Akalaitis' The Bacchae and Ben Brantley

Achilles and his heel, Odysseus and his bow, Agamemnon and his bathtub, Oedipus and his Sphinx, Agave and her son's decapitated head, Hamlet and his Ghost, Macbeth and his Witches, Lear and his daughters, Othello and his handkerchif and Estragon and his boot. A boot is suggestive of soldiers, and Beckett's use of the boot in Waiting for Godot is a then-fresh reflection of Nazi troops witnessed by Beckett and wife Suzanne walking in Paris streets. Only God knows what made JoAnne Akalaitis think of transferring 'Tis Pity She's a Whore from early seventeenth-century Italy to mid-twentieth-century Italy during times of il Duce Mussolini! and in 2009 in her new staging of Euripedes' The Bacchae about which staging Ben Brantley in "the New York Times" wrote that "the actors playing Pentheus and Dionysus with a definitive if unacknowledged taste for kink ... manage to strike a few erotic sparks in their charachters' confrontations but that suppressed homosexuality is not the primary subject of The Bacchae." At that time, I emailed Brantley saying to him, "JoAnne deliberately added from her own this dash of homosexuality being aware of you sitting in the stalls making notes for your next morning's review of the play, and intending to--to use Pozzo's word about Luck trying to impress him--"mollify" you to put good notices in the NYT about her show, she added that gay dash, and JoAnne is stanchly proud of her femininity that the last word to come down on the stage in her 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was the word CUNT, and because you missed JoAnne's gay semiotic signal for your exclusive sake, you wrote that scathing review on her The Bacchae. A critic, no matter how fulture-eyed, misses sometimes some significant signals." Agave besides Euripedes' other heroine Medea are two of my favourite dramatic characters. My other heroine is Karla Zachanasian from Durrenmatt's The Visit. Who would forget Meda in the last scene riding her chariot and with her frenzy laughter departs for her father the sun god. Only Pozzo's two exits at ends of two acts of Waiting for Godot could compare to such a spectacular exit. When Agave, drunk to the brim, realises her tragedy of sucking the bones of her slaughtered (by her and her intoxicated wowen-friends) son's head, like an Arab sucking bones of a lamb's head, only Don Quixote, when looking at the mirrors and realising the fool he was, can compare, and Karla Zachanasian taking with her the coffin in which dead Anton lies is a scene with which only King Lear carrying dead body of his daughter Coredlia can compare


Aeschylus and Sophocles are greater poetry writers than Euripedes, but Euripedes is the better theatre writer. Of the three great Greeks, I relish Euripedes most

Such goings-on

With pseudo-cadences of Hamm's interrogative remark: "Do you think we are beginning to mean something?", I say: Do you think that I need psycho-analysis due to--among other symptoms that may have been detected--my perverse taste for such stage women characters as Agave, Medea, Lady Macbeth, Madame Arkadina, Karla Zachanasian, Amanda Wingfield, Violet Venable and Martha, who are robust with dramatic vitality, whereas Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona and Cordelia who, as much as they suffer, suffer from dramartic anemia? Beckett went to see a psychiatrist in London because at the time, ie 1930s, psycho-analysis was prohibited in his home-town Dublin due to religious reasons for psycho-analysis was deemed to be an act of interfering in God's creation of the soul, exactly as plastic surgery was interfering in God's creation of the body. The London psychiatrist cautioned Beckett that psycho-analysis could damage the patient's genius. Hence, in the final analysis, perversion is good for the genius as "fresh air is good for the appetite", as Pozzo informs Vladimir and Estragon. One is to imagine Beckett's dilemma--typical of the poor man--how the doors of hope were shut to his face both in heaven (in Dublin) and on earth (in London), and no wonder he replaced "Our Father, thy will to be done on earth as it is in heaven", with Hamm's shout in frenzy, "The bastard--He doesn't exist"

Beckett reversed

since my MA thesis on him in 1971 and until his death in 1989, I used to see Samuel Beckett in my dreams. In one of those dreams, I asked him about his method of writing, and he told me that he used symmetry, and I asked him whether the element of reversal came in into his writing, and when he was about to answer, my wife stirred in bed and I woke up without knowing his answer, and I was so furious that I suppressed in my heart a cry like that of Tennessee Williams' Maggie the Cat, a cry, Maggie describes that everbody all over the Delta could hear. Now, basing on the element of reversal, I have some ideas more infuriating perhaps than JoAnne Akalaitis' memorable landmark 1984 Endgame production. I think of producing Happy Days in a reversed order, ie the play unfolds like this: Act 2 of the original play, Curtain, Act 1of the original play, Curtain, AND my Act 3: Dumb show with Winnie, liberated from the mound, doing a ballet dance to a bar from Beckett's favourite musician, Schubert. In keeping with Beckett's spirit, Winnie's liberation from the mound is the liberation brought about by death, and to enhance this concept, it would be perfect that the music bar should be Schubert's Death and the Maiden used by Beckett in another play. So my added Act 3 of Happy Days shall all be typically Beckettian, without causing any harm to the Beckettian spirit of the entire play

Talk, words and dialogue

Some people's responses are brief in words but elaborate in significance, like the Oracle of Delphi to which Creon goes to bring word to Oedipus. Men talk elaborately but with little significance, whereas the gods speak briefly but with abundant significance. Rejoicing his inspiration to compose cantos, says Ezra Pound: "The gods are back. They haven't left us"
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"Where're you, boys, the woods are burnin'."
"Where's the old spirit?"
The two quotations above are from Miller's Death of a Salesman which I saw in London, late July 2005, under Robert Falls's direction, starring Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman. Ruby Cohn whom I had met at her London studio a couple of days before I went to see the play, advised me against seeing it as she had seen it and didn't like it. I went to see the play with my head full of the way Lee J Cobb speaks Willy's part on Caedmon Records. For me as on Caedmon Records, and for those who saw the play on stage under the direction of Elia Kazan, Cobb was the definitive Willy. In 1949, when Cobb flew all the way from Beverley Hills to New York City after having read the script, he arrived and said to Kazan and Miller, "I am the man", exactly as that negro actor to play O'Neill's Emperor Jones who said, "I am the man. That Irishman [O'Neill] only wrote the play." In his autobiography, Time Bends, Miller gives a wonderful account of the episode of how Cobb was discovered to play Willy.
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In Durrenmatt's der besuch der alten dame (The Visit) Karla Zachanasian is one of my favourite characters as in this dialogue with Anton, the couple is like Elizabeth and Lord Essex, dining and wining on eve of Essex's execution which Elizabeth had ordered and could have stopped but tragic necessity is stronger than human capability, likewise, Karla couldn't stop Anton's execution as much as she loves him

Karla: I will have you killed then taken to Capri in a coffin to be buried in the lawn in front of my dining room so that I look at your grave every morning when I am having breakfast

Anton: Capri! I always wanted to be there

anonymous email

Yes, what a memory! Great!

from Mahmoud Al-Jamal

Dear Professor,


I am sending this email to say hi and thanks for sending me this email. You have a great memory. Good luck in your life. Keep in touch. Salam!
Mahmoud Al-Jamal

Jadara University

from Firas Kassab

always great Mr. Sideek

Firas ( Mosul College of ARTS)