Word: chekhovs
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Tommy Lee Jones '69 is not a convincing consumptive. Last Monday, at a benefit for the Poets' Theatre, he and Stockard Channing '65 performed a reading of Love Chekhova selection of love letters between Anton Chekhov and his eventual wife, Olga Knipper. The two celebrities were first secured for the performance, and then Love, Chekhov was created for them to perform. Yet it doesn't exactly showcase their talents...
Jones, on the other hand, hardly found the voice of Chekhov. Amply filling out his suit, perched on a barstool, Jones sat stumbling over Russian place names, Of course, the reading was rehearsed only once, but surely Jones could have learned his pronunciation. His physical and iconic presence did not actually detract from his performance, and in fact his Texas accent suited the gruff, serious and asexual Chekhov as much as it distracted. His delivery, on the other hand, was just flat. One had the feeling that Jones is an actor for active, visual roles and that sitting...
...letters themselves were a surprise. They contained virtually no reflection on (or of ) Chekhov's art and instead sketched a loose plot about marital procrastination. Most exciting in their salutations (such as "my little actress" and "daughter") and in Chekhov's evasive discussions of travel, they also made an occasional gasp at beauty ("One of the cranes has flown away. Still no rain. They're building a shed in the courtyard. The other crane is bored."). Dominick Jones, who adapted the letters, included a subtle subplot in which Chekhov sends misleading and contradictory travel plans to Olga so that...
...illuminated the stage for nearly four decades, torched it with his wily intelligence, seduced it with the precision of his plummy voice. He has dwelt inside Hamlet, Romeo, Coriolanus, Richard II and Richard III (in his version, a purring, reptilian gangster), caressed the mood of wistful doom in Chekhov, played Captain Hook and Inspector Hound and, in Bent, a gay man in a Nazi camp. But except for Richard III, which he brilliantly reimagined for film, all these great performances disappeared into the playgoer's memory on closing night. You had to be there; most of you weren...
...amused to perform a facsimile of his old mischief on a curious teenager (Brad Renfro). As Whale in Bill Condon's film, McKellen is sunset charm incarnate, a gay man melting inside his decaying body for the gross, cheerful fellow (Brendan Fraser) who works in the garden. It's Chekhov in lavender...