Word: cannot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...over-eager to flex their muscles. Ivanov is certainly not without its own bag of tricks. But Yeremin never lets these tricks develop into a full-fledged side-show. And how could they? Yeremin's staging and visual landscaping of Chekov's play is so breath-taking that we cannot be distracted from it. In Yeremin's hands, Ivanov on stage becomes as lush as Dr. Zhivago on film. The degree of unity that Yeremin orchestrates on a sensory level is downright astonishing. Scott Bradley's sets are a work of art in themselves, something of a cross between installation...
...across in whispers and unsaid words, in the meanings that we hide underneath meaningless social conventions. For Yeremin, though, Chekov's characters must be as grand and deliberate as the sets. Arliss Howard's Ivanov is endlessly and openly angst-ridden. He mopes around the stage so that we cannot help but notice his misery, strips to the waist and spreads his arms like Christ on the cross, and by the end shouts his anguish to all who will listen. Debra Winger as Ivanov's wronged and ignored wife Sarah goes from the almost unbearably saintly (Sarah of the Infinite...
...center of Yeremin's production simply cannot hold. Yeremin turns the speeches Chekov meant his characters to address to one another into performance pieces directed at the audience, turns moments of quiet, embarrassed emotional confessions into visual spectacles. Gone is the intimacy that makes Chekov brilliant and the nuance that makes him profound. Ivanov the play is too beautiful a play to be treated so harshly. And Ivanov the production is too gorgeous to engage in such a struggle. Chekov and Yeremin are both brilliant, but their brilliance is not of the sort that can be reconciled...
...from within the council. Given the irrelevancy of that body, this makes them particularly ill-suited to win the authentic loyalty of students. Many of the candidates have learned to effectively navigate bureaucracy and lobby the administration. They should all immediately take the state civil service examine. But, they cannot boast any great success with student groups that are well-respected and have no legitimate claim to represent the mass of undergraduates. Even their posters are poorly designed...
...While one can question the substance of West, one cannot help but be impressed by the volume of his work. Twenty books by West since 1982 are listed in the front of the Reader. His future projects are no less ambitious: West plans a collaboration on African-American and Greek literature with Elemi Mavromatidou along with a long term project on Checkov and Coltrane and more ventuers into literary criticism. His next published works will be Heart of American Darkness, and I Ain't Noways Tired, a "bold venture in intellectual biography modeled on black musical forms...