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VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S “THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN”

Nabokov wrote THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN at 24

THE PLAY THAT SHOWS NABOKOV’S EARLY GENIUS

Vladimir Nabokov’s first major work, THE TRAGEDY OF MR. MORN was written in the winter of 1923-24 in Prague when Nabokov was twenty-four. After completing the play in January, he wrote in a letter he felt like a house just emptied of its grand piano. And what a grand piano it is, full of music and wonder.

Two years later he wrote Mary, the first of nine novels written in Russian. Other Russian novels include King, Queen, Knave (1928), The Luzhin Defense (1930), Glory (1932), Laughter in the Dark (1933), Despair (1934), Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and The Gift (1938).

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee again in 1940 when he was forced to leave France for the United States. In the U.S. he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He began writing novels in English with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1941. He followed up with Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), Ada (1969), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).

On the Modern Library list of best 100 novels written in English, Lolita is number four and Pale Fire is fifty-two. Vladimir and Vera Nabokov were married for over fifty years and they had one child, Dmitri. In 1961 the Nabokovs moved to Montreux, Switzerland where he lived until the end of his life in 1977.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) in a car window with pencil and note cards.

THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN is set in an imaginary country, part fairy-tale kingdom with an atmosphere like Shakespeare’s Verona or Venice, part post-revolutionary Russia. Before the action of the play begins, a mysterious and benevolent king has ruled anonymously, behind a black mask. Four years ago this king quelled a rebellion and has restored peace and prosperity to a troubled land. The leader of the revolution, Tremens, remains free though his friends “suffer in black exile” because the king views Tremens as a magnet for “the scattered needles, the revolutionary souls” who can be gathered up.

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 4

March 10, 2016 / think twice / 0 Comments

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

[This is the fourth part of a series. Please scroll down to read the first three installments.]

Source Materials/Subject

The relationship of The Soldiers and Mother Courage sheds interesting light on Brecht’s practice of creative borrowing. The sources and settings of the two plays are very different, but they converge through their insights into human behavior. In addition, their opening gambits establish a social dynamic that draws them together from contrasting origins.

The Soldiers is set in Flanders in the 1770s, over a three-year period in Lenz’s own time. Much of the soldier interaction in the play seems inspired by his uneasy affiliation with the Kleist brothers, especially in Strasbourg where Cleophe Fibich the goldsmith’s daughter lived as well. The publication of his semi-autobiographical Tagebuch in 1877 confirmed the author’s assertion that the Marie Wesener/Officer Desportes aspect of the play is based on a true incident in which Lenz played a part. ¹ After completing the play Lenz sent it to Johann Herder (1744-1803) with the statement “that it involved half my existence.”²In a follow-up letter, he wrote:

            It is in the strictest sense a true story, experienced and

            prophesized in the innermost recesses of my soul. But, as

            I hope, masked so that the original, who is no Herder, will

            never recognize himself in it.³

Another letter reveals that Lenz had written the play, documentary-style, as the events of the romantic intrigue were unfolding and didn’t wait for “the true story” to conclude. He had already finished The Soldiers and sent it to Herder when Cleophe Fibich (Marie) was still awaiting the return of her betrothed, Friedrich Georg von Kleist, (Desportes). Lenz wrote, “Whether he does so or deceives her is in the lap of the gods.”⁴ If he didn’t return, then Lenz comments that the play could not be published soon enough in order to ruin the man or force him to honor his pledge. If he did return, then Lenz fretted that the publication of the play would destroy Cleophe’s good name and happiness. He made attempts to conceal his authorship, suggesting the pseudonym “Steenkirk of Amsterdam” to his publisher. He even tried to convince Klinger to accept responsibility for writing it.⁵ As Lenz discovered, fidelity to nature had its downside.

Brecht, by contrast, set Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years War three centuries before his time, against a panorama of 17th century history. Another well-known drama of the same war is Schiller’s trilogy Wallenstein. Though Wallenstein may have influenced Brecht’s writing of Mother Courage, it is likely that, if anything, he was reacting against this German classic. Eric Bentley has written that Brecht at times seemed to think of himself as the Anti-Schiller, someone who opposed the depiction of the Thirty Years War in Wallenstein with his “antiheroic, anticlassical, antiromantic worm’s eye view” of the war in Mother Courage.⁶ Because of the choices Brecht and Schiller made regarding their chief protagonists—the first a canteen woman and the second a duke and commander in chief of the Imperial Forces—the plays diverge in all but the historical backdrop.

