Word: heroding
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...gestures. At his best, as he is in a daring pair of roles now on Broadway, he recaptures with easy artlessness the range and power of his debut. One night he is a lisping, languorous biblical potentate, concealing deadly willfullness within a Bette Davis-like camp distraction, as King Herod in Oscar Wilde's Salome. The next night, in the new Chinese Coffee by the relatively unknown Ira Lewis, Pacino is a manic-depressive novelist-cum-doorman, living on the extreme margins of the arts world in Manhattan and dreaming that the next confessional, autobiographical manuscript will justify his colossal...
THEATER Al Pacino out-Herods Herod -- and then some...
Just over 50 years ago, the poet W.H. Auden achieved what all writers envy: making a prophecy that would come true. It is embedded in a long work called For the Time Being, where Herod muses about the distasteful task of massacring the Innocents. He doesn't want to, because he is at heart a liberal. But still, he predicts, if that Child is allowed to get away, "Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions . . . Whole...
...What Herod saw was America in the late 1980s and early '90s, right down to that dire phrase "New Age." A society obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics, skeptical of authority and prey to superstition, its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism. A nation like late Rome in its long imperial reach, in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified Emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives. A culture that...
...sodomizing their dying bodies and preserving the heads of the "pretty" ones. In his book The Trial of Gilles de Rais, French historian Georges Bataille noted incredulously that the man given to butchering infants calmly raised a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents -- the children slaughtered in Bethlehem by Herod. Yet at his execution Gilles de Rais exhibited so much remorse that the crowd gathered to witness the death of a monster was completely confused. How could God not forgive such devout penitence? It is the Bible, after all, that promises, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall...