Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ANTON CHEKHOV wrote The Three Sisters is 1900, four years before he died. Russia in 1900 was not a very calm place. Lenin and Trotsky were in exile after a police crackdown on factory agitation. Corruption in government and business was widespread, and the peasants were as hungry as they'd always been. Chekhov's play focuses on the aristocracy, who were trying to insulate themselves from the rest of society, so it doesn't present direct comment on any other people's problems. And the aristocrats had no problems, except that they were bored and didn't know what...
...Chekhov's characters are always so human (and thus complex) that they seem important as people, not just as aristocrats. The three sisters are bored with their provincial town. They keep saying they are going to move back to Moscow, the exciting city of their childhood memories, but they never do. They talk about working, about starting life anew. They share the stage with at least half a dozen characters; as in real life, there aren't ever any true "stars...
...City Center Acting Company from New York City is doing three plays at Brandeis this week--Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters (Saturday), John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (tomorrow), and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (today, with an extra performance at 11:30 this morning). It's a good company, and they're all good plays. 8:30 p.m., Spingold Theater at Brandeis...
WOOD DEMON. This seldom produced Chekhov play is known in theatrical texts chiefly as an early version of Uncle Vanya. The familiar characters are here: the young doctor obsessed by forest conservation; the fractious old scholar and his bored young wife; Daughter Sonia and Brother-in-Law George (later called Vanya), who are remnants of his life with his dead first wife. There are five more major characters in this version who are elided or eliminated when Chekhov created a masterpiece out of the same material...
...ever watched Vanya or The Three Sisters and wished against all his better aesthetic judgment that one of the attractive, complicated, inhibited egotists would break out and change his lot, will find his fantasies acted out on stage. Though George-played commandingly by Tenniel Evans-shoots himself, Chekhov provides not one but two sets of happy young lovers at the final curtain. In the last act, the young wife, who has briefly left the old professor, remarks that on returning she feels like the ghostly Commendatore in Don Giovanni. As if by magic, the sunnier side of Mozart...