In the case of Mother Courage and Her Children not only is the heroine of “lowly origin,” so is almost all of the cast—with the exception of the General in Scene Two and Yvette’s ancient Colonel in Scene Three. Schiller’s play may have given Brecht the idea of segregating the lowly from the nobly born, rather than integrating characters from all classes through out the play, as in Shakespeare. The first section of the trilogy, Wallenstein’s Camp, involves commoners and soldiers on the war’s sidelines who do not appear in the second and third sections. The Piccolomini and Wallenstein’s Death detail the war politics of the nobility and the tragic demise of the title character. Relevant to the writing of Mother Courage, Wallenstein’s Camp features a canteen woman. In Scene Five, she is asked about the whereabouts of her husband.

CANTEEN WOMAN:

The villain! He played me a scoundrelly trick,

                        No words are too strong for the way he behaved,

                        He ran off with every penny I’d saved,

                        Left me with nothing but his brat!

BOY [comes running up to her]:

                        Mother, don’t talk of my dad like that!

FIRST TROOPER:

                        Another mouth for the Emperor to feed

                        If the army would keep alive, it must breed!⁷

This excerpt seems a shadowy prefiguration of Brecht’s play, specifically the opening scene when Courage accounts for the various missing fathers of her three children, while the Recruiter looks out for a war that has its own needs.

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, Part 3

March 8, 2016 / think twice / 0 Comments

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Dramatic Effect/ Spectator

Neither Lenz nor Brecht were as interested in advocating a counter-system to Aristotelian poetics as they were in diffusing class distinctions and building a national audience. In a July 1775 letter to Sophie von de le Roche, Lenz described his goal of bridging the gap between the classes as “the whole plan of my life, my existence, my comedy writing, even someday of my death.”¹ In the previous year in his lecture “On Götz von Berlichingen,” delivered to a literary society in Strasbourg, Lenz had prioritized weighing drama by its effect over adherence to rules. He condemned the stage of his day as overflowing with “nothing but masterpieces, which however, to be sure, are masterpieces only in the minds of their masters.”² Humorously stated, this was his aversion for dramatic art as closed form, as exposition with the nothing-left-unsaid that didn’t allow for a spectator’s lasting participation. “For let us adopt another way of judging plays, my brothers,” he argued in the Götz lecture, “let us for a change look at their consequences, at the overall effect they have.”³ This casual statement is at the heart of Lenz’s iconoclasm: not judging plays by their adherence to classical parameters, as laid out by Aristotle or the French neoclassicists who dominated the discussion of drama in 18^th century Europe, but by their ability to generate a spark of something new that the audience could carry out into the streets. Regarding the spectator effect, Lenz continued:

Therefore, cui bono? [for whose advantage?] What sort of effect do the products of all the thousand French geniuses have on our spirit, on our heart, on our whole existence? Heaven forbid I should be unjust. We take home with us a beautiful, delightful sweet feeling, as if we had downed a bottle of champagne—but that’s all. Sleep on it for a night and the whole thing’s wiped out again. . . .⁴

Though he denounces the theatre of feeling, judging emotionalism to be as transient as drinking champagne, he went on to ask for a theater of deeper resonances:

. . . .Where is the living impression, which afterwards mixes itself into attitudes, deeds, and actions, the Promethean spark that has stolen into our innermost soul so unnoticed that it fills our whole life with bliss, if we do not let it die away again by lying completely still.⁵

Lenz’s preoccupation with dramatic effect is expressed in his play The Soldiers itself. The fourth scene of Act I contains a lively and sexually frank coffeehouse debate between the army chaplain Eisenhardt and the Colonel (Count von Spannheim), Major Haudy, Officer Mary and others about the effects of attending the French theatre on the young military officers stationed in Armentières, Flanders. The chaplain has taken the position that the French theatre corrupts the intentions of the young officers toward the young women of the community. The debate grows heated after Haudy defends the theatre by saying that a single play, even “the worst sort of farce,” benefits not only officers but also the whole nation more than all the sermons the chaplain can preach in a lifetime.⁶ Eisenhardt responds by asking what, if anything, gentlemen might learn from the theater.

MARY: Oh, Lord do we always have to be learning something?

We enjoy ourselves, isn’t that enough?

EISENHARDT: Would to God that you did only enjoy yourselves,

that you didn’t learn anything! But in fact you emulate what is

represented on the stage and inflict calamity and blight upon our

families.

COLONEL: My dear Chaplain, your zeal is praiseworthy, but it

smacks of the cassock, if you don’t mind my saying so. What

family has ever been ruined by an officer? No doubt a wench or

two that deserves no better are put in a family way.

