(Ben Brantley’s article appeared 8/31 in The New York Times.)
They’re lip-syncing to Ella and Satchmo tonight on the outskirts of doomed, ancient Troy. Those mighty adversaries Hector and Achilles have laid down their swords and taken up hand mikes to mouth the words to a nightclub standard recorded by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
Their fellow revelers — who include heavyweights like Agamemnon, Ajax and Ulysses — have formed a happy, tipsy chorus line behind them. But there’s no mistaking the tension in the air, or the appropriateness of the lyrics of a song that won’t be written until a few millenniums after these men have died: “I thought I found a man I could trust. What a bust! This is how the story ends. …”
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