Word: orpheus
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...still gets scared ("I am a definition of hysteria''), still tells stories that get scarier and scarier-and tells them so hypnotically that the public pays him over $200,000 a year not to stop. He is the nightmare merchant of Broadway, writer of Orpheus Descending (murder by blow torch), A Streetcar Named Desire (rape, nymphomania, homosexuality), Summer and Smoke (frigidity), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (impotence, alcoholism, homosexuality), Sweet Bird of Youth (drug addiction, castration, syphilis), Suddenly Last Summer (homosexuality, cannibalism), and The Night of the Iguana (masturbation, underwear fetishism, coprophagy...
...Broadway for more than a decade. Ups and downs of critical approval never dampened the excitement of a Williams opening: 1948's Summer and Smoke, 1951's The Rose Tattoo, 1953's Camino Real, 1955's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1957's Orpheus Descending, 1958's Garden District, 1959's Sweet Bird of Youth, and 1960's Period of Adjustment...
...preoccupied- easier to go out than to be alone together. They drift off to an all-night brawl at a millionaire's mausoleal residence. "They're all dead here," the wife sighs as they enter the house. Antonioni's point is unmistakable: his hero, like Orpheus, has entered Hades, the contemporary hell of unmeaning materialism- will he find there the love, the soul, the vital core of meaning he has lost? He finds the daughter of the millionaire (Monica Vitti), a dark-haired charmer whom he fiercely pursues, only to find her as empty and desperate...
...founders of Western civilization? The Greeks themselves looked to Crete, whose earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths-of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid around 5000 B.C., grew to a colossal structure whose apartments were equipped with bathrooms and flush toilets...
...once did she encumber the music with leaden emotions foreign to its spirit, or dirty it with less than perfect phrasing and dynamics. Her coloratura in the incomparable "Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly" was remarkable for its clarity and restraint; and in the jolly "Orpheus himself may heave his head" her own humor was crisp and sparkling...