Word: chekhovisms
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...first American tour, in 1923, the company performed four plays, including Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. It returned with those two dramas, an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, and a new "realistic Soviet" play, Kremlin Chimes, all of which were warmly praised by the newspaper and magazine critics...
Stanislavski, who directed the first serious production of The Seagull, thought the play was a tragedy, and later directors have tended to adopt this interpretation even though Chekhov himself called it a comedy. By now, in fact, the "gloom" of Chekhov has become such a joke that any less than perfect production of his plays can easily make them seem farcical...
They set just the right langorous pace at the very beginning. Yet because the actors never seem embarassed by the long pauses which Chekhov actually wrote into the script, but instead used them to fill out their characterizations, the play never drags. And despite some serious lapses in acting, the cast as a whole maintains an almost flawless bittersweet tone throughout the play...
...serious scenes almost all the actors seem slightly unnatural. Chekhov should be played as plainly as possible. Because of the suggestiveness of the dialogue, it is most effective when spoken in an ordinary unaffected manner. Unfortunately, the actors try so hard to wring emotion out of crucial scenes that they kill many of their lines...
This Actors,Studio production attains a sense of loneliness, emptiness, inertia, and the parched, anguishing inability to enjoy life but only from moment to moment rather than continuously. Chekhov is the drama's Chopin, fragile, lyrical, nocturnal, romantic, ineffably sad. This mood music hovers in the air of this Broadway revival, but it does not permeate the play...