Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time or another, nearly every college sophomore has clapped his roommate on the shoulder and said: "C'mon, Oedipus, she's old enough to be your mother." Or greeted a sleepy-eyed coed at a 9 a.m. classics lecture with a cheery "Morning doesn't become you, Electra"." Jejune jests, to be sure, but they reflect post-Freudian man's easy familiarity with once intricate Sophoclean themes. If familiarity does not always breed contempt, it often produces apathy...
...work or art form for which he will be especially remembered. Rilke once said that his work "admits to the realm of myth, and he returns from its radiance aglow, as from the seashore." Cocteau was a mythmaker, retreating again and again to myths and fables-Orpheus, Oedipus, Antigone. Angels abound in his writing and painting. He wanted to enchant his audience rather than move them to pity and terror. "I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost." He would have been delighted with Auden's simple epitaph: "The lasting feeling that his work leaves...
...enormous dildo and a woman with pubic hair drawn on her leotard. It is like the TV show "Shindig," as the chorus groans antiphonally up to a very convincing orgasm. Lights out. That's demystification, allright, but it's also a pretty cheap trick to play on the Oedipus story...
Senclick explains his Oedipus best by calling it a ritual. It is somewhat like Shakesepare's The Winter's Tale as a celebration of natural harmony and order, and an acceptance of human imperfection. Senclick at times seems possessed by these imperfections...
...forms Senelick has chosen to convey ritual are highly derivative: he has borrowed Oriental Kabuki gestures for Oedipus and locasta, and this works very well, stylizing their "act" of semi-divinity almost to satire. For the Chorus he has assimilated the chanting and stick-beating rhythms of the Open Theater, the serpentine body piles of the Living Theater, and the copulation mime of Marat/Sade. All are dramatically sound, but one is aware of their unoriginality...