Word: theseus
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...underlying story comes from Greek myth via the Hippolytus of Euripides. Hippolytus is the bastard son of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, and Hippolyte, single-breasted queen of the Amazons. He lives in the home of Theseus and Theseus' young bride Phaedra. An outdoors he-man sort, Hippolytus neglects the service of Aphrodite, goddess of love. The goddess puts a sex hex on Phaedra, who is consumed with a ravenous passion for her stepson Hippolytus. She is rebuffed in her advances, and in revenge tells Theseus that the boy has made attempts on her virtue. Theseus prays...
Most of the other actors are similarly inadequate. Mitchell Agruss, as Theseus, handles some of Shakespeare's most exquisite poetry as if it were prose; Rae Allen (Hippolyta) cannot shape a long speech so as to maintain any interest at all; three of the four young Athenians are incompetently portrayed, with only Mariette Hartley, as Helena, rising above mediocrity. Titania, Oberon, and most of their minions were neither human nor supernatural, and failed completely to blend the two in the way that the play requires. Some child-fairies, costumed in what appeared to be their pajamas, were revolting...
...that almost all popular heroes have clay heads to match their feet, owned up to some personal idols. On his list: Mark Twain ("a prism through which the young country expressed itself"), Herman Melville ("he had scope and virility, didn't internalize"), Tom Paine, Albert Einstein, Edmund Wilson, Theseus, George Bernard Shaw. Allowing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was "a father figure" to him, Sahl said that he regards Dwight Eisenhower as "a stepfather figure...
...Many years have passed since my rasslin' days," said the late Herman Hickman, who tried grunt-and-groan for a while before he graduated to football coaching, "but I know there have been few legitimate professional matches since Theseus laid down the wrestling rules in 900 B.C. I even have my doubts about whether that historic match between Ulysses and Ajax was a shoot. I still don't think you can get a better night's entertainment than you will by seeing your favorite hero tangle with a villain. This plot has had the longest...
...KING MUST DIE, by Mary Renault. No great novelist but an eminently able literary archaeologist, Author Renault dug up the year's best piece of historical fiction. Her telling of the bloody Theseus story and her meticulously detailed view of ancient Mediterranean life is a notable achievement...