Word: chekhovisms
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...director and actors of the new Loeb production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters go about their work like musicians approaching an old score with reverence but concern. They chip away at crusted traditions to reveal a musical substratum running under the characters, explaining the emptiness of their lives. This underlying music--on which director Peter Sellars has focused both literally and thematically--softens the desperate boredom of Chekhov's characters, but it also carries their despair home with sentimental poignance...
...Three Sisters. Anton Chekhov's masterpiece hits the Loeb Mainstage this week in a new translation and what director Peter Sellars calls a "realistic" treatment. "I've tried to open Chekhov up, and allow as many of the meanings through as possible," Sellars says, and the new translation by Maria Markhof-Belaev and him should go far toward that end--it's much more literal than the Three Sisters you've seen before, more faithful to Russian idiom and Chekhov's word patterns...
...Maloney and J.C. Suarès (Putnam; 126 pages; $14.95 hardcover, $7.95 paper), he also has his book. Decorated with works by Hogarth, Toulouse-Lautrec, Velazquez and other masters, this anthology bristles with canine tales, poems and anecdotes. With more than 100 selections from the likes of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Twain and Thurber, the result is more than mere doggerel. There are, for instance, Odysseus' faithful Argus, who waits 20 years for his master's return, Goldsmith's poor mongrel who dies of biting a man, and Lewis Carroll's Monarch of Dogland, who discourses in Doggee...
...Yale School of Drama, Brustein and his colleagues developed a three-year, building-block curriculum in which students progress from the study and practice of poetic realism (Chekhov, Ibsen) to Shakespearean verse-speaking with increased physical stylization, to the total vocal and physical stylization demanded by the post-modernists (Brecht, Beckett, Handke). Along the way, students are gradually mixed into Yale Repertory productions, beginning as spear-carriers and moving up to understudy positions and major roles. Another innovation was the creation of two majors: Theater Management and Dramatic Criticism. The latter included courses in "Dramaturgy," the graduate acting...
Soon after arriving at Yale, Brustein began--perhaps out of necessity--to formulate a new approach to reproducing classics in the theater. In his article "No More Masterpieces" (1967), Brustein argues that the classical canon (which includes Shakespeare and modern playwrights such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg) should continue to serve as staple for repertory theaters, but that there should be "no more piety, no more reverence, no more sanctimoniousness," and no more dull, "definitive" productions: each new production of a classical play should be regarded "less as a total re-creation of that work than as a directorial essay...