Word: chekhovs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...another level, Moscow Circles is a literary odyssey. Erofeev and his fellow-passengers engage in some hilarious literary polemics tracing alcoholism in German and Russian authors (Chekhov's last words: "Let's have some champagne!"), even as his own journey takes on a mythico-literary cast. Erofeev is Sheherezade, avoiding one thousand and one train fares by telling obscene stories to chief Ticket Inspector Semyonych. He is Oedipus, parrying the ribald riddles of a drunken Sphinx. He is Dante descending through the Moscow circles of Hell, his Virgil a bottle of Stolychnaya. And in the tragic denouement, Erofeev becomes Christ...
...characterizations are swift and telling. In Bardon Bus, for example, a young woman falls in love often and, like the heroine of Chekhov's The Darling, identifies herself completely with each successive man in her life. "She takes up a man and his story wholeheartedly. . . Next time you see her she'll be in deep, going to fortunetellers, slipping his name into every other sentence; with this mention of the name there will be a mushy sound to her voice. . . Then comes the onset of gloom, the doubts . . . She will get drunk, and sign up for rolfing, swim...
...delight to see an excellent company of actors at work, but sometimes it's even more so to see them at play. In The Boys From Syracuse, the entire ART seems to be on a holiday, with nary an over-the-shoulder glance at the stern repertory countenances of Chekhov and Ibsen, and only a very cursory one at Shakespeare's. The Comedy of Errors, upon which The Boys is loosely based, never was one of the Bard's greatest creations anyway-he hadn't traded in his slapstick for lofty rhetoric and sublime poetry yet. Besides, he cribbed...
BOREDOM is itself boring, except in Chekhov's plays," writes literary critic George Watson. Ugliness is itself ugly, one might add, and this fact strikes home in Time Stands Still, a new Hungarian film directed by Peter Gothar. Set mostly in a high school in Hungary after the 1956 rebellion, Time Stands Still is mercilessly unvarying. Gloomy blue lighting, harsh, barking voices, and interminable sordid scenes--such as the pornographic picture postcards the director insists on showing--merge in a powerful social description of the dreariness of life under a repressive Communist government. The very factors that give the movie...
Short sketches of O'Neill's era set the stage for O'Neill's entrance into the theater world. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Synge were dead. In America, travelling companies that repeated Shakespeare or other European imports were very popular. Yet, says Berlin, these were only "escapist, money-making entertainment," yet to be considered art. Making that leap to original art was the accomplishment of O'Neill and his amateur theater group, the Provincetown Players. Also credited with bringing vemacular to the American stage, he set many of his plays in backgrounds that demanded specific U.S. regional dialects. His ease...