Word: snows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Black Snow is at first glance a serious play. It's a story of censorship, blood baths, theater, repression, and manipulation. The play's premise is promising: identifying and particularizing the era of Stalinist paranoia and censorship in the trials of one man trying dangerously to write about history. And it's one that you want to see succeed, dramatizing as it does the incredible events culminating in the play as it now stands...
...difficulties of the fictionalized writer Sergei Leontevich Maksudov, played by Derek Smith, only hint at the real story behind Black Snow. Robert Scanlan, the ART's literary director, has explicated the fascinating history of this play. Black Snow began as White Guard, a war novel Bulgakov wrote after serving for the defeated White Guard during the Russian Civil War. Censors stopped the serialized publication of the novel in 1925, but the Moscow Art Theatre defiantly decided to stage the novel as a play titled The Day of the Turbins. Bulgakov was consequently subjected to a decade of persecution under Stalinist...
...novel entitled The Diary of a Dead Man satirizing the experience of adapting The White Guard for the Moscow Art Theatre. The text resurfaced in 1965 and had its first Russian publication under the title A Theatrical Novel. The publication of an English translation under the title Black Snow ensued in 1967, followed ultimately by Keith Dewhurst's adaptation of the English novel into this play. The premiere production of a play that's only a year old but has been germinating for 60 years should and does feel momentous...
...production values of Black Snow scream for attention. The stark stage design by Antony McDonald and lighting design by Scott Zielinski are stunning in combination, but unlike other grand gestures like the sets for When We Dead Awaken and Misalliance, these sets aren't particularly illuminating of the themes or larger symbols at work in the play. The conversion of the ART stage into backstage at the Moscow Art Theatre is the one meaningfully creative exception...
...Black Snow, in its plot, form and characters, feels highly disjunctive, and very unfinished. Perhaps it should, since Bulgakov left the novel unfinished and Dewhurst only frames, but does not finish or conclude, the story. For all its moments of brilliance, and for all the justifiable explanations of its weaknesses, Black Snow catches the eye, but it ultimately fails to engage our imaginative sympathies...