The issue at the heart of the family battle royal in Edward Albee's "The Goat" is shocking -- funny, sure, but intentionally upsetting and even disgusting.

Nonetheless, Rodger Henderson, now directing it for the professional company at the Pittsburgh Playhouse of Point Park University, says he has wanted to work on it ever since he saw it on Broadway with Bill Irwin and Sally Field, who replaced Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruhl.

"There's something Albee does, like in 'Three Tall Women' or 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' -- he pushes human nature to an extreme that I connect with," Henderson says. "People believe, 'Oh, I would never do that,' but what a human being is capable of is really quite amazing. It's extreme, but they're real people."

Henderson thinks the audience might as well know in advance that the infidelity that sets off the play's marital warfare involves sexual relations with an animal. He doesn't want audiences to come with no idea of what they're in for -- and because the theater is small and the 110-minute play has no intermission, stumbling out in the dark would be disruptive.

Besides, the ending of the play is surprising enough.

As to why Playhouse Rep is staging it in the tiny Studio Theatre (formerly Theatre Downstairs), Henderson says, "I wanted the intimacy of it. I prefer theater that is not proscenium, because we're so used to TV, which is proscenium, and [we've learned to] dissociate from very easily."

The tiny theater means people will have to make reservations quickly for the bifurcated run: starting this weekend, pausing for Thanksgiving week, then on again Dec. 4-14.

Of course, Henderson's main reason to do "The Goat" is that it's a very good play, disturbing and funny in equal measure. When the PG named it one of the 10 best plays of 2002 outside Pittsburgh, it said: "The prolific elder pixie of the American theater is in a playful mood, but there's a cold void beneath the laughter. ... A crisp black comedy about infidelity, 'The Goat' shreds a marriage before our eyes ... brilliantly sad and darkly funny."

As profiled a year ago in the Post-Gazette, Henderson retired early from his longtime position at San Francisco State University, due partly to a recurring facial cancer that has required more than a dozen operations. He chose to move to Pittsburgh to work with the theater community he had come to know, mainly through his memorable work directing nine productions for Quantum Theatre, beginning with "Polygraph" in 1996.

(For more about Henderson, go to the 2007 Post-Gazette profile.

From the start, Henderson wanted to cast Robin Walsh, with whom he's worked several times at Quantum, as the astonished wife. "I wanted to take that journey with her."

Technically, the husband is the central character, Henderson concedes, "but she has the harder role. He's already into the affair, but she has to wrap her mind around it."

He was confident they could find actors in Pittsburgh for the other parts. The result has Tony Bingham playing the husband, Justin DeWolf as their son and Daniel Krell as the buttinsky friend. The designers are Stephanie Mayer-Staley, Scott Nelson, Michael Montgomery and Elizabeth Atkinson.

DeWolf played Frog in the musical "Frog and Toad" that Henderson directed at the Playhouse last spring. As a Point Park sophomore, he had to have his acting teacher's permission to audition for professionals. Henderson had him read with Walsh "to give him an emotional challenge -- and he met it. He has surprised me all along with his depth."

The auditions were last spring, because Albee's contract requires that you submit cast information well in advance, presumably because he wants to prohibit the unusual experiments sometimes visited on his plays, such as single-sex casts.

The troubling blend of comedy and tragedy in "The Goat" is already unusual enough.