Word: edwardes
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...protagonist is Edward Damson (Michael Pennington), a famous playwright for whom the theater is a religion and its most sacred ritual the revenge- murder that he sees at the heart of Greek tragedy. Edward has a fanatical faith in the cleansing purity of blood vengeance. His wife Helen (Judi Dench), who holds deeply to a liberal belief in fairness and mercy, is his muse and counterbalance -- playing Athena, goddess of reason, to his Perseus, the mythological hero who killed the monstrous Gorgon. The play hinges on the passionate dialectic between these two, which turns ominous when it leaves the realm...
...story is unfolded by Helen in flashbacks after Edward's exile to a Greek island and mysterious death. Her listener, a young professor of theater and would-be biographer, is also the playwright's unacknowledged son from a previous marriage, desperate to know and not to know the father being revealed...
...encompasses builds to a fierce momentum. Pennington and particularly Dench perform with such conviction that one forgets there is anything preposterous about their characters. This time Shaffer does not stack the deck in his perennial intellect-ecstasy debate but leaves the outcome ambiguous. In a gory, disturbing finale, both Edward and Helen must plumb, in their ways, the terrible meaning of the Perseus legend: that the slayer of the Gorgon becomes the thing he or she destroys...
ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Edward Barnes, Richard Behar, Janice Castro, Philip Elmer- DeWitt, Christine Gorman, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, Michael D. Lemonick, Thomas McCarroll, Richard N. Ostling, Janice C. Simpson, Jill Smolowe, Anastasia Toufexis...
CONTRIBUTORS: Kurt Andersen, Bonnie Angelo, Laurence I. Barrett, Jesse Birnbaum, Jay Cocks, Barbara Ehrenreich, John Elson, Otto Friedrich, Pico Iyer, Edward L. Jamieson (Consulting Editor), Leon Jaroff, Stefan Kanfer, Michael Kinsley, Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Overbye, Richard Schickel, R.Z. Sheppard, John Skow, Martha Smilgis, Richard Stengel, George M. Taber, Andrew Tobias...