Well, Sylvia finally died for the last time.

I spent the last two weekends of The Goat sitting in our makeshift light/sound "booth," waiting. With such a technically minimalist show, there were only a handful of cues spaced out over nearly two hours. leaving me plenty of time in between to stare off into space or, more frequently, watch the audience.

Much as I love this show, it's a little too intense to witness closely every night. I first read The Goat the year it came out and immediately fell in love with it with a kind of sad resignation as I assumed no group would ever produce it, or at least not in Cincinnati. When I finally got to see it first-hand here at New Stage a few weeks ago, it was definitely worth the wait. The raw emotions that appear on stage and the troubling subject matter force you to think about a topic that I at least had never considered. Not just think about it as a passing whim, but in a jarring, intensely personal way. It shakes you.

Which is why I loved watching other people respond. At the start of the show, there is always audible laughing, sometimes an isolated giggle, sometimes washing over the room as the whole audience resounds with one deep guffaw. A man having an affair with a goat? Ridiculous. Hee hee. But slowly, it stops being funny. This is not just an interesting notion to contemplate, but a reality, a terrible reality for the characters on stage. As the audience starts to believe it, the laughter changes. It becomes nervous, grateful for relief from the yelling, the desperate silences, the crash of pottery.

I always considered the ultimate test of an audience to be when Stevie carries on the dead Sylvia (who, by the way, left fake blood and hairs everywhere, including on my arms when I had to take her backstage every night. Ew. Anyway-). Sometimes this was met with dead silence, as if the whole audience was holding their breath. Often there were gasps. I liked those. It's always a nice reminder that the audience is getting emotionally invested in the work, enough that they would forget the people around them, forget the theatrical construct, and allow themselves to react as they would normally. And every once in a while, someone would laugh. I always wondered about those. Was it nervous laughter? Were they trying to cover another reaction? I still don't know. But even then, the effect of the work on the individual was palpable. It got to them, somehow. And that's the kind of shows I like working on.