Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...difficult for two people to fix themselves at the same point on this scale of conversational levels. But there is another dimension to communication, where mutuality is almost impossible to achieve, he said. That is intimacy, an "ultimate intimacy not obtained by shared confessions of guilts, ambitions, Oedipus complexes, or secrets," but by a mental unification analogous to sexual intercourse, a joining of thought processes so total that the listener could just as easily be the speaker. In short, one gets inside the other's head...
Unless his name happens to be Sophocles, the best thing a playwright can do with the Oedipus complex is to forget it. Purporting to explain the irreconcilable clash of son with father, the Oedipus complex, dramatically speaking, tends to reduce conflict to impasse. This is both the substance of-and the trouble with-Robert Anderson's new Broadway play, I Never Sang for My Father. Sometimes poignant, sometimes sentimental, always earnest, it essentially presents a static emotional impasse...
When The Doors finally bring off their electric wedding, it may well take the form of a small-scale musical play. The prototype is The End, their enigmatic, 11½-minute string of visions apparently revolving around an Oedipus situation, in which Morrison portrays several roles-some behind a red mask. Last week, opening an engagement at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, they introduced The Unknown Soldier, an antiwar philippic with martial music, shouted commands, the loading click of a rifle and shots mixed in with instrumental passages...
Olivier is malignantly and magnificently feral, dangerous precisely because he is a wounded animal clawing at the specter of death. One waits for the Olivier howl, and it comes-but not as the inhuman scream of the blinded Oedipus, or as his trumpet call to glory in Henry V: "God for Harry, England, and St. George!" In words charged with pain and hurtling toward frenzy, Olivier vengefully announces that he wants a divorce in order to "unite my destiny with that of a woman who together with devotion to her husband will also bring into this household youth...
...over the tangled web of his dead father's business and installs Daughter-in-Law Sara as mistress of the Harford mansion. Simon, an erstwhile poet turned gimlet-eyed merchant, agrees-if he can absorb the entire firm and expunge his father's name. Deeper shades of Oedipus. In the end, mother goes mad; Simon and Sara's doom seems to await another play. The collegiate aphorist in O'Neill has sententiously announced: "Success is its own failure...