Word: mother
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Feeling ill, Barbara Jane Mackle, 20, a tall, slender, attractive brunette, abruptly excused herself from an exam at Atlanta's Emory University last week. She checked in at Rodeway Inn, a motel near the campus, there joined her mother Jane, who had arrived earlier from Coral Gables, Fla., to take Barbara home for Christmas. During the evening, Barbara's boy friend and fellow student, Stewart Woodward, drove over in his white Ford for a visit...
After Woodward left, mother and daughter sat up in their beds talking. They were still awake at 4 a.m. when a man who identified himself as a detective knocked on the door and said he had information about an auto accident involving a man in a white Ford. Thinking that Woodward had been hurt, Mrs. Mackle opened the door and found herself confronted by a masked man carrying a shotgun, and a smaller person wearing a ski mask, who, Mrs. Mackle thought, might be a twelve-year-old boy. After binding Mrs. Mackle hand and foot, the kidnapers seized Barbara...
...fleet to Troy. Mad with grief and fury, his Queen, Clytemnestra, awaits the return of the victorious King from the Trojan War, and while he is in his bath she stabs him to death. Aided by his sister Electra, Agamemnon's son Orestes in turn murders both his mother and her lover Aegisthus. Pursued by the Furies, Orestes is tried before the goddess of Athens and acquitted at Apollo's intercession. But for the future, the goddess makes a compact "between the light of the mind and the voices of the blood...
...language transpositions from the Greek lack eloquence, spareness or precision, and the contemporary colloquialisms iar the ear. Lines like "You mean you intend to kill your mother?" produce wildly inappropriate laughter from an audience saturated with Freud. The prevailing style of the evening is that of neo-Shakespearean swashbuckling, and the barely adequate cast seems to relish all opportunities for bombast and comic clowning. The chorus resembles the witches from Macbeth multiplied. The murders might as well have been performed by Richard III. Elizabethan Greeks are a novelty all right, but they reduce the play to historical pageantry, horseplay...
James Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from his own fairly successful Broadway script, must've had it in for Katharine Hepburn. She's forced through lines like "Of course he has a knife, we all have knives. It's 1183--we're barbarians." "Hush dear, mother's fighting." She makes it through such embarrassments by playing Katharine Hepburn, adding her wry little smile to some lines ("Well, what family doesn't have its ups and downs?") and telegraphing strong emotion by quivering...