Word: chekhovs
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...Three Sisters. By Anton Chekhov. Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St., 8 p.m. Tickets are available at the Loeb Center Box Office. Call 547-8300 for more information...
...geographically ("How did we get to here?" are among the father's last words). Grief is put on hold as they squabble over the Chinese takeout, gang up on a sibling's spouse and expertly rip the scabs of old family wounds. The RSC's production impeccably fulfilled Chekhov's famous dictum that events onstage should be "just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed...
Both as man and model, Oliver Sacks has obvious appeal. He is descended from a line of literary physicians-from Chekhov to Jonathan Miller, the late Lewis Thomas and, perhaps most significantly, the Russian neurologist A.R. Luria, whose neurohistorical writings helped introduce the public to the mysteries of the brain...
More than any other Russian playwright, Chekhov is perceived in America as relevant to our age. This may be owing to his trafficking in gloom (any impulse toward optimism being, of course, evidence of callowness). But even his darkest interludes are subtle and variegated. There's a vivid moment in one of his stories when an awestruck boy beholds a flash of lightning: "someone seemed to strike a match in the sky." Something lovely is always dancing beyond Chekhov's horizon, toward which his characters gaze with palpable yearning...
Perhaps it is this hint of the ideal that accounts for Vanya's continuing attraction. Even if nothing much happens onstage, everything is happening on that other, imagined stage-a world of fulfilled passions, where scholarship leads to wisdom, industry to affluence, sexual desire to spiritual communion. Chekhov's impulse is transcendent. At his best he evokes an ethereal theater where angels perform in front of angels...