Word: phylissa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SICK LITTLE girl in a woman's body, Empress Phylissa doesn't know her powers. Drooling, a finger hooked over her lower lip, the beauty never guesses that her bedroom's an asylum. She makes you wrench, as do all the characters in The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre's The Menagerie of Empress Phylissa performed last week at the Loeb...
Director Henryk Tomaszewski has turned a traditional ballet scenario--a young princess looking over various suitors in order to choose a husband--into a grotesque, surrealistic fantasy. All Phylissa's wooers first enter gallantly, then run scared as her lust switches on. Little Napoleon, terror-struck, stabs himself in the groin. Max-Pipifax makes it further, to bed with the empress, only to be eaten by her highness--who proceeds to throw up on his flesh. The two are hardly men, nor are the rabble of other lewd cavaliers, truly Phylissa's menagerie of beasts...
...program notes, brings together a rabble of Hell's Angels on bikes (had Tomaszewski seen "Easy Rider?") with the empress's ladies--and gentlemen-in-waiting. A robot sputters on stage: can a machine be even more black than the preceding parade of frenetic suitors? At the end Phylissa stares with one eye down an inverted clarion; with the other becoming a wild, monstrous orb she eclipses the entire stage. The stage blacks out. The image of that disembodied eye stays with you, as does the memory of men cut from themselves...
...Polish Mime Ballet. A celebrated European company performs the comic mime The Menagerie of the Empress Phylissa, which combines ballet, mime theatre and gymnastics. One of the Loeb's special season presentations. Performances January 15 and 16 at 8 p.m. January 17 at 5 and 9 p.m., January 18 at 2:30 and 8 p.m. Rush seats...
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