Posted by: archive
« on: August 21, 2007, 12:04:05 AM »In terms of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean influence just on a basic practical stagecraft level...well, removal of limbs is about as Greek Tragedy as you can get, re: Rod & Carl, and I always find Tinker injecting Graham in the eye reminiscent of Oedipus putting his own eyes out with a brooch.. <shudder> eye stuff makes me feel yukky. Dismemberings & severings onstage are also very Renaissance; they liked their gore. Lavinia in "Titus Andronicus" has her hands and tongue severed (offstage, though), Heironimo in "The Spanish Tragedy" bites his tongue out on stage and in Tourneur's "The Atheist's Tragedy" the villian smashes his own brains out with an axe... The most obvious Shakespeare allusion with "Cleansed" is "Twelfth Night"; the idea of one sibling being so devestated by the other's death (Viola thinking Sebastian has drowned) that they adopt their dead sibling's clothes/persona - justifying Viola's disguising herself as a man as a means of trying to come to terms with her brother's death by trying in inhabit his whole being. Think about Grace dressing in her dead brother's clothes in "Cleansed"...
Archive 3-10-2002
Archive 3-10-2002