Word: dialect
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...which did not appear in the finished book. In Chicago, Wright worked at odd menial jobs and encountered the same fears and prejudices he had left at home. He worked nights as a postal clerk and spent his days reading and "filling endless pages with stream-of-consciousness Negro dialect, trying to depict the dwellers of the black belt as he felt and saw them...
Senelick's translation captures the three-part style of the play in its diction. The gentry speak standard Chekhov, Victorian dialect. The upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Ken Tigar), sweet, young Anya (Carolyn Firth) and occasional flunkeys speak a slangy, colloquial tongue, fresh and awkward; while a pod of surrounding actors, led by the shlemielesque "perennial student" Trofimov (Lloyd Schwartz), with his utopian panegyrics discoursed of Yepikhodov, talk a well-tuned language of parody and farce. None of the specific lines of the translation is, as they say, memorable--Senelick's staging eye works better than his ear--but they are smooth...
Although Grania is the chief culprit, the three of them bark and bite at one other all night in a manner not unlike the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey into Night. Lady Gregory's penchant for folk dialect and fairly elaborate imagery prevent the encounters from being quite so acerbic, and give the characters a sort of distance. There's not an awful lot you can do with only two or three characters on stage, and director John Pym settles for movement that is simple and unobtrusive...
...Dixie dialect is artificial at times, and Jordan's version is not so consistently readable a modernization as J. B. Phillips' classic Letters to Young Churches. But Jordan's goal is sound: "The Scripture should be taken out of the stained-glass sanctuary and put out under God's skies...
Before Vic and Walter confront each other, a Jewish-dialect comedian totters onto the premises in the form of an 89-year-old furniture appraiser. Gregory Solomon, a kind of pickle-barrel philosopher, is as welcome for comic relief as he is dramatically irrelevant. As he haggles over the value of the furniture, Solomon (Harold Gary) makes wry, mocking comments about the family, marriage, his business competitors, serving as a kind of one-man Yiddish Greek chorus...