Word: chekhovisms
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...Forest and ringed them around the spare, vast, white-draped stage. Huge birches and the bare exposed Loeb stage dwarf the actors and frame Sellar's epic interpretation. The Loeb production emphasizes the tableaux over the characters, but it does so with a brilliance in staging that brings out Chekhov's geometry and starkly, pictorially dramatizes the characters' relationship to each other. The operatic staging also serves to divorce the characters from the world outside the Prozorov mansion, emphasizing their isolation. Their grand gestures and melodramatic speeches seem absurd and meaningless, as observed from a distant height...
More subtly, however, Kogan's tour de force helps to uncover the structure of Chekhov's play, composed in part of a series of ceaseless competing refrains of leitmotifs. Irina sighs her frustrated desire to go to Moscow, Vershinin "philosophizes" and bewails his marital misfortunes, and Natasha inanely shrieks her mother love--all accompanied by recurring Chopin preludes...
...awkward character of Tusenbach and fills it out with sympathy and skill. Tusenbach's paeans to labor can easily turn into sermonizing and his devotion to Irina into sickening self-abasement, but Clemenson doesn't self-dramatize the role. He transcends the limiting qualities of the part as Chekhov wrote it to create to subtle portrait of human suffering, weltschmerz...
...monumental style, however, is least effective at the very beginning, where a touch more continuity and less mannerism might help the actors introduce themselves and the play's refrains. As it is, the opening portrays the prosaic daily life of the Prozorov household and friends with jerkiness. Perhaps Chekhov intended a sense of alienation from the start, but that shouldn't make the actors themselves look uncomfortable on stage, as they do for the first 15 minutes...
...Chopin behind it all transports the audience into the contemplative melancholy of the play itself--leaving audience, actors and playwright running at the same speed. The tempo lags only in the final act. With bare stage, static blocking and house lights turned up, the staging is faithful to Chekhov's sense of desolation, but also somewhat trying to an audience at the end of a three-hour haul...