Two of my favorite plays are playing at the Public Theater in Central Park this summer. The first is Twelfth Night, whose ending song "When That I Was" is reason enough to consider Shakespeare as one of the very best songwriters in English. Shakespeare's comedies vary in quality, to be sure, but As You Like It and this one are so filled with music and kindheartedness, so suffused with sweet melancholia, that they seem to embody the England That Never Was better than anything else.
Far darker and weirder is Euripides' The Bacchae. There is so much to recommend this play: the western sweep of eastern religions, the conflict between the rational political state and the mysterious upwellings of passion and ecstasy, the crescendo of blind, mob violence...tremendous stuff.
The performances are supposed to be first rate.
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