'Goat' a challenging role for suburban actor

Actor and suburban native Michael Joseph Mitchell first fell in love with Edward Albee's tragic-comedy “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” in 2002 when it was running on Broadway.

“My wife and I saw it in its original production twice,” Mitchell admits. “We were so stunned by the play. Albee was, as always, brilliant. But we really needed to see it again, to see what we missed.”

Mitchell laughs and then adds, “If we could have afforded it we would have gone back several more times.”

Now, nine years later, he gets a chance to inhabit Albee's masterpiece, in a production at the Chicago-based Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. And Mitchell — who grew up moving around in Hoffman Estates, Arlington Heights and Libertyville — has found the play is even more of a challenge on the inside.

“You realize going into a production like this that it is going to be a hard play. Albee writes the way people think, which is not linear,” Mitchell says. “But boy is it hard to do.”

During rehearsals, the four actors in the production lived that challenge.

“You think, looking at the play from the audience, that acting it looks easy,” Mitchell says. “It is brilliant the way Albee captures the way people's brains work.”

As you might expect from the playwright responsible for such searing plays as “The Zoo Story” and “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Albee's storyline for “The Goat” is a true button-pusher: A successful middle-aged man one day discovers he has fallen deeply love in with a goat. So deeply, in fact, that it tears his family apart.

Mitchell plays Ross, the main character's best friend — the one who has to break the news to the protagonist's wife.

“I have the easiest job of the four of us,” he says. “But still, after every rehearsal, I go home and sit and stare — and don't speak for half an hour.”

But for Mitchell, the work is worth it.

“The play is so hard, but it is so rewarding; it is one of Albee's best plays,” he says. “It is hilariously funny at times, sitcom funny, for the first 30 minutes. But that comedy is all tension and release so you can live through the full 90 minutes of the play.”

“The play is short,” he continues, “but it is packed with basic questions about what life is about and why we are here.”

<b>“The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?”</b>

<b>Location: </b>Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, (773) 404-7336 or <a href="http://www.remybumppo.org" target="_blank">remybumppo.org</a>

<b>Showtimes: </b>7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Additional show 7 p.m. Monday, April 4, as well as some additional matinees. Runs through May 8.

<b>Tickets: </b>$30-$45