Lost on the way down South

By Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff  |  August 19, 2008

LENOX - Guns. Hank Williams. Goats.

Yup, we're in the South, all right, or at least the South as conceived by the North.

New York playwright Christine Whitley has said that "The Goatwoman of Corvis County," receiving its world premiere at Shakespeare & Company, drew some of its inspiration from her childhood outside Nashville. But her Corvis County, wherever it may actually be, seems situated somewhere between Yoknapatawpha and Dogpatch.

That is, it's at once Southern Gothic and situation-comic, starkly cartoonish and frivolously gruesome. On a good day, this combination might be called "dark comedy"; think Sam Shepard. On a bad day - and this is one of them - it's called a mess. Think shepherd's pie.

Or goatherd's, if you insist. But the goats, frankly, are pretty much incidental to the story: Their offstage bleats provide "humorous" punctuation to some scenes, and the lead character's nickname, earned because she allegedly has near-miraculous healing powers with the beasts, shore do make for a purty down-home title. Mostly, though, the goats are mentioned just to remind us that these people are freaks, caricatures, dysfunctional weirdos. You know, Not Like Us.

So you've got your prattling blond manipulator, your camo-clad redneck hubby, your scowling T-shirted pothead son, and your meek gentleman caller in the form of a shy young lawyer who's here to help the goatwoman get out of a spot of legal trouble. Throw in a hunting rifle, a country-radio soundtrack, and a dark secret or two, and you've got yourself a regular Brunswick stew.

What you don't have is a play, or at least not one that makes sense as comedy, tragedy, or some intriguing amalgam of the two. Whitley seems to want to keep veering constantly from light (even wacky) to dark (even grim) as a way of throwing us invigoratingly off balance; instead, the erratic motion of this dramatic vehicle just leads to carsickness. And as the cliches and "shocking" revelations pile up, over the course of what feels like a very long hour and 45 minutes, it becomes increasingly unclear just where we're supposed to be going or what's supposed to happen once we get there.

It's possible that Robert Walsh's direction is partly to blame for the dizzying lack of equilibrium. But Walsh is generally a reliable driver, and here he handles such technical matters as sudden flashbacks and offstage catastrophes with reassuring ease. He has also helped the actors, including last-minute substitute Keira Naughton and Boston rookie-of-the-year Daniel Berger-Jones, find as much real feeling and intention as possible in their ridiculous characters.

Meanwhile the playwright is resorting to increasingly desperate gambits, including lumbering chunks of exposition and awkwardly repeated lines. So if we need to find something to blame here, I'd say it's the script.

Then again, maybe it's the goats.