Word: oberon
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Even as new Voyager transmissions were being received at J.P.L., scientists were feverishly interpreting the early results. Computer-enhanced photographs of the moons Titania and Oberon, each about 1,000 miles in diameter, showed that Oberon had a three-mile-high peak and that the surfaces of both moons were pocked with white spots from which streaks of bright material radiated. To Bradford Smith, head of the Voyager imaging team, the spots were evidence that meteorite impacts had pulverized the gray surface, exposed an underlying layer of ice and spewed it out in all directions. The haze covering the Uranian...
Historical records also show that for thousands of years people believed that, since ferns flowered but did not set visible seeds, they had supernatual powers. Even Shakespeare wrote that Oberon, King of the Fairies in A Midsummer's Night Dream, used these invisible seeds to make himself invisible and dealt harshly with those who wished to share his secret...
...parody not only of his own romantic aesthetic but also of the origin of the fabled partnership as well. Here is the regal Sibley, the gossamer Titania of The Dream, reduced to a semislattern with one thing on her mind. Here is the princely Dowell, once her dashing Oberon, as an even more unsatisfying lover, a sexually indeterminate gigolo with Saturday-night fever. At the end of the first, teasingly erotic pas de deux, Dowell effortlessly lifts Sibley aloft and, in one graceful, fluid motion, floats her offstage. The gesture promises a lovers' private communion...
...disease, alas, is catching. The source of the sorcery, the chief spinners of this Dream, must be Puck and his master Oberon, king of the fairies. Lapine's boldest experiment is to cast a woman (Marcell Rosenblatt) as Puck. But she has been directed to substitute screeching tomboyishness for sly sprightliness, and the resulting overaggressiveness is painful to watch, something like seeing the only girl on a Little League team overcompensate for her gender. Oberon is done to a star turn by William Hurt (Body Heat), who is so in love with the sound of his own voice that...
...Derrah's hulking Puck fails to spark the rest of the production in quite the same inhuman way as Mark Linn-Baker's in the spring. Derrah, verbally agile but physically sluggish, acts the comic sidekick; where Linn-Baker's animality was ferral, Derrah's is docile, dog-like--Oberon's best friend...