- A Reading * . A play of desire, a play of conquering a tyrant. Adapting Racine’s classic tales of women, desire, and tyrants.
Relevance to this ethos: Racine wrote his plays about women (Phèdre, Atalide) confronting tyrants: they are victims who die. They are tragic figures, barely even characters.
But for us, June 2020: Here are those same women confronting a tyrant—
And they may be victims, but they are victors:
“Badass Women” may be victims, but, like Roxane and Natalie: they survive tyranny, they prevail, they remain unconquered.
With an opening that packs its own twist—, and a chilling, ritualistic ending, this 90-minute “torpedo of tension” asks:
What happens if we have a family with no inhibitions, no conditioned sense of what drives are taboo?
You wouldn’t drive a car with one foot always on the brake.
Yet this is how, as civilized people, we handle basic drives. Basic instincts. Our basic hungers.
But what happens when we go ahead and drive with no brakes on our appetites?
