Word: masha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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They have come to watch a duel. The participants: challenger Maria ("Masha") Magdalena Markof-Belaeff [origine russe], who undoes her red cravate before the action commences; and instigator Mark Van Dyke Holmes, sporting sneakers, vest, and blazer in Eleanor (Roosevelt) blue...
...gonna be a Masha masher!" tootles Holmes...
...suitors who flock about the sisters are also well-played. John Bellucci masterfully plays Vershinin, the philosophizing soldier with whom Masha falls in love. Bellucci works his rich and versatile voice like a musical instrument, retaining extraordinary control of volume, diction and timing in long, technically taxing monologues. He meticulously defines his character by pacing constantly around the stage in repeated circles that parallel his sermons...
Cornuelle's spare acting aptly characterizes Masha, the bored middle sister tied to a pompous posturing schoolmaster husband. She rigidly controls her movements, gestures and voice, yet manages to convey Masha's emotional conflict, especially her moving confession of love for Vershinin...
Laboring under the burden of a broken toe, Bellucci nevertheless is eloquent and convincing, especially in the beautifully acted love scenes with Masha. Chris Clemenson takes the awkward character of Tusenbach and fills it out with sympathy and skill. Tusenbach's paeans to labor can easily turn into sermonizing and his devotion to Irina into sickening self-abasement, but Clemenson doesn't self-dramatize the role. He transcends the limiting qualities of the part as Chekhov wrote it to create to subtle portrait of human suffering, weltschmerz...