Word: chekhovs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...17th, 1896, when the first production of The Seagull opened in the State Theater of St. Petersburg, it was a resounding disaster. The play was poorly understood by its actors and poorly acted. Hissed down by the audience, it was dismissed by critics as inept and absurd Playwright Anton Chekhov, confounded by the disaster, left the theater after the second act, vowing never to write a play again...
Luckily, one member of the audience saw potential in the play, and mounted a second production. Critic-playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was at that time organizing the Moscow Art Theater with a partner and talked Chekhov into giving The Seagull a second chance. Their 1898 production of the play proved an enormous critical and commercial success, and led to the collaboration that established the Art Theater as one of the most prestigious in the world. It also inspired Chekhov to write his three greatest dramatic masterpieces. Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard...
...fate of The Seagull suggests, the very nature of Chekhov's art has often made his plays difficult to produce. Critic Keith Neilson has noted that Chekhov saw reality not as a series of dramatic climaxes, but as a mundane process of day-to-day living in which the crucial events happen unobtrusively in the background. Thus, though The Seagull includes a failed and successful suicide, a seduction, an abandonment, and the death of an infant, all of these melodramas occur offstage--mostly between the third and fourth acts. What we are shown instead is the residue of these events...
...many plays such an inversion would undoubtedly prove disastrous, but in this case it not only matches Chekhov's mood and theme, but carries the playwright's own actions one step further. Chekhov boils the play's plot down to a bare minimum; Rauch abandons the scenery as well. We are left with the bare essence: a group of men and women struggling vainly to communicate with each other and to cope with their loves, their art, and their lives...
...danger of using such an experimental setting--particularly in a play like Chekhov's--is that the form will overshadow the characters. In this production, however, the acting is uniformly so powerful that the characters rise above their setting, letting it serve only as a backdrop for their individual tensions. Peter Howard brilliantly captures Constantine's internal agitation; Claudia Silver is dazzling in her portrayal of his vain, cruel, but basically insecure mother; and Molly White plays the brooding and morose Masha with frightening conviction. Nina Bernstein as Nina Zarechny and Benajah Cobb as the old writer Trigorin are also...