Word: oedipus
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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...
With a madwoman--who may not really be crazy, though everyone tells her she is--a conniving old woman who screams "Oedipus" with every word to the squabbling heirs, Suddenly sounds like a soap opera set in Rappacini's garden. There's even an implied castration...
...this abrasive parable of sexual frustration comes Martin (Gary Oldman), an Englishman who feels like an orphan, an alien in America -- the man who fell to earth, into a lonely woman's dream. She needs a son, so he'll be one, a cross between Dennis the Menace and Oedipus. He will play on her longing and guilt, in baby talk that moves her: "You never cuddled me, did you? . . . And you never let me follow your finger along the line of nice big $ words ((like)) 'Once upon a time.' " He will relive what was never his, "my American childhood...
...THEBAN PLAYS (PBS, Sept. 16, 23, 30, 9 p.m. on most stations). Sophocles' tragic Oedipus trilogy gets world-class treatment in a BBC production starring Anthony Quayle and Claire Bloom...