Word: cassandras
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Would that the two one-acters with which the house makes its debut showed similar qualities. Despite fitful laughter, both plays have a Cassandra complex. Their common theme has been constantly drummed in recent seasons-woe is me, woe is you, woe is America. Such plays are loaded with enough dolorous symbols to break the back of Melville's whale. To compound their disadvantages, both playwrights seem wedded to the fallacy that drama is some kind of nonstop talk show...
Ruth is a whore, although the audience doesn't know it yet. The true import of Pinter's words, like the pronouncements of Cassandra, are never quite clear until the scene has been fully played out. The joke is on the actors, but also on the audience, for the broad one-liners always turn out to have a deeper meaning. This is the essence of Pinter: the audience snickers and chuckles its way through the play, only to realize at the end, that it was not funny...
Naturally, Stone has been labeled a maverick, muckraker, Cassandra, curmudgeon, gadfly and guerrilla. All of which are pretty respectable terms these days. At 63, "I've graduated from being a pariah to a character," Stone says with a kind of inverse pride. "If I last long enough, I'll have a certain amount of credibility and weight." Politically, he considers himself to be just about what a leading adversary, Spiro Agnew, says he is: a well-ripened radic-lib. "I was a New Lefty before there was a New Left," he brags...
...alien to his own exalted New England speech. "My hand drifted up and touched my brow, finding it was as wet and cold as the belly of a trout," he wrote in Out of My League. "It was a disclosure which sent the voice spinning off in a cracker-Cassandra's wail of doom. 'Mah God!' it cried out, 'y'all gonna faint out heah. Lawd Almahty! Y'gonna faint...
...four female stars in Madrid to film The Trojan Women. A concatenation of cats? A frisson of felines? Not at all. Playing mother hen, Katharine Hepburn (Hecuba) immediately put rebellious Vanessa Redgrave (Andromache) at ease by warmly embracing her when Vanessa arrived with her daughter. Meeting Senevieve Bujold (Cassandra), Katie called her "My child," to which the young Canadian actress responded with a deferential "Madame." Even Greek-born Irene Papas (Helen) was filled with love. Asked how she felt about working with her longtime mentor and friend, Director Michael Cacoyannis, she replied: "That's like asking...