Word: ranevskaya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...interactions in the Ranevskaya household have shifted during the five-year absence of Madame Ranevskaya, who owns the orchard and the house that overlooks it. She left Russia for Paris after her young son drowned in the river outside the house, and has now been fetched home to attend to her mountainous debt. Madame Ranevskaya returns to her daughter Anya, who has maintained her childlike innocence while her older sister Varya has Maintained the household...
Claire Bloom, a grand dame of theatre and the newest member of the A.R.T. company, fills the role of landowner Madame Ranevskaya ably, but is too restrained to convey the character's significance. Her Ranevskaya is flighty and foolish, and her translucent presence little justifies the excitement surrounding her return...
...work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without any discern ible contact with her beloved home...
...play's tragic relief is supplied by the wrenching pathos of the orchard's owner, Madame Ranevskaya. In this role the production boasts the splendid Irene Worth. Hers is a memorable portrayal - extravagant, feckless, alluring, touchingly vulnerable. When she ritualistically halves the telegram from her erstwhile lover in Paris - slowly, pain fully, like a bandage - an entire life is caught between the past it cannot release and the future it cannot resist...
...development, ought to be enveloped in actressy vanity and a flighty inability to cope. Yet Gloria Foster displays little vanity and seems to possess such granitic strength as to have sold the estate and axed the first cherry tree herself. Lopakin, the son of a serf, who buys the Ranevskaya property at auction, is played a shade too unctuously by James Earl Jones, who also lacks the quality of a steely, patient peasant finally coming into his own. Earle Hyman, on the other hand, succeeds as Madame Ra-nevskaya's billiards-obsessed brother Leonid. Hyman's portrayal...