Word: chekhovisms
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...folding screen, antimacassars on the backs and arms of chairs, and so on. Hovering over everything in the back are gray tree branches suggestive of tentacles that keep the inhabitants rooted to their provincial garrison town although they long to go to Moscow and its supposedly greener grass. (But Chekhov himself is careful again and again to poke holes in the characters' absurd vision of Moscow as an alleged paradise. Furthermore, I wish the cast would agree on a pronunciation of the city's second syllable...
...Chekhov once wrote of playwriting "in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are--not on stilts.... Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life." This is a prescription for utter naturalism; and, if followed exactly, it would yield only tedium...
...Chekhov in his late plays fused the "as it is" with "as it should be"; he took a moral position. True, he did adopt a quasi-realistic diction with its illogicalities, its wandering directions, its repetitions; but he was skillful enough to infuse it with a marvelous rhythm and a sort of poetic evocativeness. (This technique strongly affected the plays of our own O'Neill, Odets, and Hellman.) The director and the players--and, indeed, the audience-- must be able to catch unspecified implications, to apprehend not so much what is said as what is consciously or subconsciously thought...
...Although Chekhov is depicting a group of people, almost everyone of them is decidedly lonely, and frustrated in one way or another. And they are all ordinary, unexceptional people, essentially failures. Yet they are not carbon copies of each other--except in bad productions. Director Kahn and his players have managed to assure that every single one of these average people is unique, is an individual, is a three-dimensional character, with a past, a present, and--this is important--a future. Chekhov envisions a happier future for later, generations, and underlines the necessity of hard work and hope...
Kate Reid is the show's weak link as the middle sister Masha (the role originally played by Chekhov's own wife), bored with her marriage to a pedant and fated to be separated from the one man she comes to love. For one thing--and it may be ungallant to say so--Miss Reid can no longer pass for a young woman in her midtwenties. Masha is also the most complicated of the three sisters. Miss Reid has no particular trouble conveying the blunt, even coarse speech of Masha, but she has not sufficiently plumbed the poetic sensitivity that...