Word: astrov
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...ASTROV, the most enlightened character in Uncle Vanya queries: "Will those who live 100-200 years from now remember us with a kind word...
...that Chekhov or his characters can foresee how their social reality will change. Astrov (with Chekhov's intuition) is alone in recognizing that it must change. For the others, such problems "are not boring, they're simply beyond me," as the beautiful Yelena remarks at one point...
...like an animated family album. Professor Serebryakov (Thayer David), an aged pedant with a book-lined skull, one of the eternal fourth-raters of the life of the mind. His second wife Helena (Elizabeth Owens), a pampered young tigress on a sick old husband's fretful leash. Dr. Astrov (Winston May), pickled in vodka and suffocating in a town that the god of civilization forgot. Uncle Vanya (Sterling Jensen), who has turned his life into bread for the professor and been bitterly cheated of even the crumbs. Sonya, a flower of a girl, blooming without sun, air or water...
...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...