Word: masha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Their credo is not "Life is short. Art is long" but "Life is short. Art is shorter." Sibylline Utterances. To move from the coffeehouses to an Old Vic revival of The Three Sisters is like catapulting through time. The production is exquisitely mounted, the acting impeccable. Joan Plowright makes Masha a woman of neurotically vulnerable ardor, and as her lover Vershinin, Robert Stephens is a colonel of spineless charm. And yet by comparison, the new experiments in theater make the play seem greyer, dustier, more sibylline than it used to be-as if the sisters' failure...
Peter Weil as Sorin, and John Ross as Dorn created distinct characters; Johanna Madden, as Masha, created a superb one. All three maintained the tone and pace of the production perfectly, in their individual scenes...
...Three Sisters. If the Hemingway hero was the man to whom things happened, the Chekhov hero and heroine are people to whom nothing happens. His Sisters exist in a sad purgatory of might-have-beens and never-will-bes. Masha (Kim Stanley), married at 18 to a bureaucratic clod, alternately tongue-lashes him as a clownish bore and lapses broodily into tears. Irina (Shirley Knight) has made a hysterical religion of work. Olga (Geraldine Page) is a kind of involuntary nun of duty, serving joylessly as the local school headmistress. The cultured, well-educated sisters are too weak to demand...
...masterpiece may have a flaw, it is perhaps that Chekhov tries to make pathos do the work of tragedy. If the sisters and the men around them draw their breath in pain, they rarely raise a finger against fate. They are small sinners and great talkers. Masha comes closest to making a breakthrough to life by falling in love with an unhappily married colonel (Kevin McCarthy...
...moment of nightmare. For the most part, the reality of war is felt only in the occasional crack of a sniper's rifle or the firefly descent of flares, but its effect on Ivan and his comrades shows in their gropings for reassurance from one another. Even Masha, a girl medical officer with eyes like a grey squirrel's, helps in her inarticulate way; in one somberly lovely scene, she shyly lets a captain (Valentin Zubkov) pursue her into a forest of birches as the camera, darting on owl's wings, follows them through the receding halftones...