SWEENEY AGONISTES and THE BAD INFINITY
As though The Bad Infinity weren’t punishing enough, Blind Parrot Productions has paired it with Sweeney Agonistes, by that old symbol meister T.S. Eliot. Subtitled “Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama,” this play is every bit as impenetrable as Wellman’s. In her program notes Diana Spinrad, who directed The Bad Infinity, includes a fair and accurate “warning” about this double bill: “If you try to understand these plays as you watch them, your head will explode and you will be very unhappy!!” My head didn’t explode, but I left the theater very unhappy.
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This play also contains flashes of the bleakness that Eliot poured into his masterpiece, The Waste Land. “Birth, and copulation, and death. / That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks,” Sweeney asserts. “I’ve been born, and once is enough. / You don’t remember, but I remember, / Once is enough.”
