Tragedy and the Common Goat: Deperformative Poetics in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

While The Goat is notorious for its subject matter, the force behind Albee’s tragic poetics is less unorthodox sexuality than (de)performative language. The play hinges less on Martin’s offstage affair than on the devastating effects of particular speech acts in the theatrical now, which by turns produce and undo a reality they seem only to label. Goat lover Martin Gray is a queered martyr, beyond hetero/homonormative boundaries, whose acts of coming out unravel Stevie as a woman and as a wife. By dramatizing a couple’s potential to unmake a loving marriage through acts of speech, Albee queers tragedy through “deperformativity”: a violent undoing of the fabric of the real by words alone. The Goat thus characterizes tragedy as the unmaking of a world through utterance, irrespective of the (supposed) acts that precede it. And because Sylvia the goat is denied both utterance and subjectivity, she remains a victim of abuse, excluded from love and tragedy alike.