Word: lavinia
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...subject for a play, since any bruising or brutal confrontation between two or more human beings is the atavistic fuel of drama. Indeed, plays with rape as a central motif recur in theatrical literature. Perhaps the most notable is Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, in which the heroine-victim, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off. She secures her revenge when she reveals her rapists' identities by scratching their names in sand...
Keith barks commands, June lazes on deck, and the other two-the reasonable Britons-do what they are told. Alistair (Robin Herford), Keith's partner in business, sees everybody's side but his own, while his wife Emma (Lavinia Bertram) wonders how she can transform the toothpick that runs up his back into a spine. The only problem is that Keith, for all his bluster, does not know what he is doing, in business or on the boat, and Alistair, when he eventually takes the helm, runs them onto the mud. Salvation comes in the person...
...acrid hatred of Titus, who had her eldest son killed in a ritual sacrifice. When she takes Aaron (Errol Slue), a Moor, for her lover, the carnage begins. Despite his color, Aaron is Iago's twin in his motiveless malignity. He plots to have Titus' daughter Lavinia (Goldie Semple) raped, and her hands cut off and her tongue ripped out. Then the heads of two of Titus' murdered sons are unshrouded before the father. In retaliation, Titus stabs two of Tamora's sons to death, has their bodies minced and cooked, and serves morsels of them...
...hard to discern the parallels here, almost to see the play as a kind of roman a clef. The weak, frightened character who appears both as the mother of the Hubbard family. Lavinia, and as a neighbor named Birdie Bag try, a young flower wilting on the broken vine of old Southern aristocracy, seems to be drawn from Hellman's own mother, the former Julia Newhouse. Like Living, whose one fixed idea throughout the play is to embark on her "mission" to teach "the little colored children." Julia constantly took refuge in religion, mouthing the words to prayers or ducking...
...lurid, lacerating story intimidates the cast, with the exception of Colleen Dewhurst as Christine. She has the sensual passion and bitter force of the Greek original. As Lavinia, Pamela Payton-Wright lacks the stiletto malice of Greek vengeance but remains a young actress to watch carefully. With this revival, Director Theodore Mann and his partner Paul Libin consecrate a handsome new mid-Manhattan play house, the Circle in the Square-Joseph E. Levine Theater. They merit an A+ for enterprise and a question mark for good judgment...