Word: octavius
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When U.S. Senator Augustus Octavius Bacon died in 1914, he left 100 acres to his home town of Macon, Ga., as a park "for the sole, perpetual and unending use of the white women, white girls, white boys and white children of Macon." Half a century later, an expanding Constitution upset Bacon's plans. Macon's white citizens realized that the city could no longer administer the park and continue discrimination. Negroes were admitted, only to have the park's trustees sue, claiming Bacon's will had been violated. The city decided to remove itself...
...years ago, Egypt's Empress Hatasu sent out a whole fleet in search of new animals to stock her private menagerie; Emperor Wen, the first of China's Chou dynasty (12th century B.C.), had a collection of animals he called "the Garden of Intelligence"; Roman Emperor Octavius Augustus had no fewer than 420 tigers, 260 lions and 600 assorted other specimens from Africa...
...level of intensity throughout the play. Bramhall gives every sentence weightiness, makes every speech momentous. It is with energy, not respect, that he controls the conspirators. His antics make Cassius seem calm by comparison. And in a second act where everyone--Bramhall, David Rittenhouse (Antony), Edwin Holstein (Octavius), and Thomas Weisbuch (Cassius)--is playing at fever pitch, where a ghost puts in an appearance, and where the prodigious battle scene takes up fully ten minutes, the play degenerates into a second-rate melodrama. The giggles heard during what should have been the most exciting moments of the second act ought...
John Irving's performance as the romantic Octavius suffers less from a lapse of character than from an excess of it. Irving's Octavius is a bit too snivelling and dense but never really mars the play...
...were not quite so successful. Tony Corbett's Octavius, the heart-broken poet scorned by Ann, is quite weak enough to deserve's Ann's cruel "Ricky-ticky-tavy" nick-name, but hardly deep enough to evoke sympathy. Timothy Mayer's Stryker, the auto mechanic and supposedly the New Man, and Mark Bramhall's Hector, Violet's secret husband, are spoiled by their accents. Mayer is sometimes hard to understand and Bramhall sounds more like a simpleton than the Jack Kennedy he apparently was immitating. Both, however, have enough sense of timing to draw their laughs well...