those lines.”
However, that wasn’t the only influence Albee had when it came to writing The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? Around this time, Susan Sontag wrote a “post 9/11” article in The New York Times suggesting we should try better to understand the Muslim world, only to be castigated by many for even daring to make such a suggestion. Albee got “livid” when this happened and decided that his new play should, in essence, be about the limits of tolerance.
“People had turned on Sontag the way they turned on Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War, calling her a ‘traitor’,” Susan elaborates. “So Albee finally really realised there definitely are areas people won’t go into and that there are limits to our tolerance. Also, it is about a man who, when he gets to middle age – like many men – needs to explore the more unconscious areas of his psyche. So this is a deeply, deeply disturbing play, yet it’s also incredibly entertaining. That’s why it was such a success on Broadway. It was meant to run for only three months but ended up running for a year and winning a Tony Award as the Best Play of 2002.”
Susan plays the ‘beautiful, intelligent wife’ of this man going through what, at its simplest level, could be called a mid-life crisis. Either way, she clearly relishes the role.
“It’s wonderful!” she says. “In the play we have a great marriage, and there is no sense that we’re not having great sexual experiences together or that I am not enjoying every aspect of his career, but there is something that he is confronted with and we see what happens to her as a result of this. But there is no doubt that this is a challenging play, and if people feel they are going to have to walk out they will miss out on the challenge of trying to deal with what this play has to say. No one is saying you have to agree with Edward Albee but as someone said about The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, "Leave your moral outrage in the cloakroom."

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? opens at the Project Arts Centre on May 9.