Word: acted
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...accommodate themselves. Shohet has made Sonya, the most compassionate and heroic force in the play, a self-absorbed little bully, failing to realize that there is love in Sonya's reprimands or that her suffering goes way beyond her own unrequited love. Cornuelle doesn't help in the third-act confrontation, staging Sonya center stage, completely absorbed in her own sorrow, almost oblivious to the wrenching spectacle of her Uncle Vanya...
McCue is a passable Vanya, but he proves unwilling or incapable of ditching his distracting mannerisms. In the first two acts he consistently plays for laughs, a crotchety jokester or ludicrous lover, jerking his body back from the waist and vocalizing like a pompous burgermeister with an occasional British falsetto. This great and silly character--simple to the point of transparency--becomes so cluttered as to be almost impenetrable. The rest of his performance is sloppy but sometimes affecting. The first night I saw the show McCue hit some surprising notes of anguish in the third act...
Cornuelle successfully captures the characters' isolation, but at the expense of any ensemble feeling: just because the characters don't connect doesn't mean the actors can't play off each other. Thus, the third act upheaval doesn't build to anything, the actors standing around listlessly between histrionics. The storm, of course, is brought in by the arrival of Serebriakov and Elena, and foreshadows the emotional storm in the third act; but when the rain is abruptly turned off after the two depart it cheapens a very subtle metaphor. And I confess I don't really understand the point...
...Neil brothers protests to the contrary, the BusBoys do stand for a new freedom for popular music. Any band that dissembles creative barriers as forcefully, funnily and finally as the BusBoys is bound to act as a catalyst for all manner of musical cross-fertilization...
...clear window pane with two eyes, a nose, a mouth, hair, two ears and two eyebrows. A little of the environment is reflected through that pane, but the only way that I can really identify that pane is by the way that the eyes, nose, mouth and ears act. I feel sorry for those of you who feel the need to post derogatory, racist remarks and for those of you who feel the need to post equally derogatory racist rebuttals. I'll say a prayer, though, and keep trying to paint over those remarks...until they're erased...