Word: serpent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE'S NOT A whole lot can be said about The Open Theatre and its concoction called The Serpent: A Ceremony. They both represent an infant theatrical form as yet more of a reaction against the purely verbal drama than a definite scheme for its undoing. The guiding principles of this reaction are few but give an idea of where the form may be heading. The author, if there has to be an author, is merely one rather docile element of the collaboration; that's to say he provides the words, if there have to be words. The effect...
...Serpent, if one ignores the form in favor of the content (not an easy thing to do), inquires into the source, nature and existence of guilt, leaping back in time from James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan to Cain. Ideas wander idly in and out of the action. At all point's the company stretches its physical resources to the limit, and proves itself an unusually well-coordinated lot. Although The Open Theatre doesn't go in for the acrobatics encouraged by Julian Beck and his crowd, these performers seem every bit as able as their Living Theatre counterparts...
...musicological study J. S. Bach. Besides illuminating the context of Bach's works and propounding a more scrupulous performing style, Schweitzer showed that many seeming peculiarities in Bach came from his "pictorial" method of wedding music to text: a wiggling melody when a line refers to a Biblical serpent, an upward line when mists rise...
Evil has fallen on bad days. In an age of H-bombs and death camps, its influence in the world has hardly diminished. But men's ways of thinking and talking about evil have altered. The fine old dramatic metaphors, from the Serpent in the Garden to Gustave Doré's sulfurous Lucifer, have lost their power to terrify. Yet modern substitutes are equally unsatisfying. Social scientists reduce evil to data. Intellectuals expose its banality. The public seems able to consider the demonic only in the harmless guise of Rosemary's Baby. Like nearly everything these days...
Snake handling, which has been practiced in the South since the turn of the century, is based on Jesus' words in Mark 16: "In my name they will cast out demons; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it will not hurt them." The snakes, which are kept in special boxes by leaders of the congregation, are usually brought out as the climax to frenzied revival meetings that may last for as long as four hours. "When the ecstasy of the Lord is upon you and you take up serpents," explains Mullins, "you have...