Notes from Source: The drama opens with Dionysos, his words rendered in Carson’s plainspoken verse: “I am something supernatural— / not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element— / There is no term for it in English. / In Greek they say daimon— / can we just use that?” From here, the play moves from one outrageous scene to another, with ample violence happening just offstage. […]Agave’s tragic recognition of what she’s done destroys her in a scene so searing that, as Carson once noted when speaking about King Kreon in Antigone, Aristotle would have “underlined [it] with his highlighter pen.” In their marvelous book Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet write, “The true domain of tragedy lies in that border zone where human actions are hinged together with the divine powers, where—unknown to the agent—they derive their true meaning by becoming an integral part of an order that is beyond man and that eludes him.”

Further Notes: Place: New York Publisher: Artforum Inc