by AMY BARRATT

You've got to hand it to playwright Edward Albee - he doesn't shy away from controversial material. Watching a production of 1962's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? last year, I found that his scripts still had the power to shock. And there's a very good chance that The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia, first produced in 2000, will still pack a visceral punch 40 or more years hence.

You've got to hand it to our venerable 35-year-old theatre company, too. The Centaur is sure to upset a subscriber or two by including this play in their season. But at least one or two more will consider this recent opening the best show the company has ever done. And this is a play, daring though it may be, that belongs in a mainstream house. It gains some of its power from the fact that the people on stage resemble the people in the audience, and that the set (sofa, coffee table, tasteful art) looks like the set for every other domestic drama the theatre has ever produced.

It's not giving much away to tell you that The Goat is about a man - a married, middle-aged architect - who falls in love with a barnyard animal. His wife, naturally, finds out, and it takes a whole play just to get everybody's emotions on the table. I can't imagine any writer but Albee, a master at taking "normal" American families and turning them inside out, telling this story. It's an outrageous premise that he attacks with such conviction that we have no choice but to go along.

Of course it requires a director and a group of actors to commit just as passionately to the premise. This the Centaur company does with very satisfying results. Jennifer Morehouse has both the most difficult and the best role to play as Martin's wife Stevie. While McCall has to spend a good deal of the play wincing and looking miserable, Morehouse needs to summon all of her strength, not just emotional but vocal and physical, to create this role. It is Stevie who elevates this absurd scenario to the level of tragedy. Having seen Morehouse, a great Canadian actor who happens to live here, play Stevie, I look forward to her Medea.

The cast is rounded out by Anthony Johnston, as the couple's gay son, and Daniel Giverin, as Martin's friend Ross. Each has some good moments, but the play belongs to Martin and Stevie.

The Centaur production comes at a very opportune moment in Canadian history, opening the same week as the federal government tabled same-sex marriage legislation. One can't help recalling the standard conservative "Where will it lead?" argument against equal marriage. It will open the door to polygamy, they say, and what's to stop some guy, they ask, from demanding the right to wed his dog?

Albee, who, incidentally, is gay, isn't wading in to this debate per se. I'm pretty sure he isn't advocating bestiality or anything else, unless it's the examined life. He is looking at the taboos that exist in society that prevent us from talking about certain subjects, except as jokes. The playwright isn't asking us to throw out all of our values, just to consider which are well thought-out and which are merely knee-jerk reactions.

This production could even make us question the assumption that important theatre doesn't happen in mainstream houses.

The Goat or, Who is Sylvia runs until March 13 at Centaur (453 St-François-Xavier), 288-3161, $20–$40

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