Word: lerstrom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mark Bramhall and Marjorie Lerstrom drew the two roles most chopped up by the crossfire between Brecht and Farquahr. Farquahr's Worthy is an amorous country gentleman of leisure and a bit of a buffoon; Brecht's is a shoe merchant who plans to sell his boots to the platoon Plume recruits, and his mental temperature oscillates between extremet canniness and extreme romanticism. Bramhall might have made the role gell a bit better by treating some of Worthy's protestations as posturing. Miss Lerstrom faces the same problem with Melinda and resolves it by throwing herself vigorously into the lady...
...process of elimination points the finger rather squarely at K. Lype O'Dell and Marjorie Lerstrom, who, as Vanya and Yelena, are responsible for holding the play together. But from O'Dell one gets only the sense of a dull, complaining man. One does not find in this Vanya the education with which Astrov credits him, nor the profound melancholy the others are constantly pointing out. His philosophy comes out flat; if there is one scene in the play that is disastrously bad it is his soliloquy early in Act II, where, instead of protest at a wasted life...
...Miss Lerstrom simply does not seem to be alive to all the intricacies of her part. It is impossible to gather from her behavior in Act I that she and Sofya have been antagonistic--and this must be clear by Act II. She has the same half-smile for Astrov, for Vanya, even for Telyegin, when he protests at her forgetting his name. As a result, her dialogue drags; one feels surprise, instead of quiet uneasiness, when her relations with the others are made clear...
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