Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Oedipus" Opens...
...Faculty. The Administration sat quietly by, watching carefully all the while. It tacitly approved the productions offered by the French, German, English, and Classics Departments, as these had an aura of educational value. The debut, in 1881, of this phase of dramatics was the performance of "Oedipus Tyrannus" in Sanders. Its being by an ancient made it passable. Its being given in Greek made it somewhat laudable. And its being the first known performance in America of a classical play in the original language combined novelty with austerity, making it indubitably safe to perform...
Mourning Becomes Electra (produced on Broadway in 1931) was never a great play-let alone a great Greek play. But it is a play that hankers after greatness (and Greekness) like a schoolgirl with a crush on a bust of Aeschylus. By attempting to dramatize the Oedipus complex on a framework of Greek drama, O'Neill produced a travesty of Freudian thought and something like a parody of Greek tragedy...
Predictable Ruts. Significantly, the best of Spearhead's younger writers are turning away from technical experiments. In John Berryman's fine story, The Imaginary Jew, in Delmore Schwartz's poetic probing of the Oedipus complex ("the child must carry his fathers on his back"), and in Randall Jarrell's savage war poetry, verbal high jinks are replaced by untortured statement and controlled emotion...
Appalling and terrible, Medea is somehow yet understandable and real-her emotions less hidden in the mists of the past than an Oedipus' or an Antigone's. And with a temerity as notable as her talent, Actress Anderson (Macbeth, The Three Sisters) brought those emotions spectacularly out into the open. She flung aside both classic control and realistic restraint. She played Medea half in the grand manner, half in the Grand Guignol manner; she used every wile of body and face, every art of voice and gesture, to produce something possibly mixed or impure-but definitely, undeniably overwhelming...