Word: karamazov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Idiots Karamazov...
Forget General Exams for English concentrators. If you can make it through a production of Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato's The Idiots Karamazov at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) without feeling lost at least once, then you're well on your way to an encyclopedic knowledge of all Western literature. Talk about high cultural capital. It's not just any play that requires the equivalent of a doctorate in world literature for even cursory reference. But then again, Christopher Durang isn't just any writer. And perhaps only Durang could make a play so unabashedly laden with obscure references...
...title of Durang's latest work, a perversion (in both senses of the word) of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, seems almost chosen at random from the list of novels that it references. The basic plot of Dostoevsky's famous meditation on being and nothingness (long before Sartre took the patent out on those themes) serves as the starting point of the Durang/Innaurato collaboration: four brothers, tempestuous love, life, death, etc, etc. But it doesn't take long to leave Dostoevsky in the dust as Durang and Innaurato jump full force into the whole of literature since the Book...
...Hemingway who acts as Garnett's servant, the under-recognized and frustrated feminist author Djuna Barnes, the heroine-addicted mother of Eugene O'Neil, and the aforementioned Anas Nin, played with delightfully French self-absorption by Karen MacDonald. Not to mention the entire cast of characters from The Brothers Karamazov, with Alyosha Karamazov (played with effective, i.e. not annoying, wholesomeness by Sean Dugan) serving as Durang's Everyman character in this absurdist romp...
Director Karin Coonrod must be given credit for taming this tornado of a play. Performed as part of the A.R.T.'s CrossCurrents initiative, an ongoing attempt to "create and sustain a body of new music theatre works," The Idiots Karamazov intersperses cabaret-style singing with its mad dash through practically all the Western fiction and drama worth reading. But an experiment in Brechtian musical theater this is not. With love ballads about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being...