Word: turgenev
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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...play is the 20th by George F. Walker, one of Canada's leading writers yet largely unknown in the U.S. -- although his Beautiful City, part of a trilogy touching on the same family, has just finished a run in Chicago, and Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, had a splendid production starring Tom Hulce at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in 1988. Walker's work certainly travels. Although Escape was originally set in Toronto, Lewis' staging makes it feel entirely American, from the opening moment, when a battered TV onstage starts blaring The Donna Reed Show...
Maybe so. But 17 years ago, in a talk with TIME, he used almost exactly the same words. And so one is left with the noble, and slightly poignant, image of a restless, ambitious, complex man trying and trying for simplicity. "There's a line in Turgenev," he says, "in Virgin Soil, that absolutely haunts me. It's a suicide note, and the entire note is, 'I could not simplify myself.' What an arrow through the heart...