Word: chekhovian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...action, and there is virtually none, for this is a Chekhovian mood piece, takes place in a mental home. There are no acute aberrations. The place is no nuttier than the world, or life. Richardson and Gielgud are two men who stand on the crumbling threshold of old age, all passion spent, memories distant but present, vivid yet garbled. For them, every dawn is dusk, and every dusk is darkened with the knowledge of imminent death...
...Berger (Joan Lorring), an abrasively dislikable Momma Portnoy. Her ineffectual husband Myron (Salem Ludwig) sums up a lifetime of quiet desperation when he tells his son, "Don't think life's easy with Momma." Like many another line in the play, it lingers in the air with Chekhovian sadness, like a note struck on an unseen piano. Even though Myron is U.S.-born, he is a prototype of the immigrant father who was held in contempt if he failed economically, and derided as a philistine if he succeeded, often by the son whom he had slaved to educate...
...loath to put a name on it. It is definitely not the Chekhovian motivational mode. and it's not the special bodily technique of the Serpent. In Endgame. the route we took certainly involved motivational relationship and interaction. The product as one sees it is involved with theatricality by which I mean the consciousness of the presence of the audience...
...second offering of its premiere engagement in Los Angeles, the British National Theater performs with its usual eclat while somewhat scanting the poetic mood music of the play. Chekhov is not wholly Chekhovian without a certain hauntingly sad fragility, like a Chopin nocturne heard by moonlight. In the manner of his closest U.S. counterpart, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov is a poet of bruised hearts and defeated hopes, a laureate of losers...
...that Chekhov wrote his play for Stanislavskian actors. The Three Sisters is (and this is a classi-fication, not a judgment) a "rich" play. While the work has explosions underneath much of its surface, some of the play is just surface. For the purposes of a "poor" theatre, the Chekhovian detail that is not sitting on top of emotional volcanoes is useless. No doubt Moss will encourage his company to try new things every night, and certainly one thing he will try to do is cut out the "rich" parts of the script. After all, the goal is the climination...