Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Beard's dismissal of global warming changes when his unhappy home - his current wife is cheating on him in response to his half-dozen extramarital affairs - and his stalled work collide on the full-length polar-bear rug in his living room. (Updating Chekhov: If the author of a climate-change novel shows you a polar-bear rug in the first act, you can be sure it will bare its teeth in the next one.) Quite suddenly, Beard discovers what he believes is the solution to the problem of climate change: artificial photosynthesis, harnessing sunlight to split water and yield...
...have had a nice little talk about the Occupation," he notes. The emotions unleashed in this tale couldn't be contained in any nice little talk. They are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners to Jhumpa Lahiri's uprooted Bengalis. People are the same everywhere; it's the places that define them that are different. (See the 100 best novels of all time...
...know who else theater companies say that about?" asks Night Music director Nunn. "Chekhov." When it comes to Sondheim, debate about the future of the musical misses the point. He occupies a place in the pantheon not of musical theater, but of theater itself...
...perks of being a theater critic, in those dog days of the season when you find yourself struggling to sit through the latest Chekhov revival or pretentious little comedy about tightly wound New York singles, is the Broadway-musical revival. Yes, you can complain - as I often have - about unimaginative commercial producers who keep recycling surefire classics like Gypsy or Guys and Dolls. But there's good reason they're recycled so often: they are surefire - unfailingly entertaining, no matter how uninspired the production, the indomitable high points of a genre that is America's great contribution to world theater...
...troubles began on the prompt, “Name the world’s most famous author.” After Shakespeare, I couldn’t divine what a famous author meant to the faceless, average American. My mind reverted to its natural state. Chekhov, Joyce, Faulkner, and Proust all ran through my head. A small part of me knew that these were a Harvard student’s picks, not an average homemaker’s. Flustered, I grabbed for something, anything. Melville seemed like a reasonable choice—even if someone hasn’t read...