Word: kulyenchikov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Andrea: February 24th of this year, I was not really auditioning for plays but he saw me one day and said he had heard me sing and he asked if I'd be in his play (Curse of Kulyenchikov). I had just come back and was sort of bumming around the Harvard campus, bored Curse of Kulyenchikov was the only thing I had done...
Responsibility must ultimately lie on Simon's shoulders Kulyenchikov is a reworking of an earher Simon Play, Fools a failure when it first apperaed warned Peter Melnick and pat Pattison (Melnick is a student. Pattison a professor at Berklee College of Music) the creative team behind the revised version apparently thought that a musical treatment would improve Simon's initial effort. But their adaptation, while well-intentioned is not enough. Dressing a dog a Pavarotti will not prevent it form howling...
Simon was one of the godheads of the sugary ostensibly mellow culture of the seventies and this play shows how alarming it is that he is still at large. The premise behind the piece is that, two hundred years ago, the town of Kulyenchikov was laid under a curse by a disgruntled inhabitant. Two things can life the curse. Either an outsider must raise the intelligence of anyone in the town by even a tiny fraction or the descendants of two old families must marry resolving in matrimony the conflict which first produced the curse...
...play opens a young teacher Leon Tolchinsky (Benajah Cobb), arrives in Kulyenchikov to assume his new post. He gradually learns of the curse and quickly falls in love with Sophia Zubritsky (Andrea Burke) Tolchinsky has twenty four hours in which a been be lifted only in Sophia marries the repellent Count Gregor Yousekevitch (Robert Kane). In cliched though sometimes amusing fashion Tolchinsky fails Disaster is averted however when after Sophia tells him that she no longer accepts the validity of the curse Tolchinsky claims to belong to the Yousekevitch family. The townspeople accept Leon's assertion, and after Leon...
...Sophia Zubrisky, it is a pity that the script betrays her into mouthing platitudes as the play ends. Burke's contribution is especially refreshing next to the misguided efforts of Benajah Cobb, whose strained portrayal of Leon Tolchinsky cannot be grounded in an sense of the reality of Kulyenchikov...