Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...delight to see an excellent company of actors at work, but sometimes it's even more so to see them at play. In The Boys From Syracuse, the entire ART seems to be on a holiday, with nary an over-the-shoulder glance at the stern repertory countenances of Chekhov and Ibsen, and only a very cursory one at Shakespeare's. The Comedy of Errors, upon which The Boys is loosely based, never was one of the Bard's greatest creations anyway-he hadn't traded in his slapstick for lofty rhetoric and sublime poetry yet. Besides, he cribbed...
BOREDOM is itself boring, except in Chekhov's plays," writes literary critic George Watson. Ugliness is itself ugly, one might add, and this fact strikes home in Time Stands Still, a new Hungarian film directed by Peter Gothar. Set mostly in a high school in Hungary after the 1956 rebellion, Time Stands Still is mercilessly unvarying. Gloomy blue lighting, harsh, barking voices, and interminable sordid scenes--such as the pornographic picture postcards the director insists on showing--merge in a powerful social description of the dreariness of life under a repressive Communist government. The very factors that give the movie...
Short sketches of O'Neill's era set the stage for O'Neill's entrance into the theater world. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Synge were dead. In America, travelling companies that repeated Shakespeare or other European imports were very popular. Yet, says Berlin, these were only "escapist, money-making entertainment," yet to be considered art. Making that leap to original art was the accomplishment of O'Neill and his amateur theater group, the Provincetown Players. Also credited with bringing vemacular to the American stage, he set many of his plays in backgrounds that demanded specific U.S. regional dialects. His ease...
Perhaps as incendiary an example of this revisionism as Brustein has ever offered is the A.R.T.'s current Three Sisters, a production by Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters - to return to the gaiety of Moscow - is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with...
WHEN ANDREI SERBAN directed The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull at the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s, he seemed content to rely on traditional interpretations of the Chekhov texts. With Three Sisters he has broken away, and it's not entirely a good thing...