Word: vershinin
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...seeking some point or purpose in their lives. Olga (Rosemary Harris) idealistically teaches school but dreams of a home and family. Miserable in her marriage to a pedantic schoolmaster (Rex Robbins), Masha (Ellen Burstyn) stumbles into a hopeless, heart-wrenching affair with the garrison's Lieut. Colonel Vershinin (Denholm Elliott). The youngest sister, Irina (Tovah Feldshuh), seeks to be ennobled by the "dignity of work" in the local telegraph office...
Despite its superb ensemble work, the British National company has been unable to conceal during this Los Angeles run that it has one actress on its roster with the special authority of a star, Maggie Smith. As Masha, flinging herself into the brief, doomed adulterous affair with Colonel Vershinin (Robert Stephens), she is the incandescent epitome of all women in love. Here is a Hedda Gabler of a Russian provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with...
Nancy Cox (Olga), Susan Yakutis (Masha), Martin Andrucki (Vershinin), Deborah Holzel (Natasha), Daniel Seltzer (Doctor), Paul Shutt (Kulygin), and practically everyone else-all let their souls pour over the auditorium from time to time if not all the time. Lori Heineman as Irina and Andre Bishop as Andrei go even further than that, opening themselves up to let us see their entire nervous systems almost every second they are on stage. No matter how self-enclosed you are upon arrival at the Loeb during the next two weeks, you simply will not be able to pass up Heineman and Bishop...
...sisters. Miss Reid has no particular trouble conveying the blunt, even coarse speech of Masha, but she has not sufficiently plumbed the poetic sensitivity that lies beneath. It is not a bad performance; it just leaves a great deal yet to be explored. The problem of Masha's and Vershinin's drum-roll exchanges ("Tram-tam-tam ... tra-ra-ra"), the shortest mutual love scene ever written for the stage, has been effectively solved by substituting complementary phrases from the aria "All men should once with love grow tender" in Act II of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin...
Michael McGuire, with handlebar moustache, goatee, and a chest full of medals, cuts a handsome and dashing figure as the garrulous, fortyish battery commander Vershinin, who saddled with an impossible wife, obtains Masha's love in one of the play's several amorous triangles. He is just fine as he repeats his desire for a glass of tea, and finally gives up, saying, "Well, if we can't have any tea, lets philosophize...