Word: scandalous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Country Scandal may be mere chaff compared to Chekhov's masterpieces, but even chaff will do for a light snack. This is all that the Theatre Company of Boston intends to serve with its current production. The play has ambiguous possibilities: it could be staged as light comedy or as rather heavy tragi-comedy. The Theatre Company has chosen to save its sobriety for meatier drama...
...scandal takes place in a placid little provincial backwater, on the surface of which floats a handful of dissipated notables trying to forget how bored they are. Everyone is caught in a pointless, narcotic whirlpool of wine and frivolity, and everyone is constantly being dragged down into silly flirtations and seductions...
Beneath all the heady good-natured nonsense, A Country Scandal hints at personal tragedies and deplores the empty hypocrisy of country life. The dissolute socialites act like buffoons but they live an aimless "puppet existence" in "a hell of vulgarity and disillusionment." Their barbarous antics hide frustrated ambitions and a loss of self-respect; "irrepressible passions" drive them to torment one another...
...Theatre Company has decided to softpeddle the pathos. Instead it looks for laughs on the strength of the play's irony, and usually finds them. Chekhov filled A Country Scandal with dozens of juicy exchanges, giving the actors plenty of material...
...seem more than perfunctory. Thus when Robertson threatens to release a medical report showing that Fonda once had a mental breakdown and is a habitual philanderer, it is obvious that Fonda will be too decent to retaliate by bringing up Robertson's own involvement in an Army homosexual scandal. Director Franklin Schaffner further dissipates the film's climactic confrontation scene with Robertson's old Army buddy, letting TV Comic Shelley Berman play the role mostly for laughs. Appearances by Edie Adams, Negro Singer Mahalia Jackson, Commentators Howard K. Smith and John Henry Faulk, and Vidal himself...