Word: irina
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chekhov's best play, The Sea Gull ranks well below his incomparable Cherry Orchard, his moving Three Sisters. The people it treats of are fibreless, end-stopped artistic folk. Self-pitying, middle-aged Actress Irina (Lynn Fontanne) shrugs, screams, clutches tight the second-rate novelist, Trigorin (Alfred Lunt). Irina's son Constantine (Richard Whorf) writes advanced plays, loves the ingenuous, stage-struck Nina (Uta Hagen), who in turn idolizes Trigorin. Nina is the sea gull- the fluttering bird whom Trigorin ruins out of thoughtless pleasure, condemning her to the life of a third-rate actress, driving Constantine...
Throughout The Sea Gull sounds a deeper note also, telling of human growth and decline. The shallow Trigorin and the histrionic Irina end up playing lotto. But Nina grows, as one superb device reveals: in Act I, performing in a play of Constantine's she speaks his highfalutin but charged lines mechanically; in Act IV she repeats them, makes them live. It is in delimiting his characters without disfiguring them, in acknowledging their souls but questioning their perspective that Chekhov gives to The Sea Gull a kind of ember like glow...
...production. Critic Stark Young's new acting version is natural and charming, but last week's performance showed only a series of moods-that time-honored way of passing the buck about the dark, difficult Russian soul. Actor Lunt performed admirably as Trigorin, Actress Fontanne badly as Irina. She made the Russian woman a ham actress in a farce, displayed a rather alarming affinity for the role...
...absence Sono Osato, a Japanese-American trained under Adolph Bolm, one of the company's youngest dancers (17), is by far its most exotic looking. As a dancer, she has not yet advanced beyond petit sujet (ranking in ballet hierarchy above a corypheé, below a grand sujet). Irina Baronova, now 18, is a brilliant and imaginative artist, still addicted to lengthening her snub nose with putty, Tatiana Riabouchinska, usually superb in pale, willowy roles, last week turned flamboyant in a ballet the troupe is doing for the first time in the U. S.-Rimsky-Korsakov...
They did not meet again till Irina was famous and Ivan a hunted revolutionary. And they met only to quarrel. Then the Revolution broke and the tables turned. Now Ivan was a power and Irina a nobody, endangered. He saved her life but could not or would not keep her from prison. After an ingenious jail delivery engineered by her friends, when she was nearly at the Finnish border and safety, the two lovers met again. Whether neither or both or one crossed the border is a secret any adventure author would prefer readers to discover for themselves...