Word: yepikhodov
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...shoots himself in The Cherry Orchard, though at one point a clerk trips into the wings with a revolver. The traditional offstage commotion is heard a few moments later but no one rushes in to report that Semyon Panteleevich Yepikhodov has blown his brains out. Instead a character surmises that some bucket has dropped in some well, the play goes on and Yepikhodov comes back to swallow nails in the fourth...
Between Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play and first single-shot suicide, and Yepikhodov's unfulfilled promise to "shoot myself so to speak" in Chekhov's last play, something has obviously happened. Laurence Senelick, directing his own translation of Cherry Orchard, pays proper attention to the writer's final, bitter playfulness by mouthing a production that breaks through the somber fragilitv of traditional Chekhovian staging to a vital if slightly fuzzy theatricality...
...gentry speak standard Chekhov, Victorian dialect. The upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Ken Tigar), sweet, young Anya (Carolyn Firth) and occasional flunkeys speak a slangy, colloquial tongue, fresh and awkward; while a pod of surrounding actors, led by the shlemielesque "perennial student" Trofimov (Lloyd Schwartz), with his utopian panegyrics discoursed of Yepikhodov, talk a well-tuned language of parody and farce. None of the specific lines of the translation is, as they say, memorable--Senelick's staging eye works better than his ear--but they are smooth and serviceable...
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