Word: ranevskaya
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...