Word: lavinia
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Wonderland Park, just outside Boston, was all atwitter last week. Above the splashing of the fountains could be heard the squeals and coos of the visitors. "Peek under the rhododendrons, Lavinia, and see if they're using peat moss," whispered one. Burbled another: "I can never really face up to spring until there are pussy willows in the house...
...butlered, bachelored, dowagered, nurseried inhabitants, 70-year-old Ivy Compton-Burnett creates her own cosmos. Her scene is, like the Greek stage, mercilessly compact and periodically given to disquieting revelations and messengered melodrama. The Mighty and Their Fall concerns an enslaving, egocentric widower, Ninian, and his devoted daughter, Lavinia. Ninian decides to remarry. Lavinia becomes emotionally unhinged, a letter is mysteriously withheld, and a family will turns up with a deathbed injunction scrawled on it. By such classic Compton-Burnett devices, not only are the characters' outer fortunes made or marred, but their inner natures are thrust into...
...Cocktail Party is fashioned on the Alcestis legend (already the subject of a tragedy by one of Eliot's favorito writers). But in Eliot's play the fun has just begun when Alcestis--Lavinia returns from the dead. Lavinia and her husband realize that time's only issue has been grief and anxiety, and that their marriage in its present state cannot last. Celia Coplestone, Edward's quondam mistress (apparently considered to be another aspect of Alcestis) decides that she is also far from mental health...
Joan White as the inquisitive and omniscient Julia leads the cast in the merrier of its japes. Again and again, when the play begins to bog down in the cool of Mr. Eliot's emotions, Julia bustles in to start things going again. Priscilla Chamberlayne as Lavinia is also excellent, portraying with heavy sarcasm the role of the Alcestis of the hearth...
...Michael Sugarman makes a most fitting brother to the emperor, but Abigail Sugarman is not always at ease in the crucial role of the emperor's vengeful wife. Her face and voice do outstanding work for her difficult part, but her gestures and postures float detachedly or rigidly. As Lavinia, daughter to Titus, Susan Howe is intense and haunting. After her famous entrance ("ravished; her hands cut off and her tongue cut out") she is fully successful...