Word: chekhovisms
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...didn't have anything on except her golden curls," Danner recalls in her famously delectable foggy-froggy voice. "She could barely talk, yet she knew the whole speech better than I did. She just started reciting"--and here Danner does a splendid imitation of a lisping infant declaiming Chekhov--"The men, the lions, the eagles, the part-widges.' That was the beginning. We should have known then, I guess...
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...
Perhaps the Cornerstone Theater Company's production of "California Seagull," a recent adaptation of Chekhov's classic relocated to the Golden State, deliberately reproduces all the traits of Konstantin's play. Maybe it's a multidimensional meta-commentary on the original which adds new facets to the nexus between fact and fiction. Or maybe it's just an enthusiastic and imaginative enterprise that gets a little carried away with its "alternadrama" image. Whichever way you look at it, "California Seagull" suffers from an overdose of avant-garde. But there's something in it. And Nina is excellent...
...Alison Carey's analogy of a vineyard in Napa for a rural estate outside Moscow, and of Hollywood glitterati for Tsarist Russia's belle lettristes gives the play a contemporary edge without sacrificing any of its subtlety. The primitive set places the dialogue and acting center stage. But like Chekhov's antihero, the Cornerstone takes it all too far. At one point, the director, Bill Rauch, injects a gratuitous mime sequence, in which Konstantin (or Cam, as he is now called) jumps into an imaginary lake and wades laboriously away to the tune of pre-recorded gurgles. Similarly, although...
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...