Word: vanya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Uncle Vanya (by Anton Chekhov) is off-Broadway's latest good deed. This time though the playhouse is a tiny one on the lower East Side, the players include Cinemactor Franchot Tone and other Broadway names. Directing Vanya, as he earlier did The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, David Ross has scrupulously put Chekhov's intentions first: if he sometimes falters with so trickily delicate a play, he oftener succeeds. Chekhov's provincial tale of pathetically muffed chances and comically muddled lives, of a pompous fool for whom better people have toiled and a shallow woman...
...avoiding the sentimentalized Chekhov of sighs and samovars, this Vanya now and then overplays the comic side. But thanks to some good performances, including Actor Tone's, and to Stark Young's sensitive translation, it reveals why Chekhov-type playwrights are still panting to catch up with the master...
Chekhov put himself through medical school, but he was a doctor only by chance and a writing man out of inner necessity. Before he was 30 he had churned out some 400 stories, sketches and one-act plays, and the first version of Uncle Vanya. He believed that a writer had to be an irritated oyster before he would produce any pearls: "He who doesn't desire anything, doesn't hope for anything and isn't afraid of anything cannot be an artist." Damning his own as a literary generation of "lemonade" dispensers, Chekhov makes a telling...
...Gull is not yet fully Chekhovian, not of the quality of Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. Already-and quite wonderfully in places-it has Chekhov's fragrance, incisiveness, poignancy; It has dialogue that, if seemingly scrappy and elliptical, constitutes a marvelous sort of notation. Already, Chekhov can convey the apartness and aloneness of people; already, too, he can be about equally compassionate and merciless, not so much acquitting his characters as pardoning them...
...have been getting a drama diet with a loftier intellectual content than that of Broadway. The high-vitamin source is Masterpiece Playhouse (Sun. 9 p.m., NBC-TV), which began its experimental run with Ibsen's suicidal Hedda Gabler and ends it this month with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. This week, for its sixth performance, Masterpiece staged a fast-paced, absorbing performance of Shakespeare's Othello...