Word: three
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...With his Three Sisters. Leland Moss takes some very large first steps (particularly considering he has had two months, not seven years, with his actors) toward achieving Grotowski's total "Poor Theatre...
...apologies to music director John Miner and his orchestra. While a polysyllabic evaluation of their performance is quite beyond me, I was able to notice that tempos seemed quite spirited, the audience seemed quite appreciative, and the female timpanist was quite lovely. Dic Fledermans (in English) runs over three hours, what with everyone singing away instead of just saving things outright but no one-singers, musicians, or audience-appears to tire along...
...explain all this because it relates strongly to my reaction to The Three Sisters , which opened on the Loeb mainstage Thursday night. As I entered the theatre, I was just not in any condition to function as a journalist: I was physically exhausted and emotionally pre-occupied. In this context, maybe you can understand how remarkable it is to me that Leland Moss's production of the Chekhov play not only kept me awake for its entire three-and a-quarter hour duration-but sometimes even succeeded in making me forget everything else except what the actors on stage were...
...actors who subscribe to Stanislavski's "method." a revolutionary approach to acting which developed around Chekhov's plays in turn-of-the-century Russia. Method actors have trained us to think of Chekhov plays as having quiet, detailed surfaces under which internalized explosions almost imperceptively crupt. In Moss's Three Sisters, this now-standard approach to the playwright is turned inside out (and must be, since Grotowski's views on acting are in practice, if not purpose, almost diametrically opposed to Stanislavski...
...This Three Sisters. then, raises the explosions to the surface. The eruptions exist above the script. They happen when the actors feel they should happen, regardless of what is actually being said. While this can and does happen in a conventional Chek-hov production, the difference is that in this production the explosions are never suppressed. We not only feel them but see them. Characters (actors) almost violently grab for each other when they feel love. They growl at each other when they feel hate. They dance and spin when they are happy. The power of the production, ideally, operates...