Word: plautus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aphorisms Like Petals. The man inside all these textiles has a stupendous ego, and the only characters who come near him in all of fiction are Spenser's Braggadochio and Plautus' Braggart Warrior. "If I didn't have an enormous ego and a monumental pride, how in hell could I be a performer?'' he explains. With something for everybody, he is kind, generous, rude and stubborn, explosive, impulsive, bright and mischievous. He is an outgoing, flamboyant man to whom privacy is sacred. Now he is snapping out wisecracks. Now he is sitting alone, quietly unapproachable...
...Tufts Arena Theater traditionally scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find its plays. The splinter it removed from under its fingernail this week is "Mostellaria" (or "The Haunted House") by Plautus. This farce dates from around 200 B.C. and, except for the fact that it predates almost all of them, is totally indistinguishable from the five thousand other farces based on the carousings of a wayward son during his father's absence. It has in it the familiar wily servant and the hordes of cooperative women and it ends in the inevitable crisis precipitated by the father's unexpected...
...Mostellaria" might have had in the original is effectively disguised by Frank Copley's translation. In skirting the dangers of the overly academic translations often made of Latin and Greek plays, Mr. Copley has veered too far to the other extreme. In a program note he says that, "As Plautus tried to make his Greeks talk like Romans, the present translator has tried to make Plautus talk like a contemporary American." The flaw in this reasoning is that while there were many points of similarity between the Greek and Roman civilizations, few of these points are mirrored in our time...
...Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) In his exalted soaring into the unforgiving air, man in his bird has reaped all the riches he ever dreamed of - the poetry of flight itself and the victory over time and space. But in the swift tumble of progress called the Air Age, he has wrought more hard truth than poetry. The truth: the skies over the U.S. - busiest of all air borne nations - are roaring with an astonishing complex of featherless birds. Not counting 22,000 military aircraft, there are operating in the U.S. no fewer than 72,000 planes, ranging from lightweight, single...