Word: chekhovs
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...Chekhov's The Seagull is a great play but a very difficult one for young actors. The production at the Loeb Ex, under the direction of Charles Langmuir, is an earnest attempt, but clumsy and ultimately unsuccessful. The actors lack the experience and the finesse to make the boredom that their characters feel bearable, or their characters' doomed hopes and lost loves moving...
...blame can be placed on the actors. Langmuir's direction is uncertain, and sometimes downright sloppy. His blocking, especially when there are more than a few people on stage, is awkward, and often destroys the fragile spell of Chekhov's language. He realizes that the lack of action in a Chekhov play can become oppressive, so he keeps his actors moving, but they move aimlessly and unnecessarily, and simply make us feel uncomfortable...
...after we had scoured the ballroom for forgotten handbags and gloves (discovering mostly lost shoes instead), the head chauffeur hugged the executive secretary and then they both looked at all the rest of us and shook their heads warmly and sadly. It was like straight out of one of Chekhov's final curtains, all the faithful family retainers standing around chuckling knowingly over the foolishness of their masters...
...remarried and another is about to; the third is happy with a bisexual assortment-including his exwife. The men have pretty much dropped their vendetta with the past. While the women are more vitriolic, they seem, at play's end, sadder and more vulnerable, rather like Chekhov's three sisters, to whom a closing mock-reference is made...
...physician, Chekhov focused on life instead of zeroing in on a desk, a blank piece of paper and some obsessive fantasy or other. As a doctor, he knew that to some degree the patient is the disease. A doctor with a tragic sense is aware that all of his patients will die, even the ones whom he has helped to cure. In the meantime, there is the interminable process of living. Diagnosis is simply a gauge for determining what stage the wasting-away process has reached. Chekhov is a great diagnostician, a man with an immensely vital sense of life...