Word: playing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bill Veeck signed a midget to play major league baseball. He gave a yacht to one of the outstanding pitchers on his team. This spring various lucky bettors received prizes at Suffolk Downs--from a case of champagne to a steer. It is unfortunate that a man of such rare promotional genius should be fettered by local politics. In the end Veeck's way will bring more money to the state coffers than anyone else's way, and that is what the state is after anyway...
Almost everyone concedes that each of the last four Chekhov plays is a masterpiece, and hands the first prize to The Cherry Orchard. I happen to belong to the small group that views The Three Sisters as the summit of all Russian drama. (On Chekhov's own admission, it was the play that caused him the most trouble to perfect.) And this is the work that the American Shakespeare Festival has chosen to round out the current season, thus departing from the fifth time in its history...
...Platonov and Ivanov, for instance, Chekhov dramatized an individual, and one tremendous performance can bring them off. From The sea Gull on, however, Chekhov was portraying a group; a star or two will not suffice. Here Chekhov has done away with the clear spine that drives through the play from one exciting event to another, from one "sock on the jaw" (Chekhov's phrase) to another; he has turned his back on the technique of say, Ibsen and Strindberg. He has, in effect, turned from the solo concerto with orchestra to the more subtle and contrapuntal interplay of chamber music...
...Three Sisters there is a spine, but it is submerged well below the surface--like almost everything else in the play. The work requires a lot from its audience, which may easily choose to be just as board as some of Chekhov's characters claim to be. People say there is no plot. In a way they are right. Instead, there is a congeries of tiny plotlets, ever so delicately and carefully contrived...
Although WIN will pay to move a client and his dependents to another city if an opening is not available in the home city, it seems to be a rather costly and possibly psychologically damaging play to train someone to do a job for which there is little demand in the original locality...