Word: incognita
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Throughout On the Verge these "Victorian lady travellers" engage in an endless volley of pithy, alliterative, and highly allusive language. Plagiarizing from sources as varied as Joyce, Shakespeare, and the slang of fifties Americana, they wend their way through the kaleidoscopic landscape of "Terra Incognita," a territorial hybrid of the 19th century African Congo and the Land of the Blue Meanies from the Beatles' acid-crazed 1967 animation, "Yellow Submarine." This land is to be imagined rather than perceived: at the playwright's behest the set is relatively sparse...
Given the burdensome text of the play, its often trying twists and turns, and the demand for imagination rather than representation, the cast pulls it off rather well. Michelle Haner is well-cast as the youthful and somewhat spacey Alex, who flirts with the various characters encountered in "Terra Incognita" and has a deep penchant for the "slanguage" of 1955. Susan Gray maintains a prim conservatism throughout the play as Fanny, a young old-maid from the Midwest. Amanda Frye wields words well as Mary, a "passionate scientist" with a particularly obscure vocabulary and an inclination to corny eloquence...
...million people who, in little more than a week, made the journey cannot quite believe they did, and the faces of the thousands who pour through frontier crossings every day are bright with expectation. In Berlin, East Germans huddle over subway maps as they head into Western terra incognita, a place most of them know only from television; at other checkpoints their cars pile up for miles...
...chromosomes. The message of the genes has been equally difficult to come by. Most genes consist of between 10,000 and 150,000 code letters, and only a few genes have been completely deciphered. Long segments of the genome, like the vast uncharted regions of early maps, remain terra incognita...
This was not the well-trod turf of Bach, Mozart or even Beethoven that Norrington's crack London Classical Players were venturing onto, but the terra incognita of Hector Berlioz, the virtuoso French composer who in the 1830s revolutionized symphonic sound in such works as the hallucinogenic Symphonie Fantastique and the blazing choral symphony Romeo et Juliette. "Our goal is to present a view of Berlioz very different from modern received opinion," Norrington told the audience before the performance. "We're not like a symphony orchestra playing notes. We only play poetry here...