* Written from Edward Albee * Directed from David Esbjrnson * Starring Bill Pullman and Mercede Ruehl * of a gold color Theatre.

* Written from Edward Albee * Directed from David Esbjrnson * Starring Bill Pullman and Mercede Ruehl * of a gold color Theatre, New York City (open run)

useful old Edward Albee. One of theater's grand ancient men at age 74, he still believes that Broadway is a venue for ideas and intellectually engaging drama. After nearly couple decades of premiering his just discovered work abroad, out of town, or off-Broadway--including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women and last year's The Play About the Baby--he's exhibited his new play, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? directly upon the Great White Way. And a knowing puzzle of a play it is.

onward one hand, it's a situation comedy With a not-for-prime-time premise. Martin Gray (Bill Pullman) is a hugely happy architect who's won the Pritzker Prize at 50 and just received a kazillion-dollar commission. He lives in marital bliss with his wife of 22 years, Stevie (Mercede Ruehl) and his happily gay 17-year-old son Billy (Jeffrey Carlson). still something's amiss. And when his oldest friend, Ros (Stephen Rowe), arrives to interview him for a TV point out to called People Who Matter, the story get tos out: Martin is having an affair with gues who--or, more accurately, what?

It's not a big revelation to the audience; we've seen it coming. Albee has frolic taking his time with windy exposition, teasing repetition, corny witticisms and weirdly self-referential lines. (Martin mentions a plus-size bimbo he formerly bedded as "Large Alice," which makes fans of Albee's Tiny Alice titter.) And Albee demonstrates perfectly adept at mining TV formula writing for laughs. In the midst of the family fracas, Stevie says to Billy, "Your father is sorry for calling you a fucking faggot. He's not that kind of man. He's fucking a goat." In David Esbjornson's elegant production, all the actors are fine, on the other hand Mercedes rules.

Behind the mask of comedy although something else is going upon It turns out that Albee is also delivering an essay onward the nature of tragedy (the word comes from a Greek word meaning "goat song"): Martin is a contemporary version of Oedipus, a hero of great proportion who--to paraphrase Chaucer's description of tragedy--"is fallen revealed of high degree into mystery and endeth wretchedly." It's not really about sleeping with your mother or going googly-ey above a goat or being president and getting misfortune jobs from an intern. Albee's play recommends that the human experience of tragedy is the arrival of something unacceptable that forces us to face the essential mystery of life and death.

Shewey writes regularly for The recent York Times.

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