Word: hippolytus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MUST make your movements and expressions be heard through your voice," I was once told while making a record. Robert Edgar's staged reading of Euripides' Hippolytus has this same goal. In place of the wildly-choreographed and colorfully-masked visual spectacle of traditional staging, Edgar presents uncostumed characters at lecterns. Yet Euripides' compassion for the plight of mortal helplessness can often be felt through the voices of this cast...
Sheila Hart (Phaedra) speaks with bewildered and frightened passion as the queen who lusts for her son Hippolytus. She commands such respect with each word that her accusingly harsh "Wicked!" to her Nurse seems to damn her for eternity. When she cries "Women, stop speaking!", they dare not speak. And when she predicts her fate, Death!", I feared for her very existence. Miss Hart overcome the awkward hand gestures devised by the director by using her face and the slightest turn of her head to convey the deepest emotion...
David Richardson, as Hippolytus, uses changes in volume and tempo as a substitute for the frenzied emotionality of his character. The emotional pitch of his speeches never varies from the time he learns of his mother's love until his father orders his death...
Although Edgar has lost much of the power and the energy of Hippolytus as it was written to be performed, Euripides' sympathy for human misfortune is clearly there. To see it, go to Dunster House--and listen...
...prime element, a life force that no more obeys the laws of convention than a tidal wave heeds the shore line. The heroine (Maureen Stapleton) is a kind of common woman's Phaedra. Just as the Greek Queen went mad in her passion for her stepson Hippolytus, this Sicilian widow near New Orleans goes mad in her passion for the memory of her dead truck-driver husband. When a young sailor lights the fires of love in the eyes of her 15-year-old daughter (Maria Tucci), the widow turns fiercely moralistic. Then the image of her late husband...