Word: gothic
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...Gothic Tastes. O'Neill the sometime melodramatist could not have improved upon his own beginnings. He was born on a grey, showery day in October 1888 in the Barrett House, a family hotel fittingly located on Broadway. (During his last illness in Boston 65 years later, he was to raise himself from a stupor and cry: "Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!") His father, James O'Neill, a famous romantic actor of the day. was giving something like his 1,400th performance in Monte Cristo, the play which for over a quarter...
Before he was out of diapers, then, there existed in full force the family cross-tensions that were to help make O'Neill the blackest of black Irishmen. A nanny with Gothic tastes in murder stories and a puritanical Catholic schooling-the nuns frowned on the theater- were hardly needed to complete the job. Before he was 15, young Eugene had cut himself off from his church, but not from his sense of damnation. "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell" was his new credo. He had become the most savage of insurrectionists: the rebel with...
...cries in the night, cobwebs on the tower stairs-all the exquisitely accumulated gothic horrors-these are the forte of frail, large-eyed women novelists. Joyce Carol Oates, a brilliant writer, offers an updated variation on the genre by taking the American Dream and turning it into a kind of American nightmare...
Like most gothic romancers, Author Oates puts her really sinister touches of evil into her stage setting rather than her characters. The villain in the end is that old devil, bad environment. Trapped in an imitation-British boys' school among 13-year-old alcoholics-wizened little gnomes like himself-Richard joins his parents a little prematurely as one of the "doomed" and "damned...
...loathed Faust," Corsaro admits. "In fact, I've started off by basically disliking every opera that I've done so far. They all seemed like such old salami." But as he began thinking about it, he became fascinated with the prospect of doing Faust as a grim Gothic tale in which sheer horror and grizzly humor intertwine. He decided to introduce Mephistopheles in different guises that would fit credibly into each scene. After materializing first as a cadaver, the Devil appears later as a gypsy fortuneteller, then Don Juan, then a soldier of fortune. Next, Corsaro threw...