terrshee's Diaryland Diary

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I Won't Soon Forget the Red Sand

I'm still mulling over the production of "The Persians" which I saw at the Shakespeare Theater yesterday (preceded by the world's finest Eggs Benedict and pommes frittes at Bistro D'oc and an obligatory visit to Olssons Books).

I have rarely seen a play that swept me up quite like that. Even at over 2,000 years old, it rings with psychological truth. I could not help but be struck by how little human nature has changed, except perhaps for an ever greater desire to avoid the consequences of our actions.

Of course there are the exceedingly timely parallels on the wars of Bush Sr. and Jr., and they should not be glossed over. But the profound difference, I think, is that these Persian nobles became conscious of their errors, that they had ignored the warning signs of imperial hubris, and even encouraged them. They knew they were the ones who ordered the death of almost an entire generation of young men in an escalation of empty glory, and that the downfall of Xeres and Persia was in no small part because they allowed it to happen. And the doomed emperor himself felt the full horror of what he had ordered and did not try to minimize or deny it.

But most of all what I saw was how fragile is greatness and how quickly hubris can bring it down in a way that all involved are punished, the guilty as much as the innocent. And there are some things that cannot be made right, some pains that cannot be assuaged, some consequences from which there is no honorable escape.

It was very, very thought provoking. Oh, and gorgeous. All that red sand and fire bouncing among the neurons in the primitive parts of the brain. Beautiful, powerful, evocative

Master Yew has joined Red out on the balcony. I'll let their root systems recover from the repotting for a week or two before I start hacking off limbs and wiring them up. Unconscious revenge on years of orthodontia? Do the tortures of childhood and youth ever really heal? ;-)

7:11 a.m. - 2006-05-01
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past tense - always tense - future tense