Word: countesses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play, directed by Randall Arney, is disserved by a patchy cast. Susan Floyd flattens three potentially diverse roles (a seductive model, a brainy countess, a gushing "admirer") into one ditsy ingenue. As the wife of the bar's proprietor, Rondi Reed declaims, but does not convey, the pathos of a woman who bleakly sees through the egotism of much male solicitude. Hopper makes a sweet Picasso: you can believe he painted harlequins but not minotaurs. Most satisfying is Nelson as Einstein; a diminutive figure, he expresses something of an atom's compacted, ferocious potential energy...
...Blood Countess shows signs of that pastime. Codrescu mixes amorphous bits about the Hungarian State Archive with speculations surrounding Bathory. He further conflates legend and scholarship through his fictional Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a descendant of the countess who lives in the U.S. and craves to be punished for a death in Hungary...
...scenes that burlesque Kafka, Drake prosecutes himself before a New York City judge. But let's not quibble about jurisdiction. The Blood Countess offers stylish entertainment that starts on Page One when, "despondent over the irremediable passage of time, angered at the betrayal of her flesh," Bathory has all the mirrors in her castle destroyed. For an encore, she encases a beautiful young girl in ice. Subsequent victims are burned, pierced, torn, or licked into convulsions by a dwarf...
...rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. Pleating the 16th century with the 20th, Codrescu is nervously alert for recurrent patterns of evil and its handmaiden, absolute authority. At the extreme is the countess: "She would ask them to bring her the mirror on the surface of a lake. She would ask them to open their chests and give her their hearts. She would ask them to make gold out of wool." Representing Middle Europe's recent past is bumbling communism, a repression that...
...King of Hungary. Fortunately, the possibility is more comic than cautionary. Drake recoils at the thought of honoring his "curse of identity." So does Hungary, which, despite its share of popular reactionaries and Codrescu's imaginative efforts, is holding on to the beginnings of an enterprising democracy. A Blood Countess II might update the author's fears with a female descendant of Elizabeth Bathory who builds an international cosmetics empire with beauty products based on an old family formula...