Word: chekhov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Towards the beginning of Chekhov's The Seagull, the young idealist Konstantin stages a play he has written for a critical group of houseguests. The monologue consists largely of pretentious, melodramatic schlock; the audience reserves its praise for Nina, Konstantin's bright-eyed and innocent sweetheart, who does all the performing. The playwright-within-a-play's honest and interesting intentions of reinventing drama get lost amid his overwriting. Only the contemplative old local doctor, Dorn, discerns any promise in the play's pseudo-intellectual rhetoric: "There was something in it... It was so fresh, unaffected...
Long before Chekhov ever wrote his classic plays The Seagull. The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya and sometime after he had established himself as a brilliant story writer for magazines, he wrote a few short comic pieces for the stage. He called them "vaudevilles," though none actually incorporated musical theater. Their designation rested on their qualification as grotesque caricatures of the absurd...
...three, A Jubilee is perhaps Chekhov's strongest commentary on his contemporary and infamous Czarist Russian beaurocracy but is produced with only a somewhat relaxed vision of play's satire. The plot has too many threads to relate--most significantly it suggests that social classes were too extremely separated for members of different strata to understand each other. Likewise, women and men played such vastly different social roles they could only poorly and superficially relate...
Though A Jubilee appears to be but a few twists and turns away from crisp, the broad range of acting and execution still muddles Chekhov's clarity. Audiences greeted his vaudevilles over a century ago with sheer enthusiasm. The Nora's production falls a bit short...
...dacha in the country outside Moscow, the self-absorbed extended family living there oblivious to events in the outside world, the visitor whose energy and mystery stir this nest of gentlefolk -- Burnt by the Sun has the air of something Chekhov or Turgenev might have imagined...