Word: mythically
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Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal...
...each other only when they are locked in phys ical or verbal violence. In A Prayer for My Daughter, a police detective who could have prevented his daughter's suicide deliberately fails to do so by not answering her radio call for help. In Fathers and Sons, a mythic play about Wild Bill Hickok, neither friendship nor love escapes the carnage. In Babe's Civil War play Rebel Women, General Sherman says, "I have no passion for war." The plausibility gap in Babe's plays is that almost nothing arouses his characters' passions...
Indeed Lulu, the tragedy of a dancer whose almost mythic embodiment of the erotic principle wreaks universal destruction and death, seemed to be the one modern opera that had everything: electrifying theatricality, sex, moral seriousness, virtuoso scoring-everything, that is, except a third act. When he died in 1935, Berg had completed the third act particella, or short score; but he left the orchestration incomplete and the act was never published. Ever since, opera companies have had to present Lulu in two acts, with a makeshift third act tacked...
Mingus was a man of giant appetites and violent passions, and he elevated these traits to mythic proportions in his autobiographical Beneath the Underdog, published in 1972. He shouted, he threw things, he stormed out of clubs. At times he became obsessed with the (probably justified) fear that other musicians were capitalizing on ideas stolen from him, and he refused to solo if he suspected that spies were present. He quit performing in the late '60s, boarded himself up in an East Village apartment, and spent years fighting illnesses, poverty, and severe depression. The '70s found him back...
...Coup, Updike widens the horizons of this exploration. In effect, he puts on black face and tap dances with breathtaking agility and grace through the contradictions of culture clash and leadership in a revolutionary African nation. The mythic Islamic country of Kush resembles France's former real estate in West Africa, with a touch of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia...