Word: vanya
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe, the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater. Says Konstantin Raikin, artistic director of the Satirikon Theater, where the Russian-language debut of Jean Genet's psychosexual drama The Maids...
...finest revival on any London stage is an Uncle Vanya (translated by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore) that does justice to both Chekhov's hearty humor and his compassionate sadness at the waste of frustrated lives. It perceives the play's dominant tone not as lethargy but as furious, tragically misdirected energy. As Vanya, Michael Gambon demonstrates anew why he has come to be regarded as perhaps Britain's foremost stage actor. Alternately raging and lapsing into bathos, bubbling with kindness as he worsens the lives of those he most means to help, he embodies the tragedy...
Smith, whose mother appeared in the American Repertory Theater's production of Uncle Vanya, fell from the stairway to a concrete basement floor during a film-screening of the play last month. The wide staircase railing, which has alarmed employees at the center since it was built in 1963 and was noted as a hazard by a state building inspector in 1985, featured wide gaps between its horizontal bars that allowed the small child to slip through...
...slapstick send-up of British sex comedy, and Benefactors, a regretful recollection of the relations between two young professional couples. Wild Honey marries the wry and the rowdy strains in Frayn's writing and at the same time prefigures Chekhov's later plays, notably The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull. The joys this collaboration offers, however, are as much visceral as literary. In chronicling the tomfoolery of a village intellectual, half charmer, half malcontent, Wild Honey provides nonstop bawdy laughter followed by a silencing leap into the abyss...
...sympathy. Unlike the lives and works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, subjects of other Henri Troyat biographies, Chekhov's belong to the 20th century, an age of fretful spirits and melancholy skepticism. These impulses guide his hundreds of stories, his theatrical masterpieces (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard) and especially his letters. "You ask me what life is," he wrote his wife shortly before dying of tuberculosis in 1904. "That's like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot, and there's nothing more to know...