Word: astrov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is all very vague; perhaps it will be clearer if I say that Leonard Baker's Astrov is absolutely the center of attention in this production because he succeeds in making crystal clear his ties with every one of the seven other principals. He is an electric figure; one could almost hear the audience snap up when he came on stage and relax again when he went...
...finger rather squarely at K. Lype O'Dell and Marjorie Lerstrom, who, as Vanya and Yelena, are responsible for holding the play together. But from O'Dell one gets only the sense of a dull, complaining man. One does not find in this Vanya the education with which Astrov credits him, nor the profound melancholy the others are constantly pointing out. His philosophy comes out flat; if there is one scene in the play that is disastrously bad it is his soliloquy early in Act II, where, instead of protest at a wasted life we hear the grumbling complaints...
Miss Lerstrom simply does not seem to be alive to all the intricacies of her part. It is impossible to gather from her behavior in Act I that she and Sofya have been antagonistic--and this must be clear by Act II. She has the same half-smile for Astrov, for Vanya, even for Telyegin, when he protests at her forgetting his name. As a result, her dialogue drags; one feels surprise, instead of quiet uneasiness, when her relations with the others are made clear...