Word: vershinin
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...with a clean face and street-clothes is more startling than any make-up and costume. In elevators and dining halls, he is greeted by stares of hazy recognition and far-off voices muttering, "Aren't you...?" The sentence never ends with "John Bellucci"--it ends with names like Vershinin (from a Peter Sellars production of "The Three Sisters"), Helena Basket (the lead in the 1980 Hasty Pudding show, "A Little Knife Music"), and most recently, Mac the Knife, from last month's "Threepenny Opera...
...suitors who flock about the sisters are also well-played. John Bellucci masterfully plays Vershinin, the philosophizing soldier with whom Masha falls in love. Bellucci works his rich and versatile voice like a musical instrument, retaining extraordinary control of volume, diction and timing in long, technically taxing monologues. He meticulously defines his character by pacing constantly around the stage in repeated circles that parallel his sermons...
More subtly, however, Kogan's tour de force helps to uncover the structure of Chekhov's play, composed in part of a series of ceaseless competing refrains of leitmotifs. Irina sighs her frustrated desire to go to Moscow, Vershinin "philosophizes" and bewails his marital misfortunes, and Natasha inanely shrieks her mother love--all accompanied by recurring Chopin preludes...
Cornuelle's spare acting aptly characterizes Masha, the bored middle sister tied to a pompous posturing schoolmaster husband. She rigidly controls her movements, gestures and voice, yet manages to convey Masha's emotional conflict, especially her moving confession of love for Vershinin...
...theater and who possess talents of the highest distinction. Rosemary Harris could mesmerize an audience by reciting the multiplication table. Tovah Feldshuh is a steel butterfly, a young actress of electrifying presence and promise. As Masha, Ellen Burstyn lacks some consuming sensual hunger, but her parting embrace with Vershinin is a silent, agonized howl of lost love...