Silent Presence Research Articles

Hepatitis E in Italy: A silent presence.

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) was discovered in the 1980s and has been considered as being confined to developing countries. The purpose of this critical review was to determine the reported HEV seroprevalence rates in Italy, to identify predisposing factors and individuals at risk and to assess possible importation of HEV by immigrants. A critical review of 159 articles published in PubMed from 1994 to date was done. Only 27 original reports of 50 or more subjects, written in the English or Italian language, were included. Over three decades, the HEV seroprevalence varied from 0.12% to 49%, with the highest rates being reported from the central region of Italy. Risk factors included ingestion of raw pork or potentially contaminated food. The seroprevalence among immigrants ranged from 15.3% to 19.7% in Apulia. Italy has a population of 60656000; the total number of individuals surveyed was only 21.882 (0.036%). A national epidemiological survey program is needed to capture more comprehensive seroprevalence data.

Early neurological and cognitive impairments in subclinical cerebrovascular disease.

The subclinical cerebrovascular disease (SCVD) is an important public health problem with demonstrated prognostic significance for stroke, future cognitive decline, and progression to dementia. The earliest possible detection of the silent presence of SCVD in adults at age at risk with normal functioning is very important for both clinical doctors and scientists. Seventy-seven adult volunteers, recruited during the years 2005-2007, with mean age 58.7 (standard deviation 5.9) years, were assessed by four subtests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB)-Eclipse cognitive assessment system. We used a questionnaire survey for the presence of cerebrovascular risk factors (CVRFs) such as arterial hypertension, smoking and dyslipidemia, among others, as well as instrumental (Doppler examination) and neurological magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedures. Descriptive statistics, comparison (t-test, Chi-square) and univariate methods were used as followed by multifactor logistic regression and receiver operating characteristics analyses. The risk factor questionnaire revealed nonspecific symptoms in 44 (67.7%) of the subjects. In 42 (64.6%) of all 65 subjects, we found at least one of the conventional CVRFs. Abnormal findings from the extra- and trans-cranial Doppler examination were established in 38 (58.5%) of all studied volunteers. Thirty-four subjects had brain MRI (52.3%), and abnormal findings were found in 12 (35.3%) of them. Two of the four subtests of CANTAB tool appeared to be potentially promising predictors of the outcome, as found at the univariate analysis (spatial working memory 1 [SWM1] total errors; intra-extra dimensional set 1 [IED1] total errors [adjusted]; IED2 total trials [adjusted]). We established that the best accuracy of 82.5% was achieved by a multifactor interaction logistic regression model, with the role CVRF and combined CANTAB predictor "IED total ratio (errors/trials) × SWM1 total errors" (P = 0.006). Our results have contributed to the hypothesis that it is possible to identify, by noninvasive methods, subjects at age at risk who have mild degree of cognitive impairment and to establish the significant relationship of this impairment with existing CVRFs, nonspecific symptoms and subclinical abnormal brain Doppler/MRI findings. We created a combined neuropsychological predictor that was able to clearly distinguish between the presence and absence of abnormal Doppler/MRI findings. This pilot prognostic model showed a relatively high accuracy of >80%; therefore, the predictors may serve as biomarkers for SCVD in subjects at age at risk (51-65 years).

Rethinking Pātañjala Yoga Through the Concepts of Abhyāsa and Vairāgya

This paper offers a close reading of Patanjali’s Yogasūtra through the concepts of abhyāsa and vairāgya, “repetitive practice” and “dispassion,” drawing on Patanjali’s classical commentators and on Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s “Studies in Yoga Philosophy,” an (almost) forgotten chapter of his corpus. I open with a critical examination of Patanjali’s citta-vṛtti scheme, his attempt of “mapping” the contents of consciousness. Thereafter, I discuss the “procedure of yoga,” based on the mutual operation of abhyāsa and vairāgya for the sake of nirodha, cessation of the vṛttis, or “movements” of consciousness. A close analysis of Patanjali and his commentators indicates that both abhyāsa and vairāgya are depicted as consisting of a strong reflective dimension. This is to say that the radical meditative act of “emptying” the consciousness of its objective content is in fact a rational conclusion of the mind, as it reflects upon itself. This reflection is both sensitive to the “limitedness” of the objective world and “receptive” to the silent presence of the “unlimited” selfhood beyond, which Patanjali, following the Sāṃkhya tradition, refers to as puruṣa. It is implied here that the yogic act of disengagement from the worldly and objective (conveyed by the notions of pratyāhāra, vairāgya, and kaivalya) is as much an act of will (emphasized and “taken forward” by Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya), as it is an act of self-sacrifice. Finally, the analysis offered here reveals substantial “philosophical threads” in the Yogasūtra, a text which is usually considered as too “practical,” or “therapeutic,” or “spiritual,” to be “really” philosophical.

