Word: artaud
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SPRING HAS BEEN a long time in returning to Cambridge, and all the seemingly endless darkness, clouds, and rain, fire murky, malevolent impulses find their perfect expression in the Mather House Drama Society production of Antonin Artaud's The Cenci. The little-known play, set in sixteenth century Italy, details the family problems of the slightly offbeat Duke of Cenci, who in the course of the play turns Oedipus on his ear by killing his sons and sleeping with his daughter...
...EVEN though Monsieur Artaud was a strange and rather tortured fellow--a French poet-actor who equated sex with eviceration and spent most of his life following the 1935 debut of The Cenci in an insane asylum--and although he wrote a strange and rather tortuous play, his work has been redeemed as more than a curiosity by this Mather House group. Cenci is frequently longwinded, but Wingrove takes stage with sweeping and dynamic gestures, booming tones, and a demonic glint, effectively conveying the sickly obsession of the protagonist. Like her father, Susan Kelly's Beatrice is wronged...
...example, the play opens and intersperses scenes with flashing lights, organ music, and Gregorian chants a la Young Frankenstein. The audience, though puzzled, is amused, and the playmakers are faithful to Artaud's intention that theatre be the church of an inverted religion exorcising violence from man by acting it out on stage...
...Great Artist. It is big, and stuffed with clunky references to other Great Art, from Caravaggio to Joseph Beuys. Its imagery is callow and solemn, a Macy's parade of expressionist bric-a-brac: skulls, bullfights, crucifixes, severed heads. It includes portraits of the likes of Baudelaire, Artaud, Burroughs and other connoisseurs of crisis. It serves up, by implication, the image of Schnabel himself as a young Prince of Aquitaine, albeit a Texan one, sleepless with memory and disillusion, contemplating the wrenched spare parts of history: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In short, it is pretentious...
...Antonin Artaud...