Word: primal
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...past, Novelist Stephen King (Carrie, Cujo) and Director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) have scared people through the poetry of pulp-the primal or banal image that can raise millions of hackles. In Creepshow they have aimed lower, and hit the mark...
...over a placid, unchanging rhythmic pattern. To set the proper bardic tone for his mythological Ring of the Nibelung operatic saga, Wagner spun the entire Prelude of Das Rheingold from a single E-flat major triad, embellishing a bass note into a torrent of arpeggios to depict the primal nature of the Rhine. Ravel built Bolero around a sinuous, reiterated melody, clad in shifting orchestral colors, which only once lurches briefly away from its home...
...shades that stalk this play are the primal spirits of guilt and corruption, blinding faith and annihilating morality. Fate is the conjurer that commands them all to appear, but it is the blameful black magic of repression that sets them free to destroy. Most tragedies are about the fall from grace, but Ibsen, in Ghosts, wrote about something rather different and, for its time (1881), revolutionary: the absence of grace, the force of destiny when truth is hidden...
...passable college-level performances you might encounter on the Dunster House Dining Hall stage to truly inspired renditions from a score which was gutsy and fun to begin with. The 19-member troupe does far better as a whole pushing the decibel level to something just short of a primal scream than do any of the principals, some of whom seem completely inexperienced as vocalists. Of the main players, Calvin Wolk, as Berger, the macho ring leader, and Jeff Bercuvitz, as Claude, the occasionally ambivalent side kick, project the message of rejectionism and individuality most effectively. Larnett Son also belts...
...which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second...