Word: menelaus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...symbols were hoisted to the play's masthead to further the effectiveness of the play. The first, a bull's head, was huge, elegant, and topped by two unmistakably symbolic horns. Whatever its mythological associations or its connotations of potency, it caught aptly the implications of Menelaus's and Troilus's cuckoldry...
...Clytemnestra (Irene Papas) telling her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis under the ruse that the girl is to become the bride of Achilles. Abruptly seized by fatherly love, Agamemnon dispatches a second letter bidding Clytemnestra to stay at home. But this message is intercepted by Helen's husband Menelaus, who rails at Agamemnon for daring to dream of putting his daughter's life before Greek victory. This raises a question of moral ambiguity that runs through the play: Is this a war for a strumpet, or is it against a nest of barbarians who threaten the life...
Director Guzzetti is fortunate in his minor characters, for their performances range from passable to very good. Ellery Akers plays Helen as an empty-headed Fanny Hill, rather than a regal queen whose face launches a thousand ships, and plays her well. David Evett's Menelaus is properly unctuous and opportunistic. And Michael Nach's frenetic sing-song servility as a Phyrigian slave introduces the comic tone which diminishes the tragedy of Orestes...
...beef broth, casaba melon. Duskin snapped them awake: "I don't allow irrelevant statements. Your comments must either advance my thought or contradict it." Firmly in control, Duskin hammered his theme-the dispassion of Homer. "Remember," he said, "Helen makes it in the end. She falls back on Menelaus, and they raise her kid, and even though she's the most beautiful chick in the world, everything's cool...
...mighty Agamemnon, stroking his beard, smoking a ten-inch cigar, wearing the uniform of a Union general and looking for all the world like an actor dressed up to play Ulysses S. Grant. There too was doddering old Nestor, also wearing the blue, with binoculars around his neck. Menelaus wore pince-nez, and they all used the spittoon and the likker jug. The Trojan War had turned into the U.S. Civil War, and before the play was over, muskets banged, cannon boomed, and that old states-righter, Hector, lost his bridgework to six Greco-Yankee bayonets...