Word: sellars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bedbug, a satire of Party bureaycracy, describes the ordeal of a petty official who is frozen in an accident on his wedding day in 1929 and is defrosted in the Socialist world-state in 1979. This plot is barely intelligible in Peter Sellar's frenzied production, however. Mayakovsky's satire works mostly through verse, parody and puns--Sellars in effect obliterates all verbal content in frantic pursuit of visual pyrotechnics. Admittedly, The Bedbug demands to be staged as spectacle, but Mayakovsky also valued his words. Sellars' production reduces them to high-speed spurts of incomprehensibility...
...Director Sellars and set designer Gary Lovesky have created a visually breathtaking production--they dragged 30 live birch trees from the Harvard Forest and ringed them around the spare, vast, white-draped stage. Huge birches and the bare exposed Loeb stage dwarf the actors and frame Sellar's epic interpretation. The Loeb production emphasizes the tableaux over the characters, but it does so with a brilliance in staging that brings out Chekhov's geometry and starkly, pictorially dramatizes the characters' relationship to each other. The operatic staging also serves to divorce the characters from the world outside the Prozorov mansion...