Word: zeus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...familiar Judaeo-Christian God, Miller asserts, is indeed dead. In Miller's view, he died much as Prometheus warned that Zeus would die: he usurped power over the other gods whose existence nourished his own. This happened, says Miller, because Christian theology, particularly after the Reformation, became dogmatic and narrow. Miller argues that Jesus himself was neither. He proclaimed that there were "many mansions" in his father's house, and in teaching he used a variety of parables. Complains Miller: "Christian theology has reduced those parables to a few creeds, all of which say the same thing." What...
...plot, what there is of it, involves classical mythology, specifically, Hera's displeasure at Zeus's chasing a girl, Swoedipus. The girl is banished to a desert island, cleverly named Isle of Lucy, from which she is rescued by Androgen, her human lover, after he has consulted various oracles, performed various labors, and, appropriately, suffered. With domineering females made to look stupid, with retarded juvenile and cardboard characters floating around and with the chorus line, the show has what most Pudding audiences like...
...female impersonations, but competence rarely threatens the Pudding's stage. David Lewis, as Hera, and Michael Gury, as the Oracle of Housephli and Bulah the maid, are both sure of themselves and appear to have some idea of how to act under utterly farcical conditions. Mark Miller, as Zeus, is mostly a foil for Lewis, and his Nixon imitations were, to say the least, strange in a Pudding Show. Relevance in drag, and in black tie, is always a little suspect, if you know what I mean...
...decked out with a fireplace on whose mantle sit an hourglass, an astrolabe and a drinking-mug. There are a chandelier, a terrestrial globe on a stand, a mirror, antlers on the wall, and, most appropriately, a folding screen depicting the nude mythological Leda about to be impregnated by Zeus-as-swan. Doors lead offstage to other rooms, including the hyperactive bedroom...
Prometheus, chained to his rock, his liver torn and eaten by Zeus's eagle, cannot escape his destiny, but he can escape his fate. "Fate," Kott writes, "is non-awareness." And Prometheus, like all heroes of Greek tragedy, finally becomes pure awareness, at the pitch of ecstatic agony...