Word: gorgon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...morbid fear of water; the other insists that she is a survivor of the mythic deluge that engulfed continental Atlantis millenniums before humans got around to organizing memory into history. Order a brain scan or a cocktail of antipsychotics? Neither choice is likely, not because the gorgon at the HMO refuses to sign off on the procedures but because Dr. Perlman's clinic for the interestingly unhinged is located in low-tech London at the beginning of the 20th century...
...martial rule. As his victims are mourned, the dead murderer's grim story keeps unfolding, with details of financial folly, maudlin suicide notes, adultery, brutality, suspected fraud, even an earlier set of suspected murders. At a time of increased public anxiety over such shooting sprees, he is a severed Gorgon's head, freezing onlookers with horrific astonishment. Who was Mark Orrin Barton? Why did he go berserk...
There's Nero's ravenous tutor, Plato Pasta (Berman), who's busy planning his ideal Republic "with room for everybody...except for them frigging Corinthians." There's Plato's love interest Medusa Pade (Andrew Burlinson '97), a love-starved gorgon with killer head of hair...
...inhabits her character far more believably than do any of the others. Fiona Reed is likewise quite good as the intimidating Lady Bracknell. Reed is about twenty years younger than most actors cast in this famous part and this makes the part more interesting. She is no less a gorgon for being pretty but her relative youth (which after all makes much more sense for the mother of twenty-something Gwendolen than the usual late 60s matron cast) makes many of the most famous lines seem fresh...
...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...