Word: plautus
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...Tufts Arena Theater traditionally scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find its plays. The splinter it removed from under its fingernail this week is "Mostellaria" (or "The Haunted House") by Plautus. This farce dates from around 200 B.C. and, except for the fact that it predates almost all of them, is totally indistinguishable from the five thousand other farces based on the carousings of a wayward son during his father's absence. It has in it the familiar wily servant and the hordes of cooperative women and it ends in the inevitable crisis precipitated by the father's unexpected...
...Mostellaria" might have had in the original is effectively disguised by Frank Copley's translation. In skirting the dangers of the overly academic translations often made of Latin and Greek plays, Mr. Copley has veered too far to the other extreme. In a program note he says that, "As Plautus tried to make his Greeks talk like Romans, the present translator has tried to make Plautus talk like a contemporary American." The flaw in this reasoning is that while there were many points of similarity between the Greek and Roman civilizations, few of these points are mirrored in our time...
...Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) In his exalted soaring into the unforgiving air, man in his bird has reaped all the riches he ever dreamed of - the poetry of flight itself and the victory over time and space. But in the swift tumble of progress called the Air Age, he has wrought more hard truth than poetry. The truth: the skies over the U.S. - busiest of all air borne nations - are roaring with an astonishing complex of featherless birds. Not counting 22,000 military aircraft, there are operating in the U.S. no fewer than 72,000 planes, ranging from lightweight, single...
Down the Well. Written when he was 25., The Curmudgeon is minor compared to the later shrewd comedies that inspired (by way of plagiarisms by Plautus) European playwrights from Racine to Giraudoux...
...most important efforts have been those of the Harvard-Radcliffe Classical Players, who in the spring of 1949 gave the first play in Latin here since the mid 1930's. Since then the Players have put on six Roman comedies in the original--most of them by Plautus. By far the high point, though, was the group's very moving 1956 production in the Fogg Museum court of Oedipus at Colonus, given in Sophocles' original Greek under the direction of Robert A. Brooks...