Word: chekhovisms
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...such anecdotes as groping memory can rescue from the receding past. In the most delicate way imaginable, the snippets drawn from the seemingly great world of broadcasting and those from the little world of listening shed the most affecting and provocative light on each other. Somehow, one thinks of Chekhov, and is once again astonished by the complexity and clarity of Woody Allen's vision...
Awake and Sing, his first full-length play, is a leftist, Jewish melodrama, something that Chekhov would have written if he had grown up in the Bronx and been named Blumberg. It treads on ground that we seen many times before: the Berger apartment on the Grand Concourse looks just like Neil Simon's place in Brighton Beach, Woody Allen's old home under the roller coaster at Coney Island, and even Alexander Portnoy's house of horrors in Newark. But this is not nostalgia; the fuzzy sentimentalism of memory is replaced here with a genuine anger, and even...
...whole life, and for old Jake, who, defeated and cast aside, still manages to impart some of his idealism to Ralph. With all this going on, the play is stately in pace, complex in structure, with all sorts of subplots and developments over three long acts. As Yiddische Chekhov, it dwells on the domineering mother, the sniveling new wealth, and the slow death of the beautiful and the valuable under the crushing weight of modern avarice. Naturally, it's also about as subtle as a flying mallet: when someone flashes a life insurance policy, for example, it's the symbolic...
...platitudes, its obvious ironies, its pacing mired in quicksand. Maria Luisa Bemberg (who directed a fiery Oscar nominee, the 1984 Camila) never secures her characters in the larger landscape. The Peronistas stay offscreen, darn the luck, while the upper-crusters sit idly by, aspiring to Coward's wit and Chekhov's melancholy. Ennui finally devours them all, long after it has consumed the viewer. By Richard Corliss...
WILD HONEY Chekhov's first play, shrewdly revamped by Michael Frayn...