Word: chekhovisms
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...Night in the Ukraine, Groucho lives. So do Chico, Harpo and that lady of the formidable embonpoìnt, Margaret Dumont. The program note says that this exercise in dementia is "loosely based on Chekhov's The Bear." Groucho (David Garrison) is the shysterish Samovar the Lawyer. Chico (Frank Lazarus) is a larcenous tongue-in-cheeky footman to the imperious Mrs. Pavlenko (Hewett), the Dumont role. Perfectly at ease as Harpo, Priscilla Lopez is a creature from another planet, who at one wonderfully zany moment plucks out the inevitable harp solo on the spokes of an upside-down bicycle...
While time and subject overlap in the plays of Chekhov and Gorky, the two men differ in their angles of vision. Chekhov was a cardiologist of the wounded heart; Gorky was a cartographer of a scarred social landscape. Chekhov's characters transcend their enervating environment; Gorky's characters drown in the swamp of their surroundings...
...Lear is Sellars' work. He rarely lets his actors act, posing them for effect without reason, hiding them in shadows and drowning them out with the scratching of the steel cellos. Sellars' yen for the visually spectacular became evident in last year's Three Sisters, when he vividly rendered Chekhov's work but stretched it to more than three hours by inserting a handful of maddeningly long silences and a half dozen Chopin nocturnes. Now we expect more than flashy technique from Sellars. We want drama...
...primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head full of literary and historical associations, while fiction may draw even the most unknowing into its universe...
...typical Hollywood starlet may think that August Strindberg is a hot new agent, but Streep played Miss Julie at Vassar. Beginning her professional stage career in New York only four years ago, she conquered prized roles in Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew), Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) and Brecht-Weill (Happy End), as well as in works by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. This repertory training came to Meryl because she was ready for it; her education went on in public, but critics and audiences did the learning. Director Arvin Brown expresses what threatens...