Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hope. The play has a moderately upbeat ending -- though many don't seem to realize it. The Three Sisters is not a tragedy (a label Chekhov never used: it, like Ivanov, is a "drama"; The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard are "comedy"; Uncle Vanya is called "scenes from country life"). The Three Sisters is two parts pathos and one part comedy. Much in the play is funny, much is witty--and Kahn has not let this get obscured...
...fine example of Chekhov's oblique method, for the poignance derives not from what they say but from what they don't say. Miss Tucci and Bedford handle this scene beautifully --in both inflection and timing; and Bedford is most touching in his exit speech about the life-sharing quality of a dead tree swaying in the wind. What incredible mastery Checkhov shows here...
...that has been most frequently staged around the country. I suspect it will be quite some time before we have another production that captures as well as this one so much of the profundity and irony that Checkhov put into his richest study of the character and purpose of life...
...BACK IN 1896, William James counselled the more maleable boys down at Yale on the subject. As he then figured it was probably safer to choose, despite any doubts, to believe. For who knew what the skeptic risked by leaving life's riddles unanswered? But the times, as they say, have a-changed. Belief is not the sure bet it once was. Too often belief, when not merely irrelevant, has been shown to be destructive or self-defeating. so many philosophies, life styles, governments have been tried--and abandoned--over the past seventy years, that it is little wonder that...
...cellar, it house Linda, Mark's mad wife. In another novel produced during another time, Linda would have probably been left to her solitary fate--most probably, like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, Linda would have simply destroyed herself. At best, she could only hope to remain locked up for life, half-mad, in a Gothic tower. But, in this novel, Linda is treated as a prophet as she conducts Martha through the looking glass into another, better world...