Word: beatriz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...given life to new species of herbs more deadly than hemlock. Each shrub he cultivates is a hybrid of poison and medicinal, each plant developed as a result of his devotion to science, Dr. Rappaccini's most perfect--and most fatal--creation is his daughter, the beautiful Beatriz. She is a symbol of man's inventiveness to rival Pygmalia. The only mother Beatriz can claim is Curiosity; she knows she belongs body and soul to her father. Her breath poison, her tears acid, Beatriz lures the new Adam, a student named Juan, to descent into the garden from his garret...
Rappaccini's daughter embodies all her father's designs and more: innocently guilty, guiltily innocent, she is death in life, life in death; simultaneously poison and antidote. Despite her beauty and naivete, Beatriz is also the perversion of many myths. The forbidden fruit, she is an Italian Beatrice who leads a young man into an inferno, the Christfigure whose father shouts "My child, why have you forsaken me?" This Beatriz not only represents a reworking of past myths, she is also a symbol of moderns. As a solitary prisoner of her condition, she is doomed in her passion for another...
EVEN IF NAYLOR is coping as he was directed, Anne Strassner as Beatriz sometimes slips into reciting when acting poetry. Strassner is a Beatriz without innocence, more a Coppelia than a New Eve with her shoulders drooping and her tinge of petulance. She is as at her best at the end as she gulps from a silver vial that is supposed to redeem her poisonous blood--even though it seems to contradict her intent in the preceding speech...
...director with Chuck Gray) has engaging warmth as the young student and happy romantic. With robust simplicity, he blinds himself to the man-made net that entraps him far from the "green hills and sea foam" of his native Naples. Unfortunately, this makes his realization of the odiousness of Beatriz and the extent of his predicament as sudden as the play is short...
...acting, suggestiveness proliferates in the set and lighting. Plastic ferns and gaudy gold grapes appear hideous at first until they assume nightmarish vibrancy under the lights. Then again, it is appropriate to use flagrantly artificial plants for the garden of a supreme artificer. In addition, the tree which Beatriz calls her brother is made to resemble a stick figure of a man with his head at a tilt. Later, behind Beatriz drinking from the vial, the tree looms like a crucifix. The lighting (designed by James Meyer) creates an illusion of transparency as the Messenger blends...