Word: dionysus
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While that hardbought insight illuminates the current production at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater, the clash of wills between King Pentheus of Thebes and the god Dionysus is somewhat muffled, despite Michael Cacoyannis' incisive direction and his crisply idiomatic translation. John Noah Hertzler's Pentheus is less a king than a kinglet, a petty tyro tyrant, and Christopher Rich's Dionysus is no god but a godlet, a prancing posturer devoid of awe, might and mystery...
...Dionysus and the nerd wander off together, the latter eventually drawn into the plot as a sexual outlet for Granny (Bernadette Ward), who replaces Aristophanes' female chorus. He periodically peers out from atop the triangular point of the Acropolis, for no apparent reason...
...production begins wth Dionysus (Kosta Demos) standing on a pedestal in an awkward statuesque pose for what seems an interminable length of time. You think hard--you don't remember any Dionysus in this play. Your memory is better than you thought; director Alfredo Estrada has almost completely rewritten this play, adding and deleting characters at will...
...After Dionysus pronounces his name as both deye-yon-i-sis and deye-yo-neye-sis in the first two minutes, you begin to sense the shape of things to come. Later, you will hear Lysistrata pronounced as both li-si-stra-ta and leye-si-stra-ta, but by then the mispronounciation will seem only a minor quibble. Demos' portrayal of Dionysus is pompous, even smug, as it should be, but his pretentious remarks about respecting the sanctity of Aristophanes' play, whether performed in Athens or the Winthrop JCR, rings hollow. Director Estrada didn't, why should...
...hackneyed stereotype and cheap shots; while a few of the lines succeed (Man deprived of sex: "Do you know what four years can do to a person? Another man deprived of sex: "Yes, I was a Harvard man, too."), they more often fall flat (Kinesias...Senator Edward Kinesias!). Dionysus delivers many of these awkward lines, which are difficult to digest, but not nearly so difficult as the leering way that he recounts the tale of his "love" for Aryadne. Dionysus's role has nothing to do with the body of the play, except that the production, already a mercifully short...