Hogan's Goat

The bells that Aggie Hogan sewed in the hems of her dresses ring softly and sadly throughout William Alfred's Hogan's Goat. Though never seen in the play, and dead by the middle of the first act, she lives on as the persisting memory of sin which drives Alfred's characters to tragedy.

Treating sin in a straightforward manner is not popular in the modern theater. But Alfred does not shy away from the conventionally unpopular. His play not only deals openly with sin and guilt, but it deals with them in a frankly religious context. Hogan's Goat is a Catholic play in subject and outlook. As the curtain falls a hard, righteous priest who is no way a hypocrite tells a sobbing woman on a starkly-lit stage that perhaps she should cry for us all. There are no apologies made for sin; regeneration comes only with confession and repentance.

One woman in the audience, expecting paradox and paradigm, was disturbed and disappointed when she found instead this moral tragedy. "It's not modern drama," she complained to her husband. Indeed Hogan's Goat is old-fashioned: old fashioned in its religious theme, old-fashioned in its tight construction, old-fashioned in its immense dramatic power.

Matthew Stanton is an Irish immigrant to the Brooklyn of the 1890's. For three years he lives with the older, well-to-do Aggie Hogan. Believing that she has been unfaithful to him with Edward Quinn, Brooklyn's mayor, Stanton flees to England where he marries an Irish girl of good family in a civil ceremony. Matthew and Kathleen return to Brooklyn to start a new life. Matthew becomes a political power and at the beginning of the play decides to challenge Quinn for the mayoralty nomination. However, when what's left of Aggie Hogan dies, the unfinished business of the past reveals its power to eventually destroy Matthew's and Quinn's political hopes and to kill Kathleen.

Alfred makes the most of traditional devices. His protagonist is a man of pride and ambition who falls. There is a Fool, Petey Boyle, a hanger-on of Stanton's. There is a prophetic Priest, Father Coyne. The confrontations between Stanton and Quinn are carefully spaced and prepared. Alfred's nine years of writing have produced the highly controlled play which his buoyant, poetic dialogue needs for grounding.

Control is also the keynote of Frederick Rolf's direction. He treats Hogan's Goat as a steel spring to be coiled, tightened and in the last scene, sprung. He uses the various areas of Kert Lundell's multi-chambered set cautiously, circling the scenes around the back and sides. When the last scene of the first act finally appears down-stage center the effect is electric. It is in this meeting between Stanton and Quinn at Hogan's wake, played against an insistent Rosary on the speaker system, that the dramatic power which Alfred and Roll have held backs on the audience.

With so much restraint the first act could be deathly boring. Professor Alfred's poetry provents fun much of the time. The Brooklyn Irish celebrate with champagne "warm as tears" of face life with "a puss like the lead house of a hearse Corruption is pardoned by some as "disordered sweetness".

But the lilt and beauty of Alfred's language also presents a problem of integration. In the first act there is a certain speechiness, a tendency for dialogue to jump out of context and character for poetic effect. Combined with the painfully sparse movement of the first few scenes, this makes the early part of Hogan's Goat easier to listen to than to watch. By the end of Act I, however, as Quinn spits in Matthew Stanton's face, the action catches up with the language.

Tom Ahearne in the role of Edward Quinn dominates the acting in Hogan's Goat. With a face like a gnarled but still serviceable shillelagh, he manipulates, insinuates, coaxes and bullies the other characters. Yet his confession at the play's end, his whining claim of "being nothing, nobody" is still effective. In one speech his cockiness and his cynicism fall away, and leave a naked, ashamed man.

Ralph Waite as Matthew Stanton springs from an Actor's Studio background well-suited to his role. Following the general tone he underplays the first act and opens up in the second. He successfully completes a vastly difficult assignment: gaining the audience's sympathy but not their pardon. A more flamboyant actor would have fallen off that particular tightrope.

Fay Dunaway (Kathleen Stanton) turns the directional restraint into stiffness. Especially in the first act her voice is tense, her gestures mannerd. The well-born Irishwoman who left "God and country" for a tavern-keeper might have some residual hauteur, but she certainly wouldn't be cold. Only in her death scene at the end of the play does she loosen up, and become passionate enough to assert her role.

The American Place Theatre is in a church building of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. But the stained glass windows and the wooden arches are not enough to account for the distinctly religious impact Hogan's Goat possesses. Alfred's play is finely, perhaps too finely worked. But its elegant construction is also shot through with a more basic beauty of language and thought. It is a work of faith and love.