Word: electras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mourning Becomes Electra (RKO Radio). The eye glides like a skiff across the black, lurching waters of a New England harbor. The sound track blares the black, lurching music of the chantey, Shenandoah. And on the screen the dreadful, faintly ludicrous enginery of Eugene O'Neill's tragedy of incest lurches, and begins...
Mourning Becomes Electra (produced on Broadway in 1931) was never a great play-let alone a great Greek play. But it is a play that hankers after greatness (and Greekness) like a schoolgirl with a crush on a bust of Aeschylus. By attempting to dramatize the Oedipus complex on a framework of Greek drama, O'Neill produced a travesty of Freudian thought and something like a parody of Greek tragedy...
Mozart's librettist, Giambattista Varesco, brewed a confusing plot based on the Odyssey, with such extraneous characters as Electra thrown in. Idomeneo, King of Crete, is buffeted by storms on his return from the siege of Troy. To appease Poseidon, he swears to sacrifice the first person he encounters on landing. That turns out to be his son Idamante, who is in love with Ilia, daughter of the vanquished King of Troy. The gods finally clear up the whole matter, and the opera ends four hours later with Idamante and Ilia on the throne. Even the charm of Mozart...
William Addison Dwiggins, free-lance designer and typographical adviser of Hingham, Mass., America's preeminent designer of type faces (Caledonia, Electra, Metro and others), redesigner of periodicals (Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Century, Scribners, The Yale Review, American Mercury) book designer (A. A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, Yale University Press, Random House. The Limited Editions Club, Riverside Press, William E. Rudge, Harvard University). Master of Arts. Citation: "Typographical designer whose skill and creative imagination have left a lasting impress on the pages of our time...
...Shock." As if he had not enough troubles of his own, the unwed father has to worry about what the mother thinks of him. If, for example, she has an Electra complex (abnormal crush on her own father), she may just act as if her child's father didn't exist. This is damaging to his pride. At the other extreme, if she is a shrewish sort, her vindictiveness against him may reach "vicious proportions...