Word: jocasta
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...second novel, is subjected to nearly as many adolescent indignities as his Biblical namesake had to suffer. Instead of being tossed down a well by envious brothers, this Joseph is tyrannized by his mother Meg, a bosomy termagant with some of the less attractive qualities of Medea, Medusa and Jocasta...
...Salesman. It is a poignant plaint, and she repeats it as if she did not quite believe it. The fact is, no one is really convinced that the tormented figures of modern drama have the stature of tragic heroes. The measure of that disbelief is to imagine Jocasta asking an audience to pay attention to Oedipus, or Cordelia to Lear. Try not paying attention to them...
Cassandra's Scream. Amusingly caustic is Steiner's account of the literary bootleggers who pour new psychoanalytic wine in the old stolen bottles of the Greek myths. Gide, for instance, produced an Oedipus "who arrives at the extraordinary insight that his marriage to Jocasta was evil because it drew him back to his childhood and thus prevented the free development of his personality." White forgoing these lapses of taste, T. S. Eliot merely domesticates the Greek myths till they are as tame as Old Possum's pet cals...
Alcestis was one more contribution to the Graham cycle of Greek drama that already includes Night Journey (Jocasta), Cave of the Heart (Medea) and Clytemnestra. Around the central props-a massive, grey stone wheel and tower-the 27-minute work unfolded in episodes of tortured simplicity. Alcestis. danced by Martha Graham, writhes on a ramp with King Admetus in a series of languorous embraces; Thanatos (Death) struggles with Alcestis in a sinuously elegant dance; the hand of Hercules, bearing a single white lily, is suddenly thrust from the center of the wheel, symbolizing the rebirth of life...
...only genuine motif in the entire work-a rapid, stepwise up-and-down flourish that occurred again and again, eventually became Oedipus' climactic roar of agony. The work unfolded without set pieces or arias, and the staging by Director Günther Rennert was similarly spare, e.g., when Jocasta (Soprano Astrid Varnay) learned that she was the mother of Oedipus she threw her head back with mouth agape in a silence more horrifying than a scream...