Italian fathers' experiences of labour pain

Background: Most women in Italy ask the father of their baby to be with them during labour. While the benefits on labour outcomes related to the presence of a support person, specifically the infant's father, have largely been demonstrated, few studies have focused on the meaning of this experience for fathers who chose to be with their partners during labour. Despite growing literature on this topic, no study has been conducted in Italy. Methods: The objective of the study is to explain the meaning of the labour pain experience from the father's point of view. The chosen research method was phenomenology. The study involved six fathers. Data collection was conducted through in-depth interviews, until data saturation was reached. Data analysis was conducted using Colaizzi's method. Strategies for increasing trustworthiness were used, such as member checking, peer examination, and code and recode procedures. Results: Five core themes emerged to describe fathers' experiences, including: 1) ‘labour pain is something you have to go through’; 2) a silent presence that gives courage; 3) ‘I hope I can stay until the end of the birth’; 4) ‘I didn't know that would happen’; and 5) fathers' need to ‘recharge their batteries'. Conclusion: Fathers, or partners, are an important resource for women during their labour. However, it is important to prepare men for this role and to provide anticipatory guidance on what to expect during labour. It is important to recognise that the partner may need support or guidance from the midwife during labour. Dissemination of these findings to fathers will also help them to know that their feelings and experiences are common and shared by others.

Lettura di Purgatorio, XXVI

Canto XXVI of Purgatorio is one of the most evident examples of cross referencing and allusions to other ‘places’ or points in the Commedia which Dante uses to transform his poem into what Roberto Antonelli calls a “sceneggiatura di ferro”, i.e. a pre-defined and highly structured script. In fact, the canto is to be interpreted as one component in a complex system of intratextual connections which at the very least includes Inf. i, v, x and xv, Purg. v, xi and xxiv, as well as all those other cantos which make some mention of troubadours. Presuming that Cantos xxvi and xxvii of Purgatorio constitute the end of the first part of the entire poem, i.e. the journey culminating in the encounter with Beatrice, this article offers a critical interpretation of some of the key loci in Purg. xxvi. It then examines the role they play in Dante the poet’s ‘final showdown’ with his past, not only with those authors mentioned explicitly in the work but also with Guido Cavalcanti and his unwieldy yet silent presence.

“The garden of love's decay”: the suburban garden as eco-poetic space in South Africa

Alan Mabin recently noted that “Suburbs have been a silent presence in the widely disseminated ‘models’ of the apartheid city. [H]ow the suburbs happened is assumed rather than understood.” Many suburbs, including the famously well-treed northern suburbs of Johannesburg and, indeed, the historically white suburbs of Grahamstown, do not fit the American or Australian stereotype; their uses and meanings prove to be extremely patchy and variable in practice. Susan Parnell and Mabin have thus been arguing for a break away from what they perceive as methods “bound by racial fetishism” that have obscured many dimensions of urbanisation from view. The ecology of the small garden offers one such break. Increasingly, urbanisation studies are environmental or ecological in their approach, yet even here the garden for a long time has scarcely featured. This article makes a move towards filling that gap. Against the background of urbanisation studies both in South Africa and elsewhere, outlining the multi-layered cultural histories of the suburban garden, the article focuses on the poetry of Don Maclennan from a broadly ecocritical perspective. Such literatures, it is suggested, provide crucial insights into the phenomenological meanings of gardens at the individual emotional level.

