Best Onstage Argument Against the Sanctity of Marriage

If there are plays about the sacred and holy union known as heterosexual marriage, Edward Albee didn't write them. From 1962's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?to his most recent, The Goat, Albee's plays startlingly dissect the institution, and real-life married couple Mark Robbins and Elizabeth Robbins bravely picked up The Goat's scalpel at the Unicorn Theatre in March. The lengthy fight at the center of the play was like an exorcism of the stage couple's every grievance over a 20-year haul. And despite the inter-species love affair on the surface of the play, Albee isn't writing about bestiality. He is revealing what happens to partners when everything they hold dear turns out to be pockmarked with lies. In the process, he raises one of nature's most basic questions: fight or flight?