Overview

In this play, the playwright goes back to the tradition of using myth in dramatic art. He combines this honored tradition with a realism that is unsurpassed. In so doing, he enriches the play by layering it with realism. Realism in all of the arts is out of fashion now and has been for a century. This is because all of the arts have been taken over by the academicians and want-to-be academicians; and academic people have never lived in the real world; or it has been so long since they have lived in the real, realistic world that they have forgotten what it is like. (Most professors have never worked a real job.) In addition, mediocrity really blooms in the hot-house atmosphere of the academies. Living the life of the mind, the academic finds that the mind takes over. Having nothing real with which to occupy its time and energies, the mind turns more and more to phantasies of various kinds. And so today, we have phantasies performed in theatres. And phantasies that are based, not upon fact, but upon other phantasies. Myth supplies the motive power for people, since the beginning of the human race, to interpret and to make sense of their mysterious and dangerous world. The real power of myth results from a human obsession to understand his/her world; myth is inseparable from the human imagination and the forms with which the human imagination is able to create and fill with myth. Every part of life has been and continues to be mythologized. In American sports, for example, we have the Michael Jordan myth: the myth is that Jordan singlehandedly beat teams to earn six world titles, when in reality corrupt officiating accounted for at least half of those championships. Sports authorities to this day claim that Jordan could actually suspend himself in the air, defying the law of gravity. What this play does is what all great art does and that is to select important details and then to use them to build the dramatic structure and fill with itself as content. The psychological realism here is superb. The cultural differences, not only in actions, but also in psychology are presented wonderfully. Everything in this play contributes to its unification and organization. The dramatic artist enhances fact and its reality with augmentation of feeling and mental cleverness to produce great hilarity. The playwright here does what few playwrights in the history of drama and theatre has succeeded in doing: he has combined great and clever humor with (potential) tragedy. The playwright has re-established contact with what is most vital and relevant to the human predicament. He celebrates the human in spite of all its flaws and shortcomings.

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