Lady with (not really) a Lapdog
Sep. 28th, 2003 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firstfrostSaw Lady with a Lapdog at the ART tonight (a wedding present of season tickets! Woo!). I do plan to keep track to see what percentage of the season involves Lying On The Stage; so far it's one for one.
I've been trying to think how to describe it. Not "a play by Chekhov" - more like "a short story by Chekhov, competitively narrated by its characters." I very much liked the actors, especially the two principals - both verbally and physically very interesting. The female lead sounded Russian to me, which I eventually decided meant "Sounded like Susan Ivanova", which is probably not a perfect reference for sounding Russian (tone, not accent, and don't bother telling me Claudia Christian isn't Russian, I'm assuming she's an actor too...). The set was interesting (and had the ART penchant for Very Large Pieces of Cloth), and included a lot of sand to scuff about.
The thing that was most lost on me was the use of exponentially Shatnerian pauses. I had no idea how much I depend on normal conversational phrasing to keep an entire sentence in my head. I would just have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time the end rolled around.
"The train......... departed.... quickly... its lights....... vanishing."
Too many for me. :)
I've been trying to think how to describe it. Not "a play by Chekhov" - more like "a short story by Chekhov, competitively narrated by its characters." I very much liked the actors, especially the two principals - both verbally and physically very interesting. The female lead sounded Russian to me, which I eventually decided meant "Sounded like Susan Ivanova", which is probably not a perfect reference for sounding Russian (tone, not accent, and don't bother telling me Claudia Christian isn't Russian, I'm assuming she's an actor too...). The set was interesting (and had the ART penchant for Very Large Pieces of Cloth), and included a lot of sand to scuff about.
The thing that was most lost on me was the use of exponentially Shatnerian pauses. I had no idea how much I depend on normal conversational phrasing to keep an entire sentence in my head. I would just have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time the end rolled around.
"The train......... departed.... quickly... its lights....... vanishing."
Too many for me. :)
