Word: serpentes
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THEATER RITUALIZES LIFE. Time is condensed, people's behavior is more rigorously guided by certain formulae, the actors tend to follow a proscribed order of words. Jean-Claude van Itallie '58 pushes this transformation even further in The Serpent by representing life as a kind of religious ceremony. In a series of 14 episodes, he attempts to integrate Biblical revelation with the human condition in the United States of the 1960s, and the result is visually engaging but conceptually strained...
...play runs a gamut of themes from murder to lust to alienation and old age. Eve succumbs to the serpent's temptation in the Garden and bequeaths petty, disillusioned existences to her 20th-century daughters. Cain's allegedly unwitting murder of his brother is juxtaposed against the assassination of a president, presumably Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King, Jr., while the American public, embodied in a hysterical chorus, shirks all blame for the killings. Society is rather tritely compared to a flock of lemmings, and four women bewail the discontinuity of modern life as they clench and splay their fingers...
...text of The Serpent is often banal enough to make one cringe. A couple of lengthy exchanges of verbal non sequiturs, supposed articulations of existential anguish, are peppered with McKuenesque dilemmas. Someone tells of passing a friend on the street without trading any greeting--each of them feared the other had looked through instead of at him. Someone else describes a dinner party where she wanted to "scratch out the women's eyes" and "grab the men's balls"--a lame evocation of hostility made even more hokey by the gratuitous vulgarity. While couples copulate with increasing fervor and come...
What's new about narcissism? It has been around since the serpent told Eve "You will be like gods . . ." Another name for it is original sin-and I suppose it's at least part of what prompts me to write this letter, hoping to see my name and my opinion in TIME...
...take the blame. For if there is one serpent most easily discernible in the Garden of Eden togetherness that Americans hope for from tennis, it is the American husband. Until the advent of Women's Liberation, when men began to be accused of a certain piggish dominance again, a sociologist's easy generalization about the American middle-class husband was that he had lost his domestic clout. It is hardly more than a decade, in fact, since wits began describing the commuting husband as a "yard man with sex privileges." Now it appears that whatever happened...