Thrilling Affects

This essay investigates the sexual cultures of contemporary Hindi-language ‘detective’ novels by focusing on the writings of one of India's biggest-selling authors, Ved Prakash Sharma. Sharma's novels are usually available at railway stations and bus stands, as well as bookstalls in the poorer localities of north Indian cities. The essay suggests that the sexual motif in the novels sits alongside an unstated discourse of ‘Indian traditions’ – such as brahmcharya (celibacy) and ‘the stable Indian family’ – and that this discourse is established both through narratives within the novels, as well as techniques that lie outside them, such as the author's letter to readers that prefaces each novel. The silent presence of ‘Indian traditions’ forms the ground upon which engagements with consumerist modernity – marked by goods, technologies and transnational connections – is predicated. The pleasure and ‘efficaciousness’ of the novels lie in the constant relay of choices between the world of globalized consumerist modernity and ‘traditional’ morality.

Revisiting ‘Tintern Abbey’: The Challenge of the Familiar

How very familiar Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ is. So much so that we might detect in the poem’s opening phrases a hint of laboriousness, even of potential tedium: ‘Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! and again I hear / These waters . . . ’ (my italics). The poet insists that he is indeed going through it all yet again: ‘Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs’; ‘I again repose / Here’; ‘Once again I see / These hedge-rows . . . ’. There is of course always danger in repetition – ‘That strain again!’ can easily turn into ‘Enough, no more!’ – but there is the potential presence of elegy too: ‘Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown . . . ’ Such are the temporal repetitions against which elegy measures its losses, its failures to return. Human returns perhaps inevitably have elegiac potential, if only by setting Nature’s reassuring resumptions (where ‘chearful Fields resume their green Attire’) in sad contrast to the moment when there is no return (‘One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill’). Repetitions (sometimes a sad refrain) can suggest how Time takes its toll. Each new arrival will bring a parting. To catch these hints of the elegiac and melancholy at the beginning of ‘Tintern Abbey’ suggests how Wordsworth’s poem appears to short-circuit elegy by asserting its spiritual consolation after only thirty lines. The ‘tranquil restoration’ –what elegy may move toward, or hope to glimpse – is already reassuringly there in line 31. The communal, or communing, ending of the poem in the spiritual companionship of Dorothy acts as an affirmation of what has been a silent presence throughout, a constant support to balance the ‘presence that disturbs’, confirming that the domestic and familiar are comfortably in place alongside the sublime and mystical (‘For thou art with me, here’). As a poem of revisiting, ‘Tintern Abbey’ reclaims the ‘here’, not simply in terms of location but also as a direction, emphasised by its repeated pull of here, this and these. The underlying idea is of noticing what is at hand, with the reassurance that whatever distant journeys of mind or body are made, whatever absences may intervene, there is always something familial within reach. I want briefly to visit the poem yet again from the point of view of such familiarities, and consider what the implications of these might be for readers and critics. Are we in danger of simply reinforcing the poem’s familiar resonances, sanctioning its faith, hope, and charity, or conversely of feeling the need to pull the anchor away and disrupt them? Perhaps in the poem’s very acknowledgment of the familiar lies a complicating factor about the nature of

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

The Romantic Discourse of Ameen Rihani and Percy Shelley

Abstract Most contemporary studies of Rihani’s The Book of Khalid draw attention to its intertextuality and American Transcendentalism and/or ‘‘the voice of Carlyle.’’ This article intends to interrogate the silent presence of a different intertextuality by invoking English Romanticism as it emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although Rihani’s Khalid does not seem to be aware of the poet and essayist Percy Shelley, it is this absence that makes him all the more relevant. Such an undertaking is not an exercise in compiling a list of Rihani’s sources, but rather a new reading of the diversity and plurality of a particular paradigmatic literary genre that animated a new generation of Arab authors and intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to decipher the signatures of a literary event in its Western and Arab contexts.

Presence detection using wideband audio-ultrasound sensor

A presence detection scheme is proposed for determining occupancy in indoor spaces using a wideband audio-ultrasound sensor. The scheme involves ultrasonic detection by processing the echoes due to transmission of a pulsed sinusoidal waveform, in combination with audio event detection at lower frequencies. The resulting binary detection results are then fused using an OR rule. The proposed scheme improves detection performance by determining occupancy under silent presence and still presence conditions. Experimental results are shown to validate the obtained improvement in probability of detection, while maintaining a given probability of false alarm.

