Word: zeus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...approach to tragedy is almost too empathetic. He begins and ends with the supreme sufferer, Prometheus. The classic hero, he suggests, enters a world that is either mismanaged or overmanaged. The tyrant may be a king or he may, as happened in the case of Prometheus, be Zeus himself. Out of compassion for the tyrant's suffering victims, out of a superb but frightening presumption, the hero ultimately proposes himself as "mediator and savior." He will rebel. He will disturb the existing order-even risk chaos-to secure a new covenant with power...
...twenty years past the glorious days of the slaying of Medusa--he is impotent, his wife sleeps around. Pegasus can no longer fly and Bellerophon has become a professor of literature. Barth's heroes have unheroic self-doubts, think dirty thoughts, study poli sci and get high on hippomenes. Zeus, in the form of a high school drop-out, rapes unsuspecting women and Bellerophon is dismissed by all as another quack would-be hero. Heroic love is forever lost in the sexual profusion and confusion of these post-Freudian ancient Greeks...
...they run the gamut from pure kneeslapping comedy to bawdy jokes and nude appearances. Pan and Cupid swing rosy-cheeked down from thereafters, babies are eaten alive, a sexy maiden is transformed for punishment by Juno into a credible cow with amazingly bovine expressions, a jive-ass-hipster Zeus with greaser shades trysts with earthling maidens, and the verdict is pronounced upon Narcissus. "The sucker came up from inside of him, and that's a rumble nobody can cool...
...finer plays. While Barbara Undershaft (Jane Alexander), who does the Christian God's goodly work among the poor, owns the play's title, it is her munitions tycoon of a father, Andrew (Lee Richardson), wielding the twin thunderbolts of "money and gunpowder," who is the capitalistic Zeus. Shaw himself had a Caesar complex. He was fascinated by absolute power and that explained his deplorable temporary enthusiasms for Hitler and Stalin. But his Undershaft is of another breed. This merchant of death is also an apostle of life...
...Welles-Houseman partnership ended badly, with Welles hurling blazing Sterno heaters at Producer Houseman and howling anathemas at him in that voice of Zeus...