Word: chekhovian
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Making a connection of that kind is an important service to Henley. Though her territory looks superficially like the contemporary American South, it is really a country of the mind: one of Tennessee Williams' provinces that has surrendered to a Chekhovian raiding party, perhaps. Her strength is a wild anecdotal inventiveness, but her people, lost in the ramshackle dreams and tumble-down ambitions with which she in vests them, often seem to be metaphors waywardly adrift. They are blown this way and that by the gales of laughter they provoke, and they frequently fail to find a solid connection...
Written in 1904, Summerfolk was prescient about the 1905 revolution in Russia, which was a dress rehearsal for the cataclysm that brought the Bolsheviks to power twelve years later. Reflecting the boredom and despair of the Russian middle class, it is Gorky's most Chekhovian work. It follows, without an obvious plot, the lives and loves of the summer folk who spend their vacations, as always, in cottages in the woods. Sellars, 26, who came to national attention with a production of The Inspector General at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard while he was still an undergraduate there...
...airy greenhouse of a set, All's Well teems with musical-comedy bustle: dashing cadets in aviator goggles, marching bands and sultry chanteuses, and a Florence railway station full of Nunn's beloved smoke effects. But there is gravity here as well as buoyancy. A mood of Chekhovian wistfulness is set at the start with the valse triste of a young couple fated to part, and Nunn spends the next 31¼ hours indicating that Bertram and Helena may never be suited to each other, even at the end. Bertram has surrendered, but with noblesse oblige; Helena...
...combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion - any passion-just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable...
After Museum and The Art of Dining, Tina Howe continues to learn, and to grow as a playwright. In Painting Churches, at off-Broadway's Second Stage theater, the tone, if not the maturity, is distinctly Chekhovian. Howe captures the same edgy surface of false hilarity, the same unutterable sadness beneath it, and the indomitable valor beneath both...