Word: babe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Carl Nagin as Dionysus is brilliant within the context of the interpretation. He succeeds in breaking up lines written in the fifth century B. C. with cigarette smoke, a feat that demonstrates Babe's modernizing at its most effective...
...Babe has directed the part, however, Pentheus is more than irritable--he is mad. So it means very little for him to fall under the spell of Dionysus as he has no rationality to be deprived of. At the start Pentheus should provide a sane, if angered, resistance to the god. In the Agassiz production he can only spit inanities...
Director Thomas Babe has chosen to do the William Arrowsmith translation in modern dress, with Pentheus of Thebes looking something like a teenage Marshal Ky, and the god Dionysus a blond-haired cigarette-smoking James Dean. The first resemblance is most pointed; Babe interprets the autocratic, highly organized government of Thebes as a garrison--perhaps fascist--state, threatened by the earthly, irrational Dionysiac cult. The interpretation works in that Babe's production is exciting theatre, and in the end faithful to the original as well. Just the same there are points worth questioning...
...this sense Babe's interpretation of The Bacchae fits only incompletely, but it is a fascinating, often startlingly valid job of reapplication. Where it doesn't fit, we still have the original. Babe has not been so carried away with the modern parallel as to seriously distort the play, and in the second half he seems to have kept his modernizing to a minimum. Thus the limitation of the fascist parallel--its lack of a modern alternative into which Dionysus can fit--is never fully exposed, because the interpretation is correctly underplayed...
William Schroeder's uncomplicated set seems wholly appropriate not only to the play but to Babe's rendering of it. Probably no designer has ever done so well by Agassiz's rather stultifying stage. In fact the whole technical side of Babe's production is flawless, with the lighting particularly commendable...