Word: mannone
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...school district too, the war created holes that had to be filled and that began to feel like a contagion. First, grade-school librarian Nolan Brown, a grandfather, Vietnam vet and National Guardsman, was called up for a desk job in Baghdad. Math teacher Kathy Mannon stepped into his post. Eleven days later, her husband Dennis, the librarian at the high school, was called up by the Air Force Reserve. Retired teacher Judy Gray, nearing 60, volunteered to fill in for him. Gray's own daughter Regina Jones had just seen her husband Albert leave for Iraq too. Jones...
...familiar plot, O'Neill takes the ancient Greek legend of Electra and sets it in the weeks following V-J Day. Ezra Mannon returns home from the war only to be killed by his wife Christine in collusion with her lover. Daughter Vinnie and son Orin work their revenge. Like the House of Atreus, three generations of Mannons are cursed. O'Neill's insistence on parallels is at times heavy handed, though. The main characters' names, for instance, mimic too closely their Greek counterparts. Ezra Mannon for Agammemnon, Christine for Clytemnestra, and Orin for Orestes are unnecessary hints...
...particular hell is this: while Ezra Mannon (Agamemnon) is away at war, his wife Christine (Clytemnestra) takes a lover, Adam Brant (Aegisthus). Daughter Lavinia (Electra) adores her father, hates her mother and is smitten with Adam. Ezra's return results in homicide and suicide. When the killing ends, Lavinia locks herself in the ancestral mansion to placate the ghosts of her forebears in solitary, lifelong penance...
...Neill employed the classical plot as a framework in which he could examine dramatically the suppressed guilt he saw in the Puritan mind. The murder and desire for revenge that divides the austere Mannon family into two camps is also the conflict between Puritanical repression and the open sensuality of the foreigner. Except for details of place and time, O'Neill has not had to change Aeschylus' story at all: the Trojan War has become the Civil War, and Agemmemnon is now the victorious General Ezra Mannon...
Exceptional acting in the main roles overcomes the picture's constant danger of falling into absurdity. Katina Paxinou plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia...