Word: goat
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...bells that Aggie Hogan sewed in the hems of her dresses ring softly and sadly throughout William Alfred's Hogan's Goat. Though never seen in the play, and dead by the middle of the first act, she lives on as the persisting memory of sin which drives Alfred's characters to tragedy...
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...
...unprovoked violence. Once more, the defense hammered away at alleged inconsistencies in the testimony of prosecution witnesses. Shying away from the blatant racism of the late Matt Murphy, who defended Wilkins at the last trial, Attorney Arthur Hanes told the jury it had to choose between the "Judas goat," Gary Rowe, and the "scapegoat," Collie Wilkins. If you do not vote for conviction, countered Attorney General Flowers, "the blood of this man's sin will stain your county for eternity...