Book Review: Oedipus Tyrannus

Tags

classics, fiction, Oedipus, plays, theater

Oedipus Tyrannus

by Sophocles

genre: classics, play

Summary

A blind prophet predicts that a son will kill his father and marry his mother. After running from this fate, Oedipus realizes that the boy is him.

Causing Fate

Tags

books, Destiny, Emlyn Chand, Farsighted, Fate, fiction, Kung Fu Panda 2, Oedipus, paranormal YA, Sophocles, theater, young adult

Oedipus, Farsighted, and Kung Fu Panda 2. What do they have in common? In each, a character brings about their own Fate by acting to avoid it.

Oedipus
Oedipus learns of a prophesy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. What he doesn’t know, is that he’s adopted. He runs away from home, trying to keep the prophesy from coming true. Thinking he is away from his parents, he stabs a stranger on the road and marries an older woman, thinking he has won. As it turns out, the stranger was his father and woman, his mother. By running away from the people he thought were his parents, he brought about the prophesy trying to avoid it.

This post includes spoilers for Kung Fu Panda 2 but none for Farsighted.

Reflections on Charlie Cox Runs With Scissors

Tags

Bucket List, Charlie Cox Runs With Scissors, comedy, commitment, death, goals, life, Michael McKeever, Midland Community Theater, perseverance, play, theater, tragedy

Charlie Cox Runs With Scissors is a play about a man who has just found out he has a terminal illness.  He’s led a boring life as an editor rather than pursuing writing so in his last months he decides to write his memoirs. Characters representing Love and Death fight for his attention once he finds himself at a secluded motel and fill-up station, in love for the first time in his life, trying to make sense of this cruel twist of fate. The entire play was wonderful, but two quotes require special attention.

“I cried not because I was dying, but because of the life I lived.”

“I can’t be dying because I never lived.”

Theater Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Tags

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, Midland Community Theater, performance art, reviews, Ten little soldier boys, theater

10/14/2011 show of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None put on at the Midland Community Theater.

Ten dinner guests show up on an island to find their host is not their to greet them.  A record plays and accuses each of the dinner guests of murder. Come to find none of the guests has actually met their host and while all recognize the names of their supposed victims, all deny any wrongdoings.  Ten soldier figurines sit on a vanity in the common room; after the first guest chokes to death, they discover one of them has broken and notice the poem that sits above the remaining soliders.

Ten little Soldier boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self and then there were nine.