Word: plays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...METAPHOR which playwright Ronald Ribman has made the title of his play is not an original one. Long before him, Turgenev had likened the lives of some men to the futile effort, the useless suffering, of a fifth horse hastily harnesses to a coach and four. All its striving, the tether lacerating its back as it strains forward, is pointless...
...tone of Ribman's play original. The combination of resignation and amused tolerance which characterizes landowner Nikolai Alexeevich Chulkaturin is reminiscent--deliberately so--of Camus' heroes. But there is a new dimension to Chulkaturin. He is awkward, comicly so at times. He possesses that amazing ability to stop a conversation dead merely by his appearance...
This is the only quality he shares with Zoditch, the first reader of the Grubov Publishing Company. Zoditch--much against his own inclination--is assigned to read the diary that Chulkturin kept just before his death. As Zoditch reads, the play weaves in and out of his own flights of fancy as well as those of the book he is reading. All are acted out in front of him, with occasional interruptions--as when a fellow tenant manages to get chewed up by the landlady's wolf hounds...
This is the piece of human garbage that Peter Lempert is given to play, and, with the exception of a number of scenes where he is just a bit too hysterical, he plays them well. Despite the fact that Dustin Hoffman popularized the role, Lempert's Zoditch is so real, with his thin face, his pointed nose, his beady little eyes, and a body and limbs that curl and twist like those of a man old before his time, that it is virtually impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. What Lempert does best is comedy, and, though Zoditch...
...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