Word: much
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...space of the Festival theatre, one couldn't just construct the usual box of three walls and a ceiling. William Ritman has solved the problem nicely by having us face the living-room (and dining-room beyond) from the diagonal. And he has carefully included objects that tell us much about the characters of the household--little vases of lilacs or lilies-of-the-valley, framed pictures, an old square piano with a tasseled shawl, candle brackets by the main door, a writing desk and accoutrements, a folding screen, antimacassars on the backs and arms of chairs...
...skillful enough to infuse it with a marvelous rhythm and a sort of poetic evocativeness. (This technique strongly affected the plays of our own O'Neill, Odets, and Hellman.) The director and the players--and, indeed, the audience-- must be able to catch unspecified implications, to apprehend not so much what is said as what is consciously or subconsciously thought and not said. In addition, Chekhov has woven a host of verbal and tangible symbols into his texture, which makes the result richer than any mere slice-of-life...
...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...
...recent years The Three Sisters is the Chekhov play 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
...SCOPE and thoroughness, The Four-Gated City is very much a nineteenth century novel. However, its concerns are much more contemporary. To simplify matters immeasurably--and, for those who have read the book, perhaps intolerably--the narrative alternates between the two poles of politics and insanity--the public and private responses of modern man. As literary marriages go, it seems the successful offspring of an alliance between George Orwell and Virginia Woolf...