Word: hogans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Matthew Stanton is an Irish immigrant to the Brooklyn of the 1890's. For three years he lives with the older, well-to-do Aggie Hogan. Believing that she has been unfaithful to him with Edward Quinn, Brooklyn's mayor, Stanton flees to England where he marries an Irish girl of good family in a civil ceremony. Matthew and Kathleen return to Brooklyn to start a new life. Matthew becomes a political power and at the beginning of the play decides to challenge Quinn for the mayoralty nomination. However, when what's left of Aggie Hogan dies, the unfinished business...
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...
...Alfred's 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...