Word: oedipus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lead in Arthur Miller's CBS-TV drama Playing for Time. Politics also excluded her from being cast in the Broadway drama Plenty. That same year, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, allegedly fearful of disruptions and of losing donor support, dumped Redgrave from scheduled performances as narrator of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. She brought a civil rights suit pleading that "people's livelihoods should not depend upon their holding 'correct' political views." The U.S. Supreme Court last January rejected her bid for a punitive-damages award, although it let stand a judgment of $39,500 to cover lost employment -- an amount...
...company through triumphal seasons in London and New York City -- Olivier could spread out the banquet of those contradictions in a single evening. In Henry IV, Part I, he was the stuttering, heroic Hotspur; in Part II, the cagey-senile Justice Shallow. The curtain would fall on his Oedipus, with its searing scream of self-revelation; after intermission he would mince on as Mr. Puff, the giddy paragraphist of Sheridan's The Critic. It was all part of a 70-year striptease in which this consummate quick-change artist always had one more veil to remove, and proof of what...
Allen's method is different. In Oedipus Wrecks, his efficiency is that of the perfectly practiced anecdotalist, not wasting a moment on irrelevant detail, yet knowing when to linger over the important ones. In this brisk vignette, Allen himself plays Sheldon, victim of a kind of transcendental Jewish-mother joke. It would spoil the fun to say how he transforms a stock figure, a yammering, smothering mom (Mae Questel, who is splendid), from a private torment into a public menace, but it is literally magical to behold...
Bill Buckner, the first baseman who let a ground ball slip through his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, is Oedipus Rex, the murderer of a city's dreams. Wade Boggs, the perpetual American League batting champion, is Prometheus Bound, scorned because he never makes The Big Hit. He gives you fire, but Bostonians expect him to produce a furnace...
...always with Gurney, an outward simplicity conceals a puzzle hunter's trove of puns, metaphors and hidden allusions. In the opening scene, the father misquotes a literary reference and the son, in gentle correction, claims that Coleridge said the three great plots were Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones and Volpone. Sure enough, the play turns out to be, like Oedipus, a struggle between father and son; the play within a play hinges, like Tom Jones, on questions of hidden parenthood; and the father, like Volpone, proclaims his forthcoming death to see what favors can be extracted in the hope of inheritance...