Word: chekhovs
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...Chekhov is almost painfully Russian. His characters are up to their necks in suffering and continually say such things as "How life changes, How it deceives one." They are married to stupid husbands, or not married, or about to be married to people they don't love; they have forgotten all they used to know, or else are too stupid to know anything. But never are they happy for more than one sardonic joke at a time...
...months, U.S. televiewers have been getting a drama diet with a loftier intellectual content than that of Broadway. The high-vitamin source is Masterpiece Playhouse (Sun. 9 p.m., NBC-TV), which began its experimental run with Ibsen's suicidal Hedda Gabler and ends it this month with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. This week, for its sixth performance, Masterpiece staged a fast-paced, absorbing performance of Shakespeare's Othello...
...Wisteria Trees (by Joshua Logan; based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard; produced by Mr. Logan & Leland Hayward) converts Chekhov's 19th Century Russian landowners into turn-of-the-century Louisiana gentlefolk. Thereafter there are perhaps as many subtle differences between The Wisteria Trees and The Cherry Orchard as there are obvious resemblances. The difference that matters most: The Wisteria Trees is immeasurably inferior...
Playwright Logan's Lucy Andree Rans-dall is turned into a rather more aware heroine, and amorously lost lady, than Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya. Helen Hayes plays the part with resourcefulness and brightness, and serves (more than anything in the play) as a kind of handrail through the evening. For Logan has not learned Chekhov's trick of creating drama by evading it, has not his ability to seem at once compassionate and inexorable...
...truth is that Playwright Logan has infused a touch of Yancy Loper into Chekhov, and what is heard at the end is the sound of the ax hacking the heart out of The Cherry Orchard. Yet the real trouble with The Wisteria Trees is not that it falls short of Chekhov, but that on its own terms it is so frequently blurred and limp...