Word: goats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...