Word: slave
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...narrative, a virtual travelogue of the 5th century B.C. His services to the Persian Empire involve extensive travels throughout the known world. He goes to India to secure new sup plies of iron for Darius and then to far-off Cathay (China), where he is usually treated as a slave instead of an ambassador. His peripatetic existence throws him constantly into the presence of the powerful and influential. He meets, among others, Buddha, Confucius, an ar ray of Indian mystics and holy men, Pericles, Thucydides, Sophocles. He knows people who knew Pythagoras and Aeschylus. During his last years in Athens...
...with an innocent, stupid honesty. He also laid down the law from the outset: You'll need a tie, and no dungarees. You should shave, and we don't let the stock boys wear tennis shoes." I hate people who call sneakers "tennis shoes," but I was a slave to capital, so I kept nodding and smiling...
...Green is the obvious catalyst who precipitates suspended emotions and passions. The author wisely does not explain too much. She depends on a ripe, sometimes overripe, prose style to create atmospheres in which strange things are possible. The Caribbean, with its buried history of slave trade and uprisings, its lingering essense of negritude, is a good stage. Morrison attempts to evoke island life with touches of the magic realism that made Song of Solomon so successful. It does not quite work in Tar Baby. In fact, the strongest sense of place is conveyed in a scene set in New York...
...does Aladdin resign himself to his fate, as does a dishonest merchant, whose excuse for cheating the boy is. "It's my destiny." (Early in the play, a paradoxically liberated slave girl not only refuses to be sold to the dishonest merchant, but she helps an honest one to pay for her.) "Don't wait for angels to save you," the slave girl sings at the evening's end. "Make a home in the body God gave you. Alone." Aladdin, then, is the story of a boy whose "exile" from the material world keeps him honest, open and strong...
Absinthe is the catalyst. It turns Verlaine (David Markay) violent and makes Rimbaud (Nicky Silver) into a satanic enfant terrible. Transforming his mentor into his slave, Rimbaud pries Verlaine loose from his wife and son. The rest of their tempestuous saga is fairly accurately chronicled in the production at off-Broadway's La Mama Theater. The play is flawed, but it is amazing that British Playwright Hampton (The Philanthropist) wrote it when he was only 18. He was obviously drawn to Rimbaud as a fin-de-sicle spiv, and Silver plays him that way. Markay's Verlaine...