Word: rauch
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AFTER WATCHING the first scene of the Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theatre's production of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, the audience realizes that the material is not appropriate for young children of people easily embarrassed by explicit dramatizations of sex. However for others, director Bill Rauch's creative adaptation of this collage of 10 one-act dialogues is a superbly orchestrated version of the delicate material...
...BILL RAUCH meets and overcomes this challenge by employing an experimental trick of staging. Seating the audience on the small Agassiz stage, Rauch stages the play in the theatre itself...
...many plays such an inversion would undoubtedly prove disastrous, but in this case it not only matches Chekhov's mood and theme, but carries the playwright's own actions one step further. Chekhov boils the play's plot down to a bare minimum; Rauch abandons the scenery as well. We are left with the bare essence: a group of men and women struggling vainly to communicate with each other and to cope with their loves, their art, and their lives...
...theater as a stage proves doubly successful in underlining another theme of the play: The difficulty or absence of communication between men and women. Not only does the size of the theater dwarf and separate the characters (Rauch, however, uses the space very evenly), but the rows of seats provide frustrating barriers between them. Characters, unable to make themselves heard or understood, race down aisles, violently pushing up the seats in their frustration. Not only does this express what words cannot, but it builds a frenzy of tension and frustration. In one particularly evocative scene. Nina and Constantine--reunited after...
Ironically, Chekhov's genius lies in his ability to communicate the inability to communicate. Rauch's production not only captures this haunting theme, but--by putting the audience on stage, and the stage in the audience--suggests that the loneliness and isolation of Chekhov's characters is all too real...