Word: chekhov
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...watch a soap opera and then be able to find intelligent reasons for the act later in the week on the pages of our slick arbiter of taste. Either way, it jars. Somehow it smacks of elevating the form without changing the content. Who knows? Maybe Chekhov would have watched the Iowa State Opera's version of "Boris Gudonov" complete with introduction by a genuine Russian. Then again, our ultimate pop icon Elvis Presley probably was closer to popular sentiment when he plugged his Sony with a .38, explaining to his manager, who lay wounded by the richochet, in that...
Tales have no doubt existed ever since the first cave woman asked her mate what happened during his day in the ooze. The modern short story is a very late mutation of his long-ago answer. Innovators such as Chekhov, Turgenev and Joyce, among others, turned the brief narrative away from its traditional purpose, i.e., telling what happened next, quickly. By the early decades of this century, serious story writers had pretty much replaced sequence with pattern, events with perceptions. The virtual disappearance of plot from short fiction produced, to be sure, plenty of wispy work, attenuated aper...
...that, properly directed, the amplifier can restore the theater: "The Loeb seats 550-plus. It's not that good acoustically, and the actors have to project like crazy. Do you know what happens to acting when it's projected?" It Loses truth. It hurts when you start to project Chekhov to a thousand-seat theater. I wanted something even more intimate than Chekhov, yet I wanted something gigantic too...I try to combine the radio-film soundtrack technique with realistic Brechtian staging, bridged by an element of cinematic imagery...
...There is humor in Chekhov, but it lights the interstices of his work, not the core. At the center is pain-of unrequited love, of oppressive boredom, of raw edgy nerves, of desolating aloneness...
Under the telling direction of Andrei Serban, the revival at Manhattan's Public Theater embraces all these aspects of Chekhov in part or in whole. The cast is admirable, and Serban's painterly eye groups them in configurations that enhance Jean-Claude van Itallie's faithful and felicitous adaptation of the text. Best of all, this production captures the ruminative pauses in Chekhov when people seem to be listening to faint, melancholy music borne across still, nocturnal waters...