Word: chekhovian
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...What Underwear!" Communists even show a certain pride in genteel Chekhovian shabbiness. Restaurant tablecloths are almost always slightly soiled, but clean oilcloth is distinctly nekulturny. Hotel maids may forget to remove dead cockroaches, but they never fail to dust the chandelier and the grand piano. Only at the ballet does the Russian's old love of flashing hues and sumptuous textures seem to come into its own. Even women's underwear at lingerie counters is coarse and drab, prompting a visiting French Communist's classic comment: "What under wear! Yet what a birth rate...
...challenge which, unfortunately, none of the performers meets with total success. The one who comes nearest to doing so is Laura Esterman. The mock innocence of her Desdemona-like refrain, "Me thinks my lord hath anger in his look," is as convincing as her langorous intonation of pseudo-Chekhovian eclectic imagery: "I see a cloud shaped just like a samovar." Her Odets mama ("A dry-goods store you don't sneeze at, papa") carries on the grand tradition of Molly Picon and Gertrude Berg. However, her miming as the maid in Drainpipes owes more to French farce than to Ibsen...
...flashing mastery of theater, the way he can put a character in a preposterous situation and still make a playgoer cliffhang over the outcome. The archetypal relationships, father versus son. Nina grieving over the child that will never be born, have unimpaired emotional authority. So do some scenes of Chekhovian poignance. such as Nina's autumnal soliloquy on the meaning of the men in her life and what time has done to her and them...
...bittersweet mood of boredom (in every scene a clock seems to be ticking) is classically Chekhovian. The actors-Alexei Batalov and lya Savvina-are at once wholly natural and wholly professional, and Director Josef Heifitz' black-and-white camera work, while academic, manages magically to evoke the torpid heat of Yalta, the snowy chill of Moscow. And nowhere in the film is there a foot of propaganda-either for home consumption or for foreign eyes...
...Menagerie, Iguana served to bracket the whole range of Williams' achievement, a body of work so substantial that it now casts a larger shadow than the man who made it. In that shadow lies a form of theater as well as a series of plays, the theater of Chekhovian sensibility mated with the Freudian irrational unconscious. The champion of the rival Ibsenite theater of social