"Tara-Jean is confused, then frightened, as Cass crowds into her, getting almost nose-to-nose as she searches the young star's face for something that will explain Tara-Jean's stratospheric success and her own failure. "Our faces were so close that her eyes looked like one giant copper eye," Cass recalls. "There were green flecks inside that copper eye. Was that the mark of fate?""
"The spectacle is captured by a panopticon of phone cameras, and Cass is swiftly "cancelled" on social media and in the New York theater scene. The echo of Greek epic, comically permuted, is clearly if absurdly legible: Cass is a kind of dipshit Odysseus, less a warrior than a walking locus of bad judgment and self-hatred, and Tara-Jean essentially a bystander, transformed into a Cyclops by the disfiguring power of Cass's jealousy."
Cass, a failed playwright, fixates on Tara-Jean, a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind whose rapid success Cass perceives as stolen acclaim. At an opening-night party Cass confronts Tara-Jean, pressing so close that Tara-Jean's eyes appear as "one giant copper eye" with green flecks that Cass interprets as fate. In a mesmerized state Cass jabs an exploratory finger into Tara-Jean's eye, injuring her. The incident is filmed by a panopticon of phones, and Cass is swiftly "cancelled" on social media and in the New York theater scene. The episode reads as a darkly comic, mythic permutation: Cass as a hapless Odyssean figure consumed by envy.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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