Word: senelick
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Between Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play and first single-shot suicide, and Yepikhodov's unfulfilled promise to "shoot myself so to speak" in Chekhov's last play, something has obviously happened. Laurence Senelick, directing his own translation of Cherry Orchard, pays proper attention to the writer's final, bitter playfulness by mouthing a production that breaks through the somber fragilitv of traditional Chekhovian staging to a vital if slightly fuzzy theatricality...
...SENELICK uses the conventional style but he restricts it to one group of characters, primarily the downtrodden landlords, Raevskaya (Marilyn Pitzele), her brother Gaev (Bro Uttal) and their adopted daughter Varya (Janet Leslie). The style becomes part of the dramatic action of the production. It is a hot house aristocratic style of life and acting; constantly undercut on one side by a rude bourgeois frankness (played with 20th century realism) and on the other by a broad comedy, which is often the symbol and mockery of unclutered peasant bumpkinry...
...Senelick's translation captures the three-part style of the play in its diction. The gentry speak standard Chekhov, Victorian dialect. The upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Ken Tigar), sweet, young Anya (Carolyn Firth) and occasional flunkeys speak a slangy, colloquial tongue, fresh and awkward; while a pod of surrounding actors, led by the shlemielesque "perennial student" Trofimov (Lloyd Schwartz), with his utopian panegyrics discoursed of Yepikhodov, talk a well-tuned language of parody and farce. None of the specific lines of the translation is, as they say, memorable--Senelick's staging eye works better than his ear--but they are smooth...
...problem may be nothing more than a lack of faith on the part of Director Senelick and his cast, a conservative interpretation of the limits of any one style of characterization. But Miss Pitzele and Ivan Lamb, as a loyal butler who has kept alive on sealing wax for twenty years, offer fine examples of actors who established stature from with in a consistently played character...
Enter Laurence Senelick as Reb Azrielke. For the remaining two acts he commands the stage, judging the rightness of the dybbuk's claims, then bringing the powers of the underworld against him. Senelick is by turns pitious and imperious, awful in the robes of his rabbinical office, then faint in the arms of a friend. His lines are difficult, full of the persistent legalisms that could have reduced tragedy to laughable pontification. Set against the virtuosity of his performance is the disembodied voice of the dybbuk, sounding all the more despairing and alone in its electronic chill. There, away from...