Word: staging
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Sellars and set designer Gary Lovesky have created a visually breathtaking production--they dragged 30 live birch trees from the Harvard Forest and ringed them around the spare, vast, white-draped stage. Huge birches and the bare exposed Loeb stage dwarf the actors and frame Sellar's epic interpretation. The Loeb production emphasizes the tableaux over the characters, but it does so with a brilliance in staging that brings out Chekhov's geometry and starkly, pictorially dramatizes the characters' relationship to each other. The operatic staging also serves to divorce the characters from the world outside the Prozorov mansion...
...Cornuelle (Masha) and Anne Clark (Irina) turn in carefully sustained and sensitive performances as the three sisters whose emotional foibles and frustrations are the play's heart. Clark as the youngest sister deftly moves from lighthearted young girl to pensive despairing woman. In one scene she darts across the stage, childishly reveling in the attention she receives; in the next, she stonily recalls her former happiness and despairs of finding fulfillment in work or love. Clark uses a completely different tone, inflection, gestures and stage movement to differentiate the younger and older Irina...
That one exception is David Michael Berti as Sir Eglamour, the bit part knight who helps Silvia escape in Act V. He leaps on stage wearing silver boots, a white cape, silver leggings and a white tunic with a heraldic device on the front. Shazzam! It's Disco Superman! The house howled at every word. Berti played it to the hilt, flourishing his cape and pouncing about the stage like Batman, delivering his lines with Marvel Comics bravado. As comedy this bogus touch was great, but as Shakespeare it seemed rather strained and out of sorts with the prevailing traditionalism...
Peter Ginna's appearance as an eccentric, macaroon-eating detective Julian Christoforou in Eye immediately commands attention. He slinks around the stage, shoes untied, hair greasy and unkempt, slurping yogurt. His initial energy never wanes, and his loony, yet contemplative characterization provides the best humor of the evening...
Kaplan and Ginna exploit the contrast between their characters for the greatest comic and dramatic effects, creating an interesting and compelling stage relationship. Ginna, however, sometimes rushes through his lines...