Bad Romance: Parallels Between The Goat and Buried Child Jessica Viggiani College

Edward Albee’s The Goat and Sam Shephard’s Buried Child are both twentieth-century Pulitzer prize winners, two compositions which reveal challenges to conventional norms of family, love, and relationships. Both of these plays display numerous similarities regarding family. Both present a desirable and ideal nuclear family on the exterior; however hide a dark underlying secret and abnormalities that serve to destroy the family. The female antagonists, Shelly in Buried Child, and Stevie in The Goat are stable figures; however their discovery of the horrifying family secrets resulted in them becoming unstable, and subsequently losing their sense of realism and having mental breakdowns. These breakdowns are emblematic of the women reaching their wits end, rendering them unable to cope with what they once thought was invulnerable.

The Goat focuses on Martin, the loving husband and father, Stevie, the loving wife and mother, and their fifteen-year-old son, Billy. The play revolves around the time when Martin and Stevie have been married twenty years, it is Martin’s fiftieth birthday, and Martin has just been announced the youngest person ever to win the Pritzker Prize — architecture’s version of the Nobel Prize. All aspects of...