Word: passion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Everyone knows the story--of Charlie Brown and his failures; of the passion Schroeder feels for Beethoven, only to be harassed by the love-sick Lucy (who in this production cries "Hooray for Barry Manilow" just to get a rise out of the budding pianist); of Snoopy's unending battle with the Red Baron. The small circle of friends grows up in these amusing vignettes, while an occasional moral dots the otherwise harmless script. There's not an undergraduate who in his youth didn't toss a few "good griefs" into the wind at a younger sibling...
Gemini is deeply personal, and the play's primary impact is on the emotions. Even surrounded by excessive babbling and posturing, the moments of genuine, unvarnished feeling have a lucidity that carries them effortlessly out of the mess. (I knew Herschel's gentle rhapsody on his life's passion, trolley cars, was important because it made me cry.) All those piled-up absurdities emit enough shocks of recognition to power a theaterful of electric chairs...
...something for you," Al mysteriously tells his cute, freckled neighbor) and his visits to his girlfriend (Karen Allen). The driving disco and violent gyrations of the cruising scene contrast strikingly with Allen's soft-toned flesh and delicate moaning orgasm. When Allen goes down on him, Pacino's passion rises as the throbbing Village theme invades his senses. The sequence arouses, perhaps in a trite or superficial way, a heterosexual's most basic fear of homosexuality: are the physical aspects of this act really any different when performed by a man instead of a woman...
...massacre of sensibility reels on Ted, Pacino's neighbor, is murdered and while all clues point to Ted's jealous roommate as the culprit, Friedkin knows better. In an ambiguous series of elliptical shots, the director hints that Pacino has butchered Ted in a bizarre exorcism of his homosexual passion. Like the priests who die to save Regan in Friedkin's last sensationalist film, Ted dies to save Pacino's heterosexual soul...
Electra completes this portion of the cycle. It begins as a long threnody by Electra (Lynn Dearth). Stoking a cauldron of hatred toward her mother Clytemnestra, Dearth is a cauldron herself; if she continues at this level of passion, she cannot fail to be a top actress of this decade...