Word: greats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...know only the titles: The Fatherless, and Laugh It Off If You Can. At 21, he wrote the sprawling but remarkable Platonov, which turned up only long after his death, in the Soviet period. In his late twenties, he turned out Ivanov, a flawed but great and vastly underrated work capable of packing a tremendous wallop in performance; and the tentative, transitional The Wood Demon, which later also provided much of the plot of Uncle Vanya...
...midtwenties. Masha is also the most complicated of the three sisters. Miss Reid has no particular trouble conveying the blunt, even coarse speech of Masha, but she has not sufficiently plumbed the poetic sensitivity that lies beneath. It is not a bad performance; it just leaves a great deal yet to be explored. The problem of Masha's and Vershinin's drum-roll exchanges ("Tram-tam-tam ... tra-ra-ra"), the shortest mutual love scene ever written for the stage, has been effectively solved by substituting complementary phrases from the aria "All men should once with love grow tender...
...young baron Tusenbach, the lieutenant who wins Irina's hand only to be shot in a duel, Brain Bedford performs with great skill--to the extent to actually playing on the piano the middle section of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. His glasses, moustache, and long hair parted squarely in the center help make him properly homely. There is an extraordinary amount of traffic in this play--entrances and exists, greeting and farewells. One of the most moving farewells in all drama is the parting of Irina and Tusenbach in Act IV--a fine example of Chekhov's oblique method...
...male Lady Macbeth. Right from the first act, Charles Cioffi's portrayal is a remarkable piece of acting. Solyony speaks scarcely a half dozen times in all of Act I, and spends most of the time sitting silently on a chair in the corner. Nevertheless, Cioffi tells us a great deal about this morose and mysterious character. We notice a tiny facial tic, and a nervous fidgeting of the thumbs. Sometimes he talks to himself. At other times we perceive that the conversation is making no impact on him at all: his mind has drifted elsewhere, and his eyes have...
...undergoing harrowing experiments in order to determine the limits of her consciousness. As the novel closes, she is stranded off the Scottish coast, England having been decimated by poison gas and radioactivity. She has also become a member of a telepathic community whose members speak to each other across great distance through the power of their own shared thoughts. In doing so, Martha attains a perspective that permits her to see, in the midst of the chaos, a terrible beauty being born. Around the world, mutant infants begin to appear. To their earthbound parents, these children that "see" and "hear...