Word: summerfolk
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...Washington's Kennedy Center last June, his appointment was greeted with both shock and greedy anticipation. This was, after all, the Harvard prodigy who had made his name with audacious updatings of Shakespeare, transplanted Handel's opera Orlando to Cape Canaveral and spiced up Maxim Gorky's 1904 play Summerfolk with songs by George Gershwin. Yet his first offering at Kennedy Center, a production of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I directed by Timothy Mayer, was shocking only in its conventionality. So acute was the disappointment of critics and audiences that Sellars closed the play three weeks early...
...founder of Socialist realism, and the Gershwin brothers of Broadway and Hollywood have in common? That was the intriguing question when Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater announced that Director Peter Sellars, the theater world's newest Wunderkind, would make a musical out of Gorky's long, semipolemical play Summerfolk by adding Gershwin songs. After last week's opening of the hybrid, the answer is, alas, all too apparent: Gorky and Gershwin have nothing in common except Sellars himself...
Written in 1904, Summerfolk was prescient about the 1905 revolution in Russia, which was a dress rehearsal for the cataclysm that brought the Bolsheviks to power twelve years later. Reflecting the boredom and despair of the Russian middle class, it is Gorky's most Chekhovian work. It follows, without an obvious plot, the lives and loves of the summer folk who spend their vacations, as always, in cottages in the woods. Sellars, 26, who came to national attention with a production of The Inspector General at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard while he was still an undergraduate there...
...Company is one of the glories of the English-speaking stage. It is a touchstone troupe whose productions linger in the mind as definitive. In its brief two-month stay at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the R.S.C. is presenting three works, a little-known Maxim Gorky play called Summerfolk, a shortened version of King Lear, and an infrequently performed Shakespeare play, Love's Labor's Lost. Here is proof, once again, of the company's complete artistic mastery...
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