ANIMAL HOUSE: Edward Albee's Tony-winning 'The Goat or Who is Sylvia?' fuses shock and laughter at GableStage

It's a hideously hurtful scene, one that no one wants to live through. But we do.

Long-married couple seems to have it all. He's a master of his universe, a prize-winning architect who has bagged a hugely important $200 billion project just as he has reached the fraught age of 50. His wife is lovely and bright, always faithful, and their sex life still smolders and sizzles.

Then it happens: She finds out he's been cheating.

With a goat.

True, these scenes don't usually turn on revelations of bestiality. But this play -- The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? -- is by three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee, a master craftsman whose artistic daring is as fierce at 75 as it was at 31, when he first seized the theater world's attention in 1959 with his explosive one-act, The Zoo Story.

Winner of the 2002 best play Tony Award, The Goat has just begun the season at GableStage, the cozy Coral Gables theater where artistic director Joseph Adler is as fearless about staging shocking work as Albee is in writing it.

"In order to make his point, Albee has to up the ante," Adler says. "I saw this in New York and was blown away by it... The conceit is so outrageous! And I love cage-rattlers."

Yet unfathomably, given its subject, this particular cage frequently rattles with laughter -- from inside-theater jokes, as well as puns spun from the juxtaposed mention of the architect's illicit beloved, the goat, and the name of his son, which is (of course) Billy.

."I was astounded by how riotously funny it was," Adler says. "If you stood outside the theater, you'd think it was something by Neil Simon. He disarms the audience with humor."

That should not, Albee himself says, come as a surprise.

"Except for The Death of Bessie Smith, there's humor in all my plays," the wryly witty Albee says by phone from his Manhattan loft. "The Zoo Story is quite funny -- until it isn't. Serious does not mean humorless."

Consider the second part of the play's title. It comes from William Shakespeare's song in Two Gentlemen of Verona, the one that begins, "Who is Silvia? what is she,/That all our swains commend her?/Holy, fair, and wise is she; The heaven such grace did lend her,/That she might admird be."

Then think about Albee's Sylvia being a goat.

As with all his plays, The Goat germinated in Albee's mind for a very long time, until the moment when he couldn't "do anything but write it down. I see it and hear it as if it's being performed. If the reality of what's going on [in the writing] isn't more interesting than what's going on downstairs, I'm in trouble."

And to Albee, no matter how extreme the plot elements, reality is key: "I don't think about metaphoric situations."

Actor Bob Rogerson plays Martin, the Sylvia-besotted architect, in The Goat. When he first read the play he found it "completely disturbing. But in a way you couldn't stop thinking about."

Laura Turnbull, who plays Martin's wife Stevie, wasn't sure at first that she wanted to do it.

"I found it interesting, disturbing, shocking," says Turnbull, who starred in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune with husband Avi Hoffman at GableStage last summer.

"I see it as about a woman who's married to an extremely successful man, and he has an affair that's beyond her comprehension. It's something you thought was so sacred and so perfect, and it comes crashing down around you. And it's how we deal with it."

The actress speculates that Albee might have heard someone say, in mockery or fury, "You had an affair with that pig? You had an affair with that cow?"

And then took it to an extreme.

"Seventy years ago, it would have been a married man having an affair with another woman," Turnbull says. "Thirty years ago, it would have been another man."

Acting Albee requires utter precision. The playwright not only constructs dialogue in which every punctuation mark points to the way he wants a speech delivered, but he also indicates the style or emotional quality of the lines in parenthetical instructions, with words like "sneering," "preoccupied" and "bereaved."

.He says simply, "A play should be director-proof and actor-proof."

Contractually, he gets to approve directors, actors and designers for all productions of his plays, and he requires more rehearsal time than many theaters typically have.

But, says Rogerson, it all pays off: "It's a matter of connecting the emotional wave to it. And once that wave is smooth and seamless, there's nothing to say but those words."

Adds Turnbull, "You have to find his rhythm, and then you see what he means."

Albee, though loath to analyze or offer up the themes of his work, says of The Goat, "It's about a man who's hopelessly in love. And it does serious damage to his marriage. It's about the limits of tolerance, hypocrisies. It's all about what you can get away with."

One thing Albee did do, once he had decided on the particular taboo that would rip apart his characters' marriage, is to research the subject.

"I teach in Houston, and I talked to some of my professor friends who had grown up on farms and had relations with animals. I'm not advocating it, nor am I not advocating it," he says dryly.

He's kidding. No pun intended.

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.