Word: creon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...once again, thanks to the American Shakespeare Festival, we are able to witness the stunning story of Antigone, who, believing that the soul of an unburied body was condemned to restless wandering throughout eternity, defied the order of King Creon, her uncle, by scattering earth on the rotting corpse of her slain brother Polyneices, with the full knowledge that the penalty for so doing was death...
...alter certain features of Sophocles' play. But he had every right to do so. After all, Sophocles' own version of the tale was far from the first, and contained its own innovations. Before Sophocles, Antigone was supported in her act by other young maidens; and she was defying, not Creon and his guards, but the corporate decree of the entire Theban Senate. Sophocles had the inspired idea of placing Antigone in glorious isolation; and, as Sir Donald F. Tovey said in a quite different context, "Nothing in human life and history is much more thrilling or of more ancient...
Antigone holds a special historical position, too. Written in 1942 and first performed in 1944, it was the most important stage work to emerge during the Occupation. It was widely construed as a political allegory, the conflict between Antigone and Creon being viewed as that between the R*esistance and the collaborationists. The French people were divided, however, into those who found the play "fascist" and those who found it "antifascist." Thus Anouilh would seem to have achieved a good deal of the "negative capability" that Keats attributed to Shakespeare. And it is true that Anouilh did not stack...
There was smoke right from the first reading. In Anouilh's updating of Euripides' tragedy, Medea is abandoned by her lover, Jason, who takes up with Glauce, daughter of King Creon of Corinth; in retribution, Medea kills her two children by Jason, and murders both Glauce and Creon. Magnani's view was that Medea had got the short end of the stick, that Jason was a no-good porco. Menotti did not quite see it that way. "Jason's story is like every Italian man's," he explained. "He is just a tired...
...script, although I once more wanted more speaking and less action. The red lights of the climax in Rex were replaced by the shattering booms of Zeus' thunder; even Laura Esterman as Ismene, with emotion shivering in every syllable, was drowned out by the noise. Friedman as Creon again, Richard Backus as Theseus, and David Blocker, who replaced a less talented Lorenzo Weisman of Rex as the leader of the Colonus chorus, supplied that immeasurably graceful skill of speech which brought me back from the visual, just as I had wanted...