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...A.R.T. uses Robert Fagles' translation of the Greek. Fagles is best known for his recent translations of Homer, and like those works, this text scans fluidly, is easily understood when spoken and is often the epitome of "plain English." If this production lacks the cantankerous glitz of many A.R.T. productions and seems less relevant than 20th century productions of Antigone by Hasenclever, Anouihl or Brecht, it is because, like Fagles' translation, it is primarily concerned with bringing a classical text to life...
...Proverbs shines among the wisdom literature, and, if it is not blasphemous (that is, if it is not "froward," a lovely word, meaning stubbornly contrary, disobedient) to mine the text for base political meaning, has something for everyone...
Both Gold and Card have this aim in mind, but there the similarities end. Gold is deeply tanned, ponytailed and fast talking, with a background in experimental music and toy design. His group has spent the past couple of years dreaming up utterly outlandish text-display inventions like Speeder Reader. There's the Tilty Table, a vast and thin computer screen on shock absorbers that you tilt in any direction to scroll through a document that would in real life be 30 ft. across; Listen Reader, which uses tiny embedded computer chips to produce different ambient sounds on each page...
Gold's RED team seems to have reached the same conclusion: it's O.K. to skim, and it's O.K. to read pictures instead of text. Its Hyperbolic Reader (based on the hyperbolic tree, a Xerox PARC invention) tells a children's story in Perspective Wall style. Cartoons and speech bubbles grow large as you move a joystick over them, then shrink as you turn to another part of the story's tree. In Fluid Fiction (also created with PARC software), another children's story is told in just 24 sentences. But touch the end of any sentence...
...these inventions and the philosophy behind them, it's hard not to get a sobering sense of the impending death of traditional, text-based linear narrative. Will generations to come ever know the delights of picking up a good book and reading it from start to finish? Or will they rather skim through it on their tablet PCs, Speeder Reading what the computer has predetermined to be the best bits based on their previous preferences, choosing alternative endings, letting the robot dog finish it for them...