Word: cybele
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...line is simple enough. Dion Anthony and William Brown are high school friends and both are in love with a girl named Margaret. Anthony wins the girl but messes up his life while Brown becomes an intensely driven and successful architect. Not only do they share the same mistress, Cybel, but when Anthony falls on hard times Brown gives him work ghost-designing important assignments. Anthony's impossibly sensitive nature drives him to drink and death. Brown has what he's waited a lifetime for, the chance to assume Anthony's role as husband, father and creative designer--but wish...
...creative pagan acceptance of life fighting eternal war with the masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity as represented by Saint Anthony:" Margaret is the "eternal girl woman with a virtuous simplicity of instinct, properly oblivious to everything but the means to her end of maintaining the race;" Cybel is "an incarnation of Cybelle, the Earth Mother doomed to segregation as a pariah in a world of unnatural laws;" and last of all, Brown is "the visionless demi-god of our new materialistic myth--a Success--building his life of exterior things inwardly empty and resourceless...
...flash around their stylized plastic masks and they do so with considerable cleverness. Only John McMartin as Dion Anthony has difficulty finessing his way through the surrealistic script. The New Phoenix's leading lady. Katherine Helmond, does well in the role of Margaret, and Marilyn Sokol is fine as Cybel, although offhand it's difficult to picture how an Earth Mother should be. Best of all is John Glover as Billy Brown. Quick and versatile, the play's few moments of glory...
Like all O'Neill's estranged brothers, Brown and Dion find two common parents. One is our father who art in heaven and the other is Cybel (Dora Landey), the prostitute, who loves Dion and is kept by Brown. Actually, she's less of a whore than an undergraduate impression of one: she's sage, a salty philosopher, Mother Earth and Elaine May all in one. And she likes Dion to kiss her goodbye...
...mystical pattern" which O'Neill is striving for, however, was brilliantly achieved by Donna Smith as Margaret, in the pier scene of the Prologue, and again by Margaret Ragan, as the prostitute Cybel, in her first scene with Anthony. The staging of Sanders was ingeniously worked out by John Holabird '41 and Howard Turner '41, in three raised platforms with black curtain backdrops...