Nina's obsession with being perfect -- the perfect ballerina, the perfect daughter, the perfect Swan -- lead her down an increasingly dark path in which her sanity is threatened and the drums of tragedy thunder with increasing dread.
That was a young king who was encased in ritual and who had to learn about human suffering: his Lear is an old king who has to undergo a similar moral journey in which he acquires sanity via madness.
As reality and fantasy clash and merge, the song describes the creative process as a Wellesian hall of mirrors in which the author's sanity is at risk.
The novel is a Dionysian dream in which nothing, not even sanity, can escape the corrosive chaos of this circumstance; but its form is bravely Apollonian.
He's quick to dismiss superficial similarities to Moon, in particular the scenes in which Gyllenhaal grapples with his sanity in an isolation capsule.
The play's first act is an often delightful tease, building to an uproarious curtain scene in which Marjorie hysterically questions her own sanity.
The play's first act turns into an often delightful tease, building to an uproarious curtain scene in which Marjorie hysterically questions her own sanity.
But he uses the dementia of farce to explore a late-1960s socinty in which the distinction between madness and sanity is blurred and the rigidity of gender constantly eroded.
It is the European soccer authority's way of trying to bring sanity to a sport in which so many teams are spending what they do not have, living on bank loans and untenable debt.
It reminded me of the "Loveland" sequence from Sondheim's "Follies," in which kitschy vaudeville numbers reveal the characters' unravelling sanity.
