Goat

In Goat, a short one-act for a man and a woman, we hear in the darkness the sounds of subway trains passing above and see a flickering fire in front of a man sitting, warming his hands.  Lil, with a flashlight, asks the man if his name is Goat.  He tells her to go away, but she says she needs him to do something for her.  He says there are snakes everywhere, that he kills and eats them and makes boots out of their skins.  He asks her why she has come to this lost place and tells her that he is here because he was cast out.  Lil says that Goat knows her husband and his brother and their father because the father is also Goat’s father.  She says things were fine until the second son came along and Goat was replaced in his father’s affections and pushed out.  The third son was Adam, her husband, the moron.  Goat says he dreams of falling into the abyss, and Lil says she dreams about the garden and wants Goat to help her get back at the father by tricking Adam’s new wife into breaking the rules and begin a “relentless chain reaction.”  She says Goat is the only one who can make the father pay for casting them out.  He can wear his snakeskin boots, she says, and we hear the sound of “something violent and terrible going by” as the light fades out.