Word: trojan
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...Union general and looking for all the world like an actor dressed up to play Ulysses S. Grant. There too was doddering old Nestor, also wearing the blue, with binoculars around his neck. Menelaus wore pince-nez, and they all used the spittoon and the likker jug. The Trojan War had turned into the U.S. Civil War, and before the play was over, muskets banged, cannon boomed, and that old states-righter, Hector, lost his bridgework to six Greco-Yankee bayonets...
First of all, let's leave ancient history out of this. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, the playwright is not confronting us with those noble Greek and Trojan warriors that Homer and others sang of. The proper names are retained--Priam, Hector, Aeneas, Achilles, Ulysses, and the rent--but any further resemblances are purely coincidental. Cressida does not even exist in the Illad; and the sagittarial hero-god Pandarus was not debased into a pimp until Boccaccio latched onto...
...Griethysen makes Troilus into an effete poseur who has obviously just read The Sorrows of Young Werther. The only trouble with this interpretation is that such a Troilus would never even have survived basic training after being drafted into the Trojan army...
...weakness of the ending is presently the play's major flaw. The plot itself concludes quite brilliantly, but the actual transition to a finale is awkward. Menelaus has been losing out to rival Trojan fisheries ever since his wife was involved in a scandal for corrupting the morals of a minor (Paris). The Trojan War offers an easy way out for everyone: Helen gets her lover, Menelaus his market, Achilles his promotion stunt. . . . But Segal, somehow, doesn't get the scene which would logically conclude the show...
...Wolf Pack. For those who came in late-a great many people educated at colleges with elective curriculums-The Odyssey is the story of the long voyage home from the Trojan Wars of Odysseus, lord of Ithaca, to be reunited with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. On the way, he and his men suffered such ordeals as imprisonment by brutish cannibal giants, shipwreck, seduction, famine and feast. Meanwhile, back at the palace, a half-hundred soft civilians squatted on the absent lord's domain, eating and drinking their heads off, seducing the maidservants, insulting the stripling heir...