By Robert Avila

A PERFECT MARRIAGE , an ideal family, a highly successful career, a life of privilege and comfort, the approbation of one's peers and the admiration of the public – all brought crashing down by an affair. It's an old story, of course, except the part about the goat. And yet Edward Albee's 2002 Tony Award-winner, The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? – which closes American Conservatory Theater's season in a powerhouse Bay Area premiere courtesy of director Richard E.T. White – is theater of remarkable and lingering power, a result of its revivifying examination of classic dramatic structure as much as the unsettling transgression of contemporary norms.

Architect Martin Gray (Don R. McManus) stands at the peak of worldly success. At 50, he's become the youngest recipient of architecture's highest prize, and won a ridiculously large $200 billion commission from corporate America to design the "World City," an architectural dreamscape of the future set to rise from the farm fields of the Middle West. We learn so from Martin's childhood friend Ross Tuttle (Charles Shaw Robinson), who's over to tape an interview with Martin for Ross's television show, a program with the snobby title People Who Matter. At the same time, in a necessary concession to a supposedly democratic age (and as part of Albee's arch setup of the play's central tension), Ross must stumblingly qualify his introduction by observing that naturally "everyone's special," it's just that the Martin Grays of the world "matter in extraordinary ways, in ways which affect the lives of the rest of us – enrich them, inform them." And so Ross inadvertently sums up, with comical bluntness, the building blocks of the Greek-style tragedy ahead.

Martin, meanwhile, expresses little interest in the future, let alone in building it. (In this respect, he's something of a reluctant Faustian type.) As we first encounter him, he's a distracted and forgetful mess, much more worried about the recent past, like where he left the head of his shaving razor. Martin's scattered mind comes from the consciousness of having deceived his beloved wife, Stevie (Pamela Reed), by falling in love with a certain Sylvia. Now, as Martin is faced with having to confess an inexplicable love to the woman he adores and their 17-year-old son Billy (Joseph Parks, in an impressively supple turn), the Gray family threatens to be brought irremediably down.

The Goat is really several plays at once: a ferocious comedy, a family melodrama, and a modern rendering of Greek tragedy. As the deceptively simple plot moves forward over the course of three scenes (making up a single 105-minute act), its formal structure points further and further back. Subtitled Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy, the play in fact heads as far back as the dawn of Western drama. (And when one considers that the Greek root of the word tragedy, tragos, means "goat," even that four-legged plot detail gains a certain historical heft.)

The play's mode at the outset, however, as we meet Stevie and Martin, is that of a sophisticated if slightly outrageous modern comedy. The exceptionally well-matched, intelligent and loving couple even burlesque themselves at one point, in a playful bit of Noel Coward-inspired repartee that amounts (unbeknownst to Stevie) to the entire story in a nutty nutshell. In scene two, the comedy suddenly takes on darker, more dramatic shading as Stevie and Billy reel over the revelation of Martin's bizarre infidelity. Finally, in the third movement, we follow this ideal American family into the abyss of full-blown pre-modern tragedy. This is not literally a Greek drama, of course. The acting is naturalistic, there's no chorus, and the only masks (mostly African art pieces in the Gray household) remain mounted on the wall. But the ancient form bleeds visually and thematically into the scene like a palimpsest.

Throughout, Albee's dialogue and story line are masterfully crystalline, laced with classical and even self-referential allusions, ethical and existential questions, and metaphorical subtleties that continue unfolding long after the curtain falls. White's direction is meticulous and spot-on, while his cast is outstanding. McManus's Martin, in his futile attempt to convey and then wrestle with the social implications of his ineffable experience, grows superbly in complexity, while Reed brilliantly and chillingly transforms Stevie into a fully tragic heroine, culminating in an almost atavistic incarnation of avenging womanhood.

Kent Dorsey's luxuriant set design – an elegantly styled contemporary living room filled with enough antique art, sculpture, and exotica to fill a small museum – gives us the contrast between the ancient and modern again with just the right degree of excess to match the play's own meta-narrative impulses. After Stevie, in her anguish and rage, has reduced much of this scene to rubble, Peter Maradudin's fiery late-afternoon sunlight further suffuses the room in the play's final movement with an atmosphere evocative of doomful and overlapping trajectories, personal and historical.

'The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?' runs through July 10. See Stage listings for show times. Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. $11-$68, (415) 749-2228. www.act-sf.org.