Word: phaedra
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ancestors included Great-Granduncle James Russell Lowell, Cousin Amy Lowell and relatives on his mother's side who date back to the Mayflower. More combative than his genteel forebears, Lowell was fascinated by power. He often chose for his theme the doomed great in history: Racine's Phaedra, Mary Stuart and Cleopatra, and Alexander, "double-marching to gain the limits of the globe." Classmates at his prep school, St. Marks, called him Cal, after the despotic Roman emperor Caligula, because he was so imperious. The name stuck all his life. But a critic who described...
...Phaedra, wife of Theseus, spurned and disgraced, twists and writhes in an agony of incestuous love for her stepson Hippolytus. Loosening a white silk sash at her waist, she knots it around her throat, pulls it tight, then falls to the ground in a lifeless swoon, her hair spilling in an orange cloud over her crimson robes. On a balcony overhead, a chorus splits the air with a rising lament-a sort of aural locust swarm-followed by a series of immense, loud gong-tones...
...sprinkling a few gilded names among the less familiar artists who will get exposure at Mini-Met, Chapin clearly hopes to attract subscribers from the parent company as well as tap a new and younger public. On opening night, for example, a gifted newcomer named Nancy Williams sang Phaedra, while Dido and Aeneas were handsomely dispatched by International Stars Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart. The audience reflected the casting: brocaded ladies and black-tie escorts presumably for Lear and Stewart, denim and leather for Williams...