Nature abhors a vacuum and so did Spiro Veloudos, the artistic director of the Lyric Stage Company, who has been trying to get ''The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" since seeing it in New York, where it won the Tony Award in 2002.
And he makes the most of this opportunity. ''The Goat" is one of those plays that's a director's and actor's dream. The story of a man who blows up his perfect life all for the love of a farm animal -- and we're not talking Platonic love -- is both hysterically funny and jaw-droppingly tragic. It's naturalistic in form, but with a dollop of absurdism.
Veloudos's direction is masterful. All the play's disparate elements are in proper proportions, with help from four gifted actors. The Architectural Digest set design by Brynna C. Bloomfield, complete with modern art and ancient artifacts, couldn't be better in capturing the bourgeois contentment that ''The Goat" deftly punctures.
The self-satisfaction of the American Dream has been a target of Albee's from ''The Zoo Story" in 1958 and ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1962 through his later plays. Self-satisfaction turns to self-deception in Albee's work, and in ''The Goat" it does so with roller-coaster rapidity.
Martin is a character who has it all. He's an internationally renowned architect. His wife is the only woman he's ever wanted. His son is gay, and Martin can congratulate himself that he didn't need ''Seinfeld" to tell him there's nothing wrong with that.
But perhaps it's our fate that there will always be a love that dare not speak its name. No matter how we pride ourselves on tolerance, there will always be something to test that tolerance. And no matter how we arrange our perfect families, there will always be temptation.
Albee floats these themes, in part by seducing us at first into thinking that we're watching a comedy Noel Coward, whom he both admires and emulates, might have written had he come along in the 21st century.
