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Chekhov and Ibsen are the great dramatists of the middle classes, and of the two, Chekhov would seem to be the truer to his characters. His plays are made of the frustrations, losses and petty tragedies of unimaginative, often foolish members of the rural gentry, professional men and intellectuals. And if Chekhov’s work is about anything, it is about the insignificance of such people.Yet there is a strange kind of poetry that runs allthrough the plays; and even the poorest production will bring it out. It does not exist in the language of the speeches themselves but in the way scenes are structured. Chekhov's charactersnever speak to each other. Each is always engaged in a monologue no one but he can hear. Serious conversations, when they occur at all, begin in the middle and are interrupted or dissipate in reverie. The plays are not held together by plot or the confrontations of characters but by the polyphonic representations of moods.It is this musicality that makes Chekhov so desperately difficult to perform. One simply cannot hope to get by with one or two good actors in the key roles. Not only most every part be played well; it must be made consonant with the work of every other actor.Often one’s sense of a character depends not onlyon how he is portrayed, but on how he is received; whether he is answered, believed, taken seriously. And as in other poetic drama, the way a character is played may hang on the characterizations of other actors. Chekhov’s plays are, in short, the sort of thing that absolutely must be performed repertory by experienced people who can work with each other and who are at least as committed to the enterprise as to self-ad-vancement.To get down to business, ’’The Cherry Orchard” at the Harper Theatre can be called only mildly successful. And that is a sign not only of failures in direction and acting but of thelamentable fact that Second City has only barely got the beginnings of a troop of decent actors and nothing of the spirit of a repertory company.Lybov Andreyevna and her brother, Leonid, around whom the play centers, are owners of a fine old cherry orchard which has belonged to their family for generations. Old-fashioned and impractical, they have run so far into debt that they cannot pay off a mortgage on the orchard and it is sold to Yermolai Lopakhin, a merchant who was born a serf in the household. At the end of the play, Lybov and her family leave house and past behind as Lopakhin begins to cut down the orchard to build summer cottages.Paul Sills, the director, has chosen to underscore the comedy in producing this, the last of Chekhov’s plays. All in all, I think, it was a right and good decision. But comedy is gotten at the price of a good deal of rather self-indulgent overacting.There was bewildering tendency for even rather good actors to make hugerapid often violent gestures rather as though they were Italian, or in the Yiddish theatre. Bewildering, largely because speaking itself was undervalued. Lines were raced through, and spoken in barely audible monotones by several actors. WarrenLeming, as Trofimov, the student, was particularly guilty in this respect, and threw away two very nice scenes in the second act.Other actors and actresses had an unfortunate tendency to slip, with great irregularity, into a generalized Central European accent that could have served for anything from Norwegian to Transylvanian. There is no possible reason for trying to make Chekhov ethnic, and why a director would allow a cast to bother with that sort of characterization is beyond imagining.Movement on the stage also showed lack of direction. I suspect that Sills does(confd on page 9)
Newspaper Details
Hyde Park Herald
Hyde Park, Illinois, US
Wed, Dec 06, 1967
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Loyola U.
IL, USA 30 Mar 2020
Other Publications Near Hyde Park, Illinois
Hyde Park Herald