Diderot's Encyclopedic Poetics

In this essay, I argue that Diderot's writing on Vernet in the Salons becomes a place in which Diderot puts forth an encyclopedic poetics that transforms the end of the poetic and what WJT Mitchell calls "ekphrastic impossibility" into a kind of counter-poetics, in which the isolated list, the extreme structure, becomes a form of poetry, a conceptualist poetics of knowledge that rethinks categories and is epistemologically specific. In doing so I argue against Hegelian readings of Diderot's text, such as that of Norman Bryson in Word and Image who sees the contradictions of modes in Diderot's writing on Vernet as representing the end of the poetic and the triumph of reason.

Who Are You, Mrs Walter Shandy, Aberratio Naturae?

The aim of this paper is to examine the critically unacknowledged aspect of the canonical Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the authorial delineation and narrative management of the character of Mrs Shandy, who is a silent presence in the background even though the pivotal personal events for the narrator of this spoof-autobiography are his conception and birth. The novel, otherwise thoroughly structurally and thematically experimental, seems to be fossilized in the ancient and Christian philosophers' assumptions about the physical incompleteness of the "weaker vessel" and the malign influence of her disturbing physiology, which for centuries fed into the ontological concept of a woman as Nature's aberration, aberratio naturae. Mrs Shandy's muteness, a striking contrast to her husband's verbosity, her absence and exclusion from the affairs of the male dominated household seem to run counter to the novel's progressive form and linguistic audacity, the sociological shifts slowly taking root and medical discoveries made before and during this age of paradoxes.

A silent presence: the English king in parliament in the fourteenth century*

Although it has long been accepted that the medieval English parliament was very much the ‘king's parliament’, little attention has been devoted to the king's presence in the assembly and its significance. Edward II and Edward III allowed parliament to meet without them on several occasions. With the political community reacting against increasingly frequent royal absences by the early thirteen-forties, Edward III and his successors were forced to accept the importance of working personally with parliament. The manner in which the king handled this presence, in particular the use of the royal speech, was indicative of his management of the political community as a whole and the success (or otherwise) of his kingship.

The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests by Linda Underhill

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 stories function in a culture, the power they have over reality, and the responsibility every story-teller has to his or her subject — particularly when that subject is nonhuman. Thisbookfulfillsthepromiseof ecocriticism by deftly including interdisciplinary information so that the real wolf corrects“our assumptions and fantasies about it,” thus helping us reconcile our imagined wolves with both the wolves themselves and our behaviors towards them (p. i). As Robisch writes,“when we put a wolf in a story, the story at that point must be responsible to the wolf” (p. 11). The real wolf. Marybeth Holleman Anchorage, Alaska The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests by Linda Underhill Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2009. Index. 160 pages. $18.95 paper. Forests stand as one of the most ubiquitous ecosystems in the world. They have long been recognized for their ecological, commercial, and spiritual values. Linda Underhill sampled a variety of the nation’s temperate forests in an effort to more fully understand their historic and contemporary significance. The result is her anecdotal account of visits to specific forests in the Northeast, the Smoky Mountains, and the Olympic Peninsula. Although she acknowledges the need for forest products,The Way of theWoods offers unabashed support for preservation and expresses the author’s love of forested places. Visiting these sites, she writes, “affirmed my kinship with all that is wild, all that is real” (p. xiii). Each chapter takes readers to a different forest and highlights particular themes of contemporary concern. Most of the locations represent preserves in public forests and parks managed by state and federal agencies. Some groves are quite small, as in the case of the ten-acre DeVeauxWoods State Park in western New York, presented as an example of urban old-growth forest. Others represent broad, regional ecosystems. All are temperate forests, most in the Northeast. A single chapter on Great Smoky National Park and two chapters on the coastal Northwest are the only exceptions .Thematically,the book focuses on threats to forests from development, disease, habitat loss, and climate change. Underhill, a professor of English and humanities, brings readers along on walks through each of the forests she visits. In most cases, she is guided by a local person involved in the study or management of the site. These guides include environmental activists, scientists , and maple sugar producers. In Oregon, her visit is not to a specific forest but to the Cascades Raptor Center in Eugene. There, staff and resident owls help her understand the issues of the northern spotted owl and Douglas fir forests. Her hikes are often family outings, and her descriptions focus on the personal emotions raised by the experience. Historians will likely be disappointed by the lack of depth applied to explaining changing land use and the historical context of her discussions. Most chapters refer briefly to the history of each area, though the book contains no citations to document sources. Some references to historical progression are presented out of order. The chapter on the spotted owl provides a very brief overview of the political and judicial stages of the issue since the 1980s.Indigenous,pre-contact forest use is mentioned, most notably in a chapter on the Alleghany National Forest in Pennsylvania , where she senses “the silent presence of the Seneca people” (p. 77). Seneca land use, however, is portrayed only briefly as an outdated caricature with no effort to document the people’s history there. Nonetheless, Underhill concludes her one paragraph on the  Book Notes book notes Oregon Historical Quarterly volunteers and staff created these Book Notes by drawing on publishers ’ descriptions. Slick as a Mitten: Ezra Meeker’s Klondike Enterprise by Dennis M. Larsen Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2009. Bibliography, index. 128 pages. $24.95 paper. After braving the Oregon Trail in 1852, Ezra Meeker built a fortune in hop farming and brokering in the Puget Sound country. He platted Puyallup and served as the town’s first mayor and businessman. In the 1890s, hop aphids and an economic depression swept away his assets, but the Klondike gold stampede of 1898 renewed his prospects. In his late sixties, he ventured north four times...

