Martin Gray
Martin is a 50-year-old man who seems to have it all. He is married to an attractive wife and has a teenage son. He just won the most prestigious award in the field of architecture and has been hired to design a 200-billion-dollar city of the future. He is also going to be interviewed by his best friend Ross, host of a popular TV program called “People Who Matter.” Yes, Martin is a person who matters; a person with everything to look forward to. And then that pretty wife finds a business card with emanating an odd, unpleasant odor.
Stevie Gray
Stevie is Martin’s loving wife. Sure, they bicker and tangle, but everything seems pretty sweet between them. Except for the problem with Billy, but that’s probably not their fault. What is their fault—Martin’s fault anyway—is the seemingly total and non-refundable collapse of their happy little home when the true provenance of that mysterious bad odor is shortly revealed to Stevie in the form of a letter.
Ross Tuttle
That letter which turns Stevie’s world upside-down and inside-out arrives the day after. During the interim, the interview Ross conducts with Martin for his TV show has gone straight down the tubes because of Martin’s obvious distraction with something else. With the camera turned off, the truth comes out: Martin confesses that there is someone else besides Stevie. Her name is Sylvia. She’s a goat. Ross feels the need to inform Stevie of the news which is still being denied her by her husband. The next day Martin confronts the ethics of a best friend sending such a letter, but by that point his own ethical standing is even more unsound based on what Ross saw upon his second arrival to the Martin living room.
Billy Gray
Upon Martin’s confession to his son once Stevie has let the beans out of the bag, their son Billy is naturally angry, confused and, yes, more than a little judgmental toward his dad. The response from Martin is to question the validity of this judgment on sexual mores in light of the fact that Billy is himself homosexual; at the time much closer to bestiality legally than it is now. If Martin’s response to his own love life is somewhat south of the levee on condition that, in fact, the levee in question can be said to be proper paternal behavior, then what Ross witnesses upon his second arrival at the Gray residence is so far south that the levee cannot even be sighted: Billy and his father locked in an embrace, mouths attached, passionately kissing, all expectations of proper parental behavior be damned. But, perhaps, not entirely forgotten?
Sylvia
Sylvia is a goat. She is one of the two loves of Martin Gray’s life. The play won the Tony Award for Best New Play and was one of the three finalists for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Edward Albee has won multiple Pulitzer and Tony Awards. Sylvia is literally a goat who serves as metaphor. There are no scenes showing Martin expressing his love physically toward Sylvia. She appears in a photo Martin shows to Ross and is a bloody carcass killed by Stevie at the end. Much of the controversy over the play stems from the fact that there are apparently quite a few people who only hear the bare bones of the plot and do not understand that while Sylvia is literally goat narratively speaking, she is just a metaphor dramaturgically speaking.
