Word: greyingly
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...bodies. Suppose them transformed into papier-mâché puppets eight to ten feet tall. Picture these puppets moving as if they were in some prehistoric slow-motion silent film. This is hierophantic theater, as old as time, as young as the infancy of man. To see The Grey Lady Cantata as performed by the Bread and Puppet Theater is rather like waiting in the mystic whispering groves of Delphi to hear the oracle speak. Despite the primordial trappings, this virtual dumb show is as contemporary as tomorrow's bombing raid. It is a cantata of death...
Glass Tear. The show begins amid the banal frivolity of a beer party. A group of the Grey Lady's giddy friends have come in to guzzle Budweiser and Ballantine's ale. These are not puppets, but men and women wearing decadent, citified masks. At the sound of a funeral chime, which is actually two lead pipes clanged together by the agent of fate at the side of the stage, the beer cans are whisked away. The guests leave and the stage is occupied by a puppet father and mother and a masked...
...father looks much like Churchill and he smokes a white cigar, but the black wings on his shoulders signify that he is the Angel of Death. The mother, or Grey Lady, is the mater dolorosa, a woman of sorrowing countenance, possibly the mother of Christ; her huge supplicating hands resemble those of a pietà. She sends her son off to war and we feel that she knows he will be killed. A single glass tear slowly descends her right cheek...
Blare of Music. A white dove of peace chirps briefly, but flies off as a black widow spider of a model plane wings its way with a searching deliberateness across the rear-stage curtain. We see the bomber's victims-to-be, other grey-lady puppets. They sway and huddle together in mute terror. We feel their pain all the more acutely because, like wounded animals, they cannot articulate it. Think of Picasso's Guernica unfolding in slow motion and you have the image of these women dying. The evening ends with a jolly blare of music...
...floor beside him. He squints. His cold, blue eyes do battle with the yellow afternoon sun that streams through the foggy windows before him. He stretches, his tall, slim body, stretching in the warmth like a lithe, tense cat. His beard is cropped close, ash-blond, almost grey in the translucent light, and blends, quite unostentatiously, with his shaggily trimmed hair. His eyebrows-enormous tensile spans that arch across his brow-seem to be all that is holding him together, so much so that you forget for the moment that Sutherland struck it big playing...