The Soul of the Golem

There are many ways of interpreting the so-called new technologies. One of the most interesting is that which stems from defining them as a social imaginary, and therefore, as collective beliefs, fears and hopes. It is common to attribute to technologies all manner of threats that, founded or not, are real in the measure that the society makes decisions and acts in a way consistent with this conviction.The fears and anxieties of society lead to a consideration of the limits of the human that technologies transgress. Among the figures with which one speaks about these limits there is Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, which threatens modern fantasies with its deformity. There is, however, another man-made creature that can serve to orient our reflection, the Golem.In 1609, 400 years ago, Rabbi Loew died. He is credited with the creation of a homunculus by combining of secret codes. The problem of the Golem was its imperfect soul made manifest in its lack of speech. Its silent presence was a source of great fear in the community that finally asked to get rid of the creature.These figures of monstrosity, Frankenstein and above all Golem, will help us to make technologies understand from the fear that society projects onto them, and this will lead us to the question concerning the imaginary fears of the technological system.

Narratives of suffering among older Jewish women

This paper analyzes what 30 elderly Jewish women said about suffering. Their views must be understood in the larger context of Jewish culture in America. A fundamental question here concerns the degree to which the Holocaust, the ultimate in suffering for Jews, is used as a personal comparison for the suffering of these women. Relatively few mentioned the Holocaust in their personal narrative of suffering. Nevertheless, the Holocaust was always a silent presence in these narratives. Our data analysis found seven themes in the in the interview material about suffering. These are: (1) a general lack of direct reference to the Holocaust as the exemplar of personal suffering; (2) a focus on the need to survive; (3) the pervasiveness of disease-related pain and discomfort; (4); miserable life experiences; (5) reviewing life and encountering the end of life; (6) discrimination; and (7) suffering as a cultural construct. Most people experience suffering at some point in their lives. Some may outlive their suffering, but most never forget it. While suffering at any one time may be intense, some people may grow away from this experience, particularly when their minds are set on other things. Narratives of suffering can become important personal testimonies and, for Jews, collective testimony. Accessing narratives of suffering through interviewing or conversation brings such experiences to the surface, painful as they might be. Yet each retelling of such a story represents a victory of sorts, as the teller says, “I am still here.” In this paper we examine narratives of suffering among 30 elderly American Jewish women age 80 and above. Nearly all were born in the United States, but were the first or second generation to be born here. While the emphasis on Americanism and becoming an American was quite strong among these immigrant generations and their children, a symbolic connection to the old country was still maintained through cultural praxis.

Viral Commensalism in Humans?

Viral Commensalism in Humans?

