Word: modern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...onetime winter home of the Ringling Bros, troupe, Sarasota is accustomed to circuses. Not so Fox Run, where one resident last week repeated in horrified tones the oldest caveat of modern living: "You never know who your neighbors...
Race Against Time. The trapped middle-ager is introspective, resigned, and rebellious all at the same time. Modern literature and drama vividly depict his psychic desperation, from Bellow's Herzog to Miller's After the Fall, from Albee's Virginia Woolf to Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, from the novels of John Marquand to the novels of John O'Hara. John Cheever, who writes of middle age with autumnal sadness, is its prose laureate. In O Youth and Beauty!, he tells of the ritual of Cash Bentley, a former track star turned 40 who, when...
Like the voice, the verse is direct, fervent, fresh, almost childishly naive. Some of it is tenderly lyrical; much of it is vehemently public poetry, poetry for the microphone. The imagery and language are startling, precise, modern. "Behind an airplane," he writes, "the sound trailed/ Rectangular, like a barge behind a tug." And again: "Radio-like, my cat lies curled/ With his green eye tuned to the world...
Director Thomas Babe has chosen to do the William Arrowsmith translation in modern dress, with Pentheus of Thebes looking something like a teenage Marshal Ky, and the god Dionysus a blond-haired cigarette-smoking James Dean. The first resemblance is most pointed; Babe interprets the autocratic, highly organized government of Thebes as a garrison--perhaps fascist--state, threatened by the earthly, irrational Dionysiac cult. The interpretation works in that Babe's production is exciting theatre, and in the end faithful to the original as well. Just the same there are points worth questioning...
...this sense Babe's interpretation of The Bacchae fits only incompletely, but it is a fascinating, often startlingly valid job of reapplication. Where it doesn't fit, we still have the original. Babe has not been so carried away with the modern parallel as to seriously distort the play, and in the second half he seems to have kept his modernizing to a minimum. Thus the limitation of the fascist parallel--its lack of a modern alternative into which Dionysus can fit--is never fully exposed, because the interpretation is correctly underplayed...