Word: emperor
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JULIAN, by Gore Vidal. A voluminous, fascinating historical novel, well researched, yet remaining oddly dispassionate and at one remove from the vibrant and youthful Roman emperor whose turbulent, 18-month reign marked the last conflict in the Western world between pagan Hellenism and early Christianity...
...achieve it, director Ben Shaktman and his colleagues turned to Eugene O'Neill, our greatest American dramatist, and revived his simple but powerful psychological study of a Negro's fear and fall from power, The Emperor Jones--but with a difference. The usual scenery and iterated tom-tom beatings have been replaced by a dozen ballet dancers and and extended orchestral score. The 1920 play was "experimental" to begin with, and O'Neill would certainly have approved the result of this further experimentation...
Performing on a bare set, the near-naked dancers themselves become the arched doorway through which the Emperor flees in panic, the stones he overturns looking for buried food, the forest trees and river he encounters during the dark night, and the visions that plague and terrorize him. Daniel Nagrin's superb choreography is enhanced by William Batchelder's expert lighting...
Being largely a monologue, the play naturally depends heavily on its Emperor, the part first made famous by Charles Gilpin and later by Paul Robeson. The work has been a rarity hereabouts. I recall seeing only Rex Ingram's performance at the Brattle Theatre shortly after the War, and Harold Scott's at Agassiz Theatre in the mid-fifties--both admirable...
...West Indian birth and U.S. citizenship, Julian first became involved in African military causes in 1930 when he personally destroyed one-third of the Ethiopian air force. Of course, it consisted of only three air planes, one of which the Black Eagle managed to crash at the feet of Emperor Haile Selassie. After serving as an arms buyer for various Latin American countries, the Black Eagle showed up in the Congo, only to be arrested in 1962, then expelled by the United Nations for allegedly smuggling arms to Tshombe...