Reflections about the role of a Psychology of Religion

The present work studies the Psychology of Religion as a theme to be understood from the concept of totality. It discusses the issue of the nature of religion, psychology and the relationship between both. It approaches the human conflicts from their connection with nature, and, above all, with God. As a possible path of a creative and healthy adjustment, faith fills a special position establishing the relationship between psychology, religion and the human person. The nature of the soul and the psychological struggles bring up a central issue: what is the role of the Religion Psychologist facing the human angst caused by guilt, by the loss of meaning of God in the human existence or up to what theoretical point does the Psychology of Religion oppose the clinical practice where the silent presence of the hallowed in human conflicts become apparent while being ignored at the exercise of our profession.

Pericles (review)

Reviewed by: Pericles Jennifer Hartshorn Pericles Presented by Georgia Shakespeare at the Conant Performing Arts Center, Atlanta, Georgia. June 28-July 28, 2007. Directed by Richard Garner. Scenic design by Kat Conley. Costume design by Sydney Roberts. Lighting Design by Liz Lee. Music by Klimchak. With Park Krausen (Gower, Thaisa, and Diana), Joe Knezevich (Pericles), Brad Sherrill (Antiochus), Kristen Burke (Antiochus's Daughter, Lychorida), Daniel May (Thaliard, Lysimachus), Rob Cleveland (Helicanus, Philemon), Hudson Adams (Cleon), Carolyn Cook (Dionyza), Chris Kayser (Simonides, Pander), Amelia Hammond (Marina), Crystal Dickinson (Bawd, Cerimon), and others. Pericles was the sole Shakespearian offering from Georgia Shakespeare this summer, though in keeping with tradition they will present another staple of the canon, Richard III, in the fall. While Pericles is unfamiliar to many audience members, this production echoed familiar elements from Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Merchant of Venice and, of course, The Tempest, [End Page 131] while director Richard Garner's occasional restructuring of scenes helped to unify the action. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Joe Knezevich in the title role of Georgia Shakespeare's 2007 season production of Pericles. Photo by Bill DeLoach. Pericles's myriad settings can prove a challenge to any company that chooses to stage it, but this production in particular embraced the text's lack of "unity of place." Each of the half-dozen locations had a vastly different feel, achieved primarily through costume and music, rather than substantial set changes. The relatively small cast necessitated doubling (in some cases, tripling), making it difficult to develop each character individually, given the limited amount of stage time allowed to each. Garner agreed that this was a challenge, saying in his director's note that he saw this disjointedness as "a call to develop a theatrical storytelling style that will embrace the quixotic nature of the story and make some sense out of it." The production struggled with these two extremes of chaos and continuity, however, some of which were dictated by the text, while others resulted from production choices. It is not uncommon at Georgia Shakespeare, particularly in those plays directed by Richard Garner, to see creative doubling and combining of roles, which frequently results in the expansion of the roles of gods and goddesses to observe, describe, and occasionally become part of the action. In As You Like It (2002), a "Man With No Name" cowboy was a [End Page 132] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Pericles ( Joe Knezevich) and Thaisa (Park Krausen) in Georgia Shakespeare's 2007 season production of Pericles. Photo by Bill DeLoach. [End Page 133] silent presence throughout the play—eventually speaking as Hymen, who "makes all well" during the wedding scene; in 2005's Winter's Tale, Paulina and Time were conflated to create a single character. Garner's production of Pericles was no different, with the roles of Gower, Diana, and Thaisa being played by a single actor, the talented Park Krausen. While Thaisa stands apart from the other two, it makes sense for the goddess Diana to be the narrator; and combining this role with that of the storyteller, Gower, fit perfectly in this production. The tripling did, however, present a challenge in Garner's restructured version of 3.1, in which Thaisa is cast overboard while Gower describes the scene. In what was perhaps a nod to the staging of Phantom of the Opera, a double for Park Krausen, wearing Thaisa's cloak, stood in for her while she, narrating as Gower, crossed over a suspended walkway above the stage. The cast was among the strongest Garner has assembled in recent years. In her combined role as Gower/Diana/Thaisa, Park Krausen was as much the star of the show as its title character. Daniel May brought a quiet dignity to the comparatively small role of the governor, Lysimachus, while Carolyn Cook's icy Dionyza and Crystal Dickenson's delightfully trashy Bawd were also standouts. Joe Knezevich's Pericles, however, remained a bewildered observer. Garner tied together the various threads of the storyline into a mostly coherent whole, while Knezevich's Pericles wandered from location to location, dazed by the whirl of events around him. Knezevich...