Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert J. Andreach

Critical Essay by Robert J. Andreach

SOURCE: Andreach, Robert J. “Unredeemed Savagery in The Orphan: David Rabe's Contemporary Oresteia.” Classical and Modern Literature 15, no. 4 (summer 1995): 329–44.

In the following essay, Andreach compares Rabe's The Orphan with the original Greek work that inspired him to write it.

While composing an afterword for the 1993 publication of his four Vietnam plays spawned by the war, David Rabe discovered the past to be alive. “Vietnam,” he writes, “rises before me as our communal manifestation of an urge toward a shadowy savagery innate in all human character but with specifics reflecting the individuality of our society, the true assertion of our deepest, unacknowledged values.”¹ He does not link the savagery and Dionysian energy in this passage, although the fourth play, The Orphan, does by linking Apollo and Dionysus. The afterword links the contemporary world and the ancient world, his theater and the theater of classical Greece. The...
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