Word: cencie
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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...
...Cenci (David Wingrove) is a man fed up with the hypocrisies of the Renaissance Church, personified by Camillo (Roger Kaplan). We know that Camillo embodies these hypocrisies--he always wears a miter--especially since he denounces Cenci for some unnamed crime, yet wants to punish our hero by taking away his estates in the name of the Church, thereby revealing greed. To demonstrate his contempt for this false system of values, Cenci embarks on a spree of killing and feasting, all leading up to his "defilement" of his daughter Beatrice (Susan Kelly). "For me," he says, "life, death, god, incest...
...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...
Sills came to the Met secure in her stardom. For Diaz's career, the principal male role in Siege means something completely different. Ten years younger than Sills, he has been at the Met for 12 and yet his greatest role to date--that of Count Cenci in Ginastera's Beatrix Cenci--didn't take place at the Met: Beatrix Cenci opened the Kennedy Center in 1972 and ran for two years at the New York City Opera. The role of Maometto, which he sang at La Scala with Sills in 1969 for his own debut there, is another crucial...
while plotting his family's ruin, Count Cenci muses: "The difference between the villainies committed in real life and the villainies acted out on the stage is that in real life we do more and say less: while in the theater we talk endlessly and accomplish very little." Cenci proposes to restore the balance, but because of Artaud's limited idea of theater and the production's failings, his promise goes unfulfilled. The Cenci is mostly talk...