Word: phaon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Justine. With the generous approval of her husband, she is a voracious lover of men, including Pittakos (who sends her a gold bracelet from Athens, still attached to a severed arm, in memory of their affair). Before the first act is over she has seduced Pittakos' twin brother Phaon, the diver who recovers the tablets from the lost city. Like his Novelist Pursewarden in the Quartet, Durrell is a superb ironist, and the play's central theme-that man is responsible for his world as immutably as he is its victim-turns on the fact that Sappho herself...
...Story. Save for Phaon, a lovechild of 12, and an orphaned girl-baby called Deodata by her poetic foster-mother, the numerous survivors of the wrecked S. S. Cormorant are all mature women. There are an artist, a circus rider, a novelist, a harlot, a U. S. debutante, a doctor, a mystic, a Negress, many miscellaneous. Most are young, most are beautiful, or soon rendered excessively so by life upon the paradisiacal island of their Robinson Crusade. The aging artist, Anni Prächtel, assumes the presidency of the Mother State, which, by shrewd conscription of mental and spiritual resources, soon...
Each year there is a season of mystical nuptials. The population of He des Dames multiplies apace. With Phaon growing into a handsome youth, and in view of certain semi-authenticated episodes, Anni Prachtel and a few cynics remain dubious of the annual parthenogenesis. But they preserve the myth, and five years after the first crop of childen, the virgin mothers feel so self-sufficient that the disposal of male offsprings is an issue. Some are for Amazonian exposure on the mountains, some for the method that elevates voices and renders docile. Instead, compassion prevailing, an isolation colony, Manland...
...there is a year when the dedicated maidens have nothing to report of their sleep in the temple save pleasant dreams. The maidens smell fraud and burn the temple, whose flames signal a lusty and welcomed invasion from Manland. In the orgy of innocent rapine and surrender that follows, Phaon is pursued, somewhat to his distaste, by bands of ardent maenads, toward whom he being older has felt somewhat as a father...
...fall production of the Dramatic Club. To some extent this is due to the success of the performances last year, but to a far greater extent to the wise selection of the play to be produced. "The Scarecrow," by Percy MacKaye '97, whose "Jeanne d'Arc," "Sappho and Phaon," and "Mater," have been seen in New York and elsewhere, is undoubtedly Mr. MacKaye's most distinguished work. Though published in 1908, it has never been performed, and the Dramatic Club, therefore, has the distinction of presenting for the first time a play which is considered by eminent critics here...