Word: lavinia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...despite the play's title, Androcles and the Lion are not the chief characters. In this respect, the work is like, say, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Clymbeline, and Henry IV. Although not appearing until after the Prologue, Lavinia is Shaw's leading character and spokesman. In his Postscript, Shaw calls her "a clever and fearless freethinker." She is one of his huge gallery of extraordinary women--a group unsurpassed by any other twentieth-century dramatist. Lavinia falls into the category of those persons passionately driven by con-science and commitment--like his Saint Joan, his Major Barbara...
Herein lies the Startford production's main shortcoming. Kathleen Dabney is attractive enough in her blue toga streaked with green, but she just doesn't give evidence of meriting her position as a leader of the Christian prisoners. Her Lavinia lacks fervor and intensity; and some of her lines don't ring true...
...other major role, that of Lavinia, is handled adequately by Bronia Stefan. On opening night, however, tragedy struck again in the two very minor parts. Jody Claflin (who, according to the program, "began her acting career when she played the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland at the age of seven") bungled completely her brief appearance as the Nurse-Secretary. And Timothy Affleck was just as inept as a Caterer's Man. (The program tells us that he "marched at the head of the town parade in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1949.") As usual, the Theatre Company comes up with good sets...
Abstract influence on the figure is found sensationally in a nude, raped, maimed Lavinia, daughter of Titus Andronicus, painted by Larry Rivers (for Show Magazine) to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th birthday. Willem de Kooning's Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point cocks the abstract expressionist's eye at nature. There is even the genial easel tradition in Raphael Soyer's portrait of his painting twin Moses...
...tragedy of Emma Lavinia Gifford, as she repeatedly confided to her diary, was that she married a man beneath her. He was a writer of sorts, but so was she; and when callers such as Ford Madox Ford and Sir Edmund Gosse dropped around, she was fond of pulling out her poems and rattling off lines like these...