Word: chekhovs
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Astrov, the troubled, drink-prone doctor in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, asks, "Those who will live a hundred ... years after us, for whom we are struggling now to beat out a road, will they remember and say a good word for us?" Those 100 years are nearly up. The play was first published 98 years ago, when Chekhov was 37 and already ailing with the consumption that would kill him seven years later. He feared that he would soon be forgotten, but today Chekhov--and particularly Uncle Vanya--seems to be everywhere...
...high-concept, image-driven entertainment, on stage as well as in the rest of popular culture, the ascendancy of what is maybe Chekhov's least eventful major drama comes as a surprise. Louis Malle's movie adaptation, Vanya on 42nd Street, has become an unexpected art-house success. This nicely calibrated play-within-a-film, starring Wallace Shawn as Vanya, follows a New York City theater company that is rehearsing the play. Two more film versions are in the works-one directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins; the other an Australian version from British stage director Michael Blakemore...
...Chekhov once gave an aspiring novelist some telling advice: "When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief." In its cool observational dispassion and fineness of construction, Uncle Vanya has all the grace of a gentle snowfall...
...store guy and his pal from the video store talk dirty but think long and wistfully about the life that is passing them by. Their customers and girlfriends are just as lost, goofy and irrelevant. The budget for Kevin Smith's movie was $27,575, but he's the Chekhov of slacker life -- and maybe of America's secret life...
...Cheever is our little Chekhov; like ragtime, he should be played slowly. The elegance and pain in his work need to be discovered gradually, like the bruised beauty of a sunset. These actors do get the shouting scenes right; their abrupt, strangulated outbursts are appropriate to people who have been bred to optimism and implosion, not to the articulation of rage. And Van Dyck finds wit and poignancy in her several roles. She often has the taut stillness of a woman listening for catastrophe. But the rest of the cast often pushes too hard. Any overacting brutalizes Cheever's prose...