Word: chekhov
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...that, properly directed, the amplifier can restore the theater: "The Loeb seats 550-plus. It's not that good acoustically, and the actors have to project like crazy. Do you know what happens to acting when it's projected?" It Loses truth. It hurts when you start to project Chekhov to a thousand-seat theater. I wanted something even more intimate than Chekhov, yet I wanted something gigantic too...I try to combine the radio-film soundtrack technique with realistic Brechtian staging, bridged by an element of cinematic imagery...
...GULL by Anton Chekhov...
...Chekhov's insistence that his plays were funny simply proves that the best of dramatists may be the worst of guides. The mainsprings of The Sea Gull's plot hardly elicit laughter. The jaded Trigorin (Christopher Walken), a fashionable author of about 35, is sensually drawn to Nina (Kathryn Bowling), an innocent 18-year-old. Watching Nina cradle a freshly killed sea gull, Trigorin jots down a writer's note: "An idea for a short story. A young girl has lived in a house on the shore of a lake since childhood, a young girl like...
...There is humor in Chekhov, but it lights the interstices of his work, not the core. At the center is pain-of unrequited love, of oppressive boredom, of raw edgy nerves, of desolating aloneness...
Under the telling direction of Andrei Serban, the revival at Manhattan's Public Theater embraces all these aspects of Chekhov in part or in whole. The cast is admirable, and Serban's painterly eye groups them in configurations that enhance Jean-Claude van Itallie's faithful and felicitous adaptation of the text. Best of all, this production captures the ruminative pauses in Chekhov when people seem to be listening to faint, melancholy music borne across still, nocturnal waters...