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Theater

June 2002

Ee-i-ee-i-o

by Mark Steyn

There’s always room for one hit play on every subject. So the big question, as this Broadway season draws to a close, is whether Edward Albee has cornered the market in bestiality. At the Golden Theatre, it certainly smells like that, if you’ll forgive the expression. Scholars may recall Rochelle Owens’ Futz (boy meets pig) but Futz never had the feel of a big-time Main-Stem bridge-&-tunnel tourist-party bus-&-truck dinner-theater hit that in just a few weeks has descended on The Goat; Or, Who is Sylvia?

I first saw the play when I was wiped out by jetlag, so I went back to see it a second time and I was amazed at the assurance that had settled on the Golden in the brief intervening period. Part of this is due to the audience, which seems to have decided that this is the new Neil Simon smash that Simon himself no longer seems up to writing. But the rest is due to Albee, whose cunning framing of his topic seems ...

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Mark Steyn’s most recent book is America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (Regnery)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 June 2002, on page 54
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