Word: cereno
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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...
...Benito Cereno, Herman Melville's parable about slavery, the moody, vaguely ailing captain of a Spanish slave ship is asked: "What has cast such a shadow upon you?" He replies simply: "The Negro." In the long aftershadow of centuries, that answer, says James Pope-Hennessy, still holds true...