Hero Play: Being & Belonging

Marital hospitality visits are chthonic reprises, swerves from, and reappraisals of the seminal texts (and structure) of Western and Christian consciousness. As a youth, the hero encounters adult reality in and as the altered/altered state of Other: his parents, the ruling alpha pair.

Oedipus, Sir Gawain, Lancelot, Hamlet, Candide, Quixote, Werther, Jane Eyre, Hans Castorp—all are guests—tragic, comic, romantic—of and in the domestic (parental and political) sanctuary of their dramatic acti...