Word: cereno
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ROBERT LOWELL'S Benito Cereno traces a dark path, negating an American's ideals, showing the invalidity of his perceptions and ending in a release of irrational violence...
Based on a short novel by Herman Melville, Benito Cereno confronts Yankee sea captain Amassa Delano with a Peruvian slave ship carrying 80 ominous Africans and four strangely behaved Spaniards, all victims of some unknown disaster, who alternately accept and ignore the American's patronizing assistance...
Because the cast seems unaware of--or apologetic for--Benito Cereno's deliberate formalism, the entire production loses dignity in its first minutes, and forces the audience to laughter over such accidentally topical phrases as "law and order...
EVEN the remarkable depiction of the master-slave relation between the slave ship's apparent captain, Don Benito Cereno (William Young), and his apparent slave Babu (James Spruill) fails to compensate for the inappropriate tone. The image of Babu as a happy, able and devoted servant seduces Delano into unwitting contradiction of his American democratic precepts: "Sometimes I think we overdo our talk of freedom./ If you looked into our hearts, we all want slaves...
...turns out that Babu is Cereno's master, that he led the blacks in killing their masters and most of the ship's crew. He is using Cereno in order to capture Delano and force him to pilot the slaves back to Africa...