Brantley, Ben. "Thwarted Souls' Broken Wings." The New York Times 3 Oct. 2008. The
New York Times. 3 Oct. 2008. 23 Oct. 2008
• “Chekhov’s characters are, they are all cut from the same nubbly cloth of exasperated loneliness and misfired intentions.
• “ ’The Seagull’ classically includes the angry reflections of Konstantin on the “need for new forms” and the inadequacy of conventional theatre and fiction. Here that sense of inadequacy is translated into every word uttered.”
• “Mr. Crook’s palpably intelligent, fiery-eyed Konstantin doesn’t collapse into fatal sadness; he self-combusts from stymied passion.”
• “Mrs. Mulligan…captures the raw hunger within Nina’s ambition, the ravening vitality as well as the vulnerability…There’s a reason that the mother-fixated Konstantin falls in love with her.”
Brantley, Ben. "Theatre Review; Streep Meets Chekhov, Up in Central Park." The New
York Times 13 Aug. 2001. The New York Times. 13 Aug. 2001. 23 Oct. 2008
• “Few playwrights demand greater instinctive harmony within an ensemble than Chekhov does. Granted, his characters are often so hermetically self-involved that they don’t even listen to one another. But it is essential that we believe they all breathe the same befogged air.”
• “…there are Arkadina’s son, Konstantin (Mr. Hoffman), an artistic firebrand whose greatest talent is for self-sabotage, and the provincial girl he loves, Nina…”
• “Mr. Hoffman’s Konstantin is closer to third-generation Actors Studio. This immensely gifted performer…gives off real emotional ferocity and sorrow. But he’s still all feelings in search of a concretely defined character.”
Murray, Matthew. "Broadway Reviews: The Seagull." Talkin' Broadway. 2 Oct. 2008. 23
Oct. 2008
• (“Mackezie Crook, every bit the ‘petty bourgeois from Kiev’ Konstantin sees himself): His ongoing quest for ‘new forms’ seems more futile than ever opposite a mother who never convincingly embodies the old way he’s rebelling against.”
• “Such twisting also gives Konstantin and Nina’s interactions an intriguing undercurrent that echoes Freudian ideas about boys wanting to marry their mothers.”
• “The saddest and scariest thing about these people is that when they’re about to walk to their doom, they’re doing it with their eyes wide open. They’ve seen firsthand the boundaries between truth and fiction, even as they blur them themselves, and are forsaking those lessons, probably to their own peril.”
Toussaint, David. "The Seagull." Edge Boston. 7 Oct. 2008. 23 Oct. 2008
• “ ‘The Seagull’ relies heavily on two themes, the most prominent being unrequited love…More enticing, and timely, are the concepts of talent and celebrity, as Nina dreams of achieving both, Konstantin fatefully struggles to achieve the former, and Trigorin merely laments possessing both in his indulgent grasp.”
• “[Crook is] ill-suited for the role, and lacks the emotional wallop needed to make the ending kill the audience in similar fashion as these poor birds are shot down.”
• “What this production fails to achieve is a true sense of comedy amid the madness.”
Sommer, Elyse. "A Curtain Up Review: The Seagull." Curtain Up. Oct. 2008. 23 Oct.
2008
• “As her son loves her despite her vanity and stingy treatment of him, so [Arkadina] persuades us that she simply can’t help herself.”
• “Mackenzie Crook is the most soulful, touching Konstantin I’ve ever seen.”
Gutman, Les. "A Curtain Up Review: The Seagull." Curtain Up. Aug. 2001. 23 Oct. 2008
• “Hoffman’s Konstantin is a revelation. While we are accustomed to seeing a broad arc in this character’s deterioration, here the anxiety that is his undoing is manifest from the outset. There is a grief in Hoffman’s voice that represents one of the production’s most compelling features, made all the more poignant when it is interrupted by the vision of an unfulfilled son grasping onto and reverting to the sorts of childhood senses he still craves so clearly. The scene in which he asks his mother to change the bandage on his self-inflicted wound, her stab at motherliness and the subsequent deterioration of all of the attendant hopefulness is glorious.”
Scott, Virginia. "Life in Art: A Reading of "The Seagull"" Educational Theatre Journal
30 (1978): 357-67.
• “Stanislavsky clearly found the attitude toward art exemplified by Treplev to be admirable and worthy of support…Treplev speaks Stanislavsky’s language. The problem is that he does not necessarily speak Chekhov’s,” (357).
• “Only two options appear to be open to [Treplev, Nina, and Masha]: they must successfully adopt some adult profession or role, or they must accept their perpetual nonentity,” (358).
• “While the two women seek identity, Treplev is perilously close to having achieved nonentity, the culminating insult in the barrage which his mother fires at him in Act III,” (362).
• “Chekhov wrote in his notebook: ‘Treplev has no fixed goals and that’s what destroyed him. Talent destroyed him,’ “ (362).
• “In Act IV we are first surprised and pleased to discover that Treplev has become a published writer and then astonished to find that he is attempting to write in the manner of Trigorin,” (363).
Jones, W. Gareth. "Chekhov's Undercurrent of Time." The Modern Language Review 64
(1969): 111-21.
• “Treplev’s decadent play—and Chekhov must have been aware of the irony—is replete with those images and their associations with which Chekhov had for a decade been setting the mood of such stories as Happiness, Lights, New Dacha, and From a Casebook,” (119).
Lahr, John. "Pinter and Chekhov: The Bond of Naturalism." The Drama Review: TDR 13
(1968): 137-45.
• “The play within the play is the embodiment of the romantic Egotistical Sublime—a stillborn creation if there ever was one. Treplev demands an organic, natural background for something coldly intellectual…The setting is perfect for Teplev’s theme of cosmic death and rebirth. He will create a new Eden, with its animal delights and verdant profusion transposed from the external world into his own mind,” (139).
I think the next step for my research is to delve into Chekhov’s life as a writer, his ups and downs, and his experiences. The quote that compares Konstantin’s play to some of Chekhov’s short stories is especially intriguing. What contradicts this notion is what Chekhov himself said about Konstantin as someone with no goals whose talent destroys him. I think the character of Konstantin may be quite personal for Chekhov and I want to go deeper here.
--Alborz
No comments:
Post a Comment