Goat Island

Goat Island is a sleeper: a little-publicized, ill housed, low-budget stroke of near genius. There were only a couple of dozen people at Thursday night's opening, maybe because it had the misfortune to coincide with gala premieres at Adams House and the Loeb. But like the sage said: "What's box office?"

Ugo Betti's play is just as much of a sleeper as the production. One of the lesser-known worlds of a lesser-known playwright, Goat Island is a full-grown tragedy about a woman's search for moral certainty. Unlike other Betti plays, it manages not to get obsessed with the question of justice for its own sake. Betti was both a lawyer and a judge, but in Goat Island he uses the legal metaphor only as a structural device, a means of pushing the play's heroine toward her realization.

Angelo, the inquisitor, arrives at the house of Agata, a widow who lives with her daughter and sister-in-law. Angelo claims to have been a constant companion to Agata's husband before his death, and he uses this claims to make Agata confide her loneliness and insecurity, thus propelling her ultimately to accept him and the freedom he represents.

If there is a conceptual failing in director Leland Moss's rendering of Goat Island, it is that he makes Angelo, and not Agata, the play's center. This leaves the three women on too much of an equal and collectively subordinate level. Moss has had to miscast himself as Angelo, which in large measure explains this shift in emphasis, since he plays the part with too little earthly charisma, and too much surface charm, to be merely an agent of anything. Angelo emerges as a likeable rather than loveable character, and his appeal reaches as much to the audience as to the women on stage with him.

Partly as a result, Jane Wingert cannot make a truly strong character out of Agata. Only at the very end, when she is on stage alone, do we get a sense that all the forces of Goat Island should direct themselves on her. And this comes as something of an anticlimax, because Moss has made almost too much of Angelo, giving him a weight he can't sustain in the play's resolution.

Probably the failings in Moss's performance derive from his also being the director, and the weak elements in his direction from his also being the star. The effect, however, is only to alter the play, not to cripple it.

No single facet of Goat Island particularly stands out: the performances are individually erratic; the set is unduly drab and natural -- particularly for such a non-theatre as Christ Church where a stylized setting would have been much more appropriate; the blocking is effective at times, and contrived at others. But the finished product somehow triumphs over its parts.

Goat Island is testimony to the healthy effect of having no money, no theatre, no stage, not much of a set, no publicity to speak of, and a good play.