Word: dictional
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...language is wretched but was it meant to be? Whatever we decide Miss Jones has the best of it. Her self-deflation, ponderous and abetted by a bit of typological cuteness, is nonetheless successful, and we are left to wonder whether it was diction or sexuality or both which fretted her. such antics, like self-criticism in general or romanticism in general lead only to an adolescent recognition of self--which is the beginning not the end of investigations...
...child's fist, thumb on top, pointed out; the gesture was often Jack's. Bobby's voice is normally thinner and higher; but at the height of his delivery of late, it has gained body and begun to resemble that earlier voice. The Harvard-trained Boston diction, the rhetorical, rising cadence-these are hauntingly similar...
...Moscow Art Theater: a distinctive technique marked by precise characterization, long pauses, distilled emotion, and tight pacing that presented the final pistol shots of an Ivanov or Seagull as the Q.E.D. of human tragedy, lucidly observed. In English-language productions, all this has been sustained by country-house diction supported by the characterological self-control necessary to maintain strong emotion over long sentences. These productions were, and are often powerful but they have two chronic diseases--boredom spawned by excessive refinement of speech and movement, and sympathetic anesthesia brought on by conventions that often dwindle into mannered absurdities. An audience...
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...
Paean. Still, his personality maintains a subtle ambiguity. When his Jewish secretary visits him in his cell, he is Goldman/Dorff, switching characters with almost imperceptible changes in diction, accent, gesture. Back in the courtroom, he is Dorff again, exhorting the court -and the audience-with a great emotional paean to Hitler. "People...