Word: irina
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From Moscow last week came a dispatch that a two-headed, four-armed, single-bodied human female born last November still lives. Named Irina & Galina, on the principle that the heads have separate personalities, the dicephalous infant is reported to smile and to respond to her names. Irina & Galina is also noteworthy in that, unlike most monsters, she has a definite usefulness...
Some physiologists believe that sleep is the result of chemical changes in the blood. Professor Alexei Dmitrievich Speransky who has Irina & Galina in charge and reported on her to the Gorki All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, thinks he has contradictory evidence. Irina & Galina's two heads share the same blood stream, but they wink, blink & nod off to sleep at different times. Sleep, reasons the professor, as did his celebrated predecessor, Ivan Pavlov, must be a nervous phenomenon...
...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...