Word: lapdog
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Anton Chekhov seems to meet Samuel Beckett in Kama Ginkas’s new adaptation of Chekhov’s short story Lady with a Lapdog, currently running on the mainstage at the American Repertory Theatre (ART). The play, which Ginkas wrote, directed and produced, is an absurdist spectacle far removed from the emotional starkness and dry humor typical of Chekhovian productions. The powerful love story is narrated by characters who constantly pause mid-sentence, interrupted at arbitrary intervals by two clowns in blue and white striped stockings and punctuated by the ardent desire of the lovers to pour sand...
...gleaming water and golden dust against the black background of the stage. The actors, especially Waterston as the beautiful and fiercely determined young adulteress, are all competent, though their frenetic energy is not enough to ward off the interminable boredom that the slow-moving staging imposes. Lady With a Lapdog also features what has to be one of the most bizarre and entertaining sex scenes in the history of theater, in which Gurov copulates with Anna by throwing sand on her while sitting atop a ladder halfway across the stage...
...director must have realized that reading a twenty-page short story aloud, even with pauses for action, cannot fill up two hours. The play opens as Gurov and Anna, the lady with the lapdog, meet and cheat on their respective spouses while vacationing at Yalta; Gurov is disgusted that Anna takes the affair so seriously, but after the pair return to their respective families, he is unable to forget her, seeks her out, and they continue their affair in secret, clinging to it desperately as the one happy element in their lives...
...Lady With a Lapdog runs through October 11 on the Loeb Mainstage...
THEATRE | Lady With A Lapdog...