“Who is she? Who is Sylvia?”
“Please don’t laugh.”
“This is Sylvia. … This is a goat. You’re having a love affair with a goat!”
So goes the revelation in the early stages of playwright Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” The play, which was the most recent in the Performance in the Borderlands’ Banned Plays Public Readings series, centers around a middle-class white family of three as they process the fact that the husband and father in the family has, in fact, been having a love affair with a goat.
On Tuesday night, a small crowd clustered into the Phoenix Center for the Arts’ Basement Theater, where four people on a small and sparsely lit stage stood before music stands and read the family’s anguish aloud. Before the play, a jazz trio performed, and afterward the audience members and readers came together to discuss the play. Wine was available on a small table in the back of the room throughout.
The idea behind reading banned plays aloud is to bring a variety of people together to discuss difficult issues such as race, immigration and, in the case of “The Goat,” bestiality and sexual taboo. The creator of the series, Mary Stephens, who is with ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts’ School of Film, Dance and Theatre, said she really wanted to provide an open forum where people can talk about these issues.
“Oftentimes, it’s only through the art that we can come to reimagine a new way of being in the world,” Stephens said. “I never thought that I would see this type of audience come together in Phoenix, Ariz. … At the level of community, there’s already this reimagining.”
Stephens first had the idea of performing banned plays in 2009 as a doctoral student at ASU. The idea became more urgent for her, however, when a number of books were taken out of classrooms in the Tucson Unified School District in 2011. The series began in February 2013, once Stephens had the time to produce it.
“These plays are amazing,” Stephens said. “They’re political, they’re charged, they’re interesting. And they deal mostly with marginal issues.”
“The Goat” made its way into the series because a Cave Creek teacher was suspended less than half a year ago for trying to teach the play in his advanced drama class. Stephens said she looks to connect the banned plays to issues pertinent in Arizona.
Banned plays tie in closely with the themes of the borderlands project. While Arizona is on a literal border with Mexico, Stephens said, people deal with figurative borders in their own lives as well. These can include many of the marginal issues that feature in the banned plays, such as LGBTQ and race rights.
“We deal with a lot of issues that create divisions,” Stephens said. “We have this going on in us all the time.”
For the most part, 70 to 80 people have attended the banned plays, though there have been as many as 110. The audience is also not what is considered a traditional theater audience, Stephens said, and usually consists primarily of young people of color—a community much more diverse than theatrical performances usually see.
This was the first time a play in the series has been indoors. Other banned plays have been outside in the garden at the Phoenix Youth Hostel, which Stephens also owns.
Venue makes a difference. Tuesday night’s show at the Phoenix Center for the Arts presented a majority-white audience.
Laci Lester, who attended the show and has been a reader in previous shows, said she noticed that there was a distinct shift in the discussion.
“At the hostel, it’s a little bit more raw and a little bit more community,” Lester said.
Nonetheless, Lester said, she thought the discussion was wonderful. It ranged from topics such as the varying degrees of taboo we place on sexual acts, such as considering bestiality worse than incest, to whether the play ought to be read in high school classes, to the different ways people kill each other – emotionally, spiritually and more.
“(We think that) marriage is right by this thing and we will uphold this thing,” Lester said. “And if it’s not what we see as correct, I will kill you.”
Such discussions take place after every banned play reading. Joshua Sherrill, who performed in the staged reading for the first time after attending most of the other shows, said that the series and the discussions have caused him to question things in his life and become a more open person.
“It has made me look at the situations in my life with a much more keen eye,” Sherrill said. “I basically abandoned the notion that any one idea is right.”
Reading these plays with a diverse community brings people art that faces issues that are not mainstream when they may not have had exposure to it before, Stephens said. Lester agreed.
“It says something when something has been made taboo. Why was it banned?” Lester said. “If you’re not in the theater community or not in the literature community, you don’t know what’s being restricted from you.”
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu
