-
Platonov
Penned at great length when the writer was just 18, Chekhov’s Platonov (never formally titled) was rejected by the actress for which it was written and not produced or published in the author’s lifetime. Yet it prefigures the themes and characters of the later plays, a poetic amalgam of fumbled suicides, frustrated loves, threatened estates,…
-
The Cherry Orchard
Things are ironically prominent in the THE CHERRY ORCHARD brought by the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Most of the action happens on a pile of household possessions, much of it covered in white sheets, at audience level, in front of a stage blocked, most of the time,…
-
Thérèse Raquin
The whites, greys and blacks of the Roundabout’s THÉRÈSE RAQUIN are so muted that, when a brown-hued backdrop appears, it is like a flash of color, and so, later on, is a sparse scattering of autumn leaves, dropped and faded. The interiors, when they appear, are dim and woody, the windows opening, at best, on…
-
Amour
The critic Stanley Kauffmann once listed what he saw as the key differences between theatre and film. His most interesting and yet least developed point was that what he calls “the effects of death” are at their most powerful on film. He meant that, since the screen actor’s work, in all of its lifelike detail,…
-
Donka
DONKA: A LETTER TO CHEKHOV is penned and posted in the language of circus. Jugglers, clowns, aerialists, and acrobats are its author. In their writing of it, the director Daniele Finzi Pasca tells us in the program, they “give shape to the silences” in Chekhov’s notes, diaries, and letters. This is not, in other words,…
-
The Three Sisters
There were numerous Russian speakers in the audience for THE THREE SISTERS on Friday night at BAM, and a comment I heard on the way out was that people were laughing in the wrong places because the supertitles were not well synchronized with the dialogue. This comment intersected in my mind with another I had…
-
La Traviata
Of all the performing arts, is any more obviously equipped to assert the largeness of human emotions in the face of eternity and infinite space than opera? The isolated instance of joy or pain breaks the confines of the human frame and demands the attention of the cosmos, or at least of anyone within hearing…
-
Anton Chekhov’s The Duel
ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE DUEL captures much of the strange poetry of diffidence and indirection that makes Chekhov a great dramatist and his comic dramas so difficult to perform. Indeed, one of the film’s achievements is to reveal the extent to which the author’s prose fiction, upon which it is based, possesses so many of the…
-
Creditors • Uncle Vanya
It comes as no surprise that Alan Rickman, a mordantly arresting screen actor, would have an affinity for Strindberg, and he has directed CREDITORS with terrifying deftness. Less performed than Miss Julie, The Stronger or Dance of Death, less studied than The Father, CREDITORS, like some overlooked stepchild, has always begged the recognition that it…
-
Lincoln Center Festival
Two from this year’s LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL: I saw Les Éphémères in two parts on Saturday and Sunday at Park Avenue Armory. There’s a lot I could write about it (of the French genius for extracting poetry from the quotidian, of the remarkable way in which the production cinematizes the stage, of the festival atmosphere…