Word: chekhovs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...excerpts from their longer works still seem satisfyingly self-contained. Roth describes himself as a child with "one foot in col lege, the other in the Catskills," and the Borscht Belt routine is what his first-person narrators constantly imitate, no matter how much they want to sound like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin's characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator is also fond of the short set piece. Here is a Cadillac that has been sitting in the heat too long: "Whatever was plastic in the car . . . had begun to bubble, boil, the glue...
Indeed, the people of The Seagull are pretty much the same as those in Ordinary People, mutatis mutandis. Redford, though, is not Chekhov. The purpose of art of this sort is to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary--this he has failed to do. He brings little in the way of creativity or technical resources to his film, only a lot of self-conscious artiness which he takes to its furthest extremes, directorial touches which never coalesce. It all starts with the opening credits, white letters on black background, no sound: "Oh, Christ," you think--"not another American Bergman...
...building on Chekhov Street, just off Moscow's Pushkin Square, was the town house of a wealthy man in prerevolutionary times. Now it is Psychoneurological Dispensary No. 14, one of the outpatient psychiatric clinics that deal with the day-to-day problems of the anxious, the alcoholic and the seriously disturbed in the Soviet Union...
...dance buffs, the current season has been lackluster, relying heavily on stock repertory and a dwindling pool of leading dancers. The most eagerly anticipated new production, Plisetskaya's The Sea Gull, which she performed to music composed by her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, evoked the atmosphere of Chekhov's play in stylized vignettes but contained little real dancing...
...trees for a housing development. There should be a hush surrounding the regal presence of Mme. Ranevsky when she sweeps into a room. Carole Shelley resembles a '40s movie starlet posturing to capture a producer's eye. All this merely taps the defects in this production. Chekhov preached that the salvation of Russia lay in work. The Shaw Festival might take that to heart...