Word: vitae
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...supermarket in a gorilla suit. Why? Why not? "I guess I'm a ham," he says. However he costumes himself, he knows that he can always cool off by jumping into the lavish Jacuzzi bath and forget everything but his motto, floating on a banner overhead: Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration...
There are actually two other characters, but each is encased in the prism of Woolf's consciousness. Her husband Leonard (Nicholas Pennell) devotedly tended a brushfire of genius at which he was painfully singed. Also vying for Virginia's affections is Vita Sackville-West (Patricia Conolly), an avowed lesbian, or Sapphist in the term of Woolfs 1920s...
...Vita's feelings were reciprocated is ambiguous: the caress and diverted kiss that occur onstage imply rather more than they reveal. Love is an unbalanced equation. The evidence of the play echoes the reflection offered by Woolf's nephew Quentin Bell in his biography of his aunt: "If the test of passion be blindness, then [Virginia's] affections were not very deeply engaged." Virginia sharpens that point in the play: "Life and a lover she thought. It does not scan." For Woolf, her work was her life. While she would drown herself as pitiably as Ophelia...
Ancient Rome bestowed laws, roads, imperial machismo, crucifixions, la dolce vita and the drama of decline and fall, the longest-running show in Western history. The city continues to give the impression of crumbling into its own ruins, its reputation as decadence central cheered on by Fellini and Gore Vidal. But like a Verdi heroine dying with a knife in her breast, Rome continues to sing impressively...
Such combat has not hindered Moravia's career. His entwined political and sexual themes were assured attention by strictures from il Duce and the Vatican. His latest novel, La Vita Interiore (The Internal Life), was banned last year under Italy's broad obscenity laws. The old national debate over censorship was rekindled; Moravia's gray head bloomed once again on magazine covers, and brawls erupted at public meetings where sections of the novel were read aloud...