Brian De Palma Dionysus in 69 (1969)
Dionysus in 69 played during 1968 and 1969 in a converted garage on Wooster Street. Brian De Palma made his movie version in the course of just two actual performances. It opened yesterday at the Kips Bay Theater. Although rough in a few technical details, it is a film of extraordinary grace and power. With exceptional imagination and intelligence, De Palma has managed both to preserve the complex immediacies of Schechner s dramatic event (based on The Bacchae of Euripides) and to work those immediacies into the passionate and formal properties of his own creation. Schechner approached The Bacchae not so much to reinterpret the play as to reexperience some of the impulses surrounding and informing itto which end Euripides s lines were sometimes useful, and sometimes not. Schechner s troupe, the Performance Group, would by turns chant, or dance, make love, plot murder, whisper to the audience, or among themselves hold group therapy sessions.
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