HAUDY: A whore will always turn out a whore, no matter whose

hands she falls into; if not a soldier’s whore, then a preacher’s

whore. (p. 11)

This is the first scene of several that features all men, military officers in a barracks-style discussion of sexuality. Using realistic dialogue unheard of in its day, with different registers of diction corresponding to the personalities of the officers rather than the uniformly elevated language of classicism, Lenz presents a spectrum of attitudes about the effects of the theatre on soldiers and the impact of a theatre-attending military on the community.

Scene Four is a meta-theatrical discussion that serves as reinforcement to the previous scene. The important Scene Three, already eluded to in regard to Zimmerman’s adaptation, has put forth an example of a theatre-going officer, the Baron Desportes, asking permission of a jeweler Wesener to take his daughter Marie to a see a twin bill of French plays: The Seeker of Wit and The Deserter (by Charles-Simon Favart, 1741; and Louis-Sebastien Mercier, 1770). The titles of the plays themselves, Lenz’s jest, offer commentary on the doomed chemistry of Marie and Desportes. Wesener refuses permission because of his daughter’s youth and because he is concerned with appear-ances. At the time, young women of virtue weren’t seen with military officers at the theater or elsewhere because the military’s ban against soldiers marrying left honorable intentions out of any such arrangement. Furthermore, as the soldier debate of Scene Four reveals, more is at stake for the Wesener family than appearances.

The scenes complement each other with a practical initiation and then a theoretical discussion of a storyline. Scene Three tugs the spectator inward toward the circumstances of the protagonist Marie Wesener and the main plot, and then Scene Four distances the spectator with the larger picture of the social issue being explored. This approach to the effects of the theatre, from within the context of a play itself, suggests the influence of the two major playwrights that Lenz translated: Plautus and Shakespeare. From both of these authors Lenz seems to have gleaned the “play within the play” approach of writing characters conscious of performing roles. Through soliloquies and asides, at the expense of theatrical illusion, stage-conscious characters blur the distinction between actor and spectator in order to provoke greater watchfulness. As the Officers in Scene Four evaluate the experience of theatre-going, the whole scene functions like an aside to the audience, who by attending The Soldiers, are in a similar position to the theorizing characters. Not only is the world a stage but the stage is a world where Lenz, through his layering of perception, abandons the classical justification for drama: Aristotelian catharsis. He substitutes his own justification: circumspection.

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 1

February 1, 2016 / think twice / 0 Comments

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers On Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Introduction

Within his rather brief lifetime, Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) faded into obscurity, and would have remained there, the “transient meteor” that his contemporary Goethe predicted he would be, were it not for his influence on German dramatists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ Lenz survived as a literary force for centuries without either popular or critical acclaim, due to being a writer’s writer. Over the past fifty years, a consensus of scholars—particularly specialists in Sturm und Drang and 18^th Century German drama—have credited this eccentric genius with founding the modern tradition in German theatre. This tradition includes Georg Büchner (1813-1837) and Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) and culminates in the work of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

STURM UND DRANG AUTHOR JMR LENZ

Brecht scholars and Brecht himself, who was inclined to concede exotic influences, have expressed little on the subject of Lenz. Certainly Lenz interested Brecht since the late twenties, though in his youth he evidently preferred other German writers such as Büchner, Kleist, Wedekind, Goethe, and Schiller.² Later, Brecht’s interest in Lenz increased. Elisabeth Hauptmann, his collaborator and life-long friend, recalled in an interview that Brecht spoke in the late twenties about staging Lenz’s play The Tutor, a project he carried out after the war.³

A sonnet Brecht wrote, “On Lenz’s Bourgeois Tragedy The Tutor”—probably written in 1938 because it was discovered in a file of Galileo fragments that were dated that year—addresses The Tutor’s notorious castration scene .⁴ The poem, like his adaptation of Lenz’s play more than ten years later, alters the rationale of the protagonist unsexing himself, transforming it from a psychological gesture into a sociological or professional one.⁵ This and another sonnet written in the same period (1933-1938) regarding Lenz’s one-time professor Immanuel Kant, “On Kant’s Definition of Marriage in The Metaphysics of Ethics,” offer evidence that Brecht was preoccupied with J.M.R. Lenz in the year before he wrote Mother Courage and Her Children in 1939.⁶

It is my contention that Lenz influenced the planning and writing of Mother Courage, a subject on which Brecht was curiously mute. In his journal of the period September 21^st to November 7^th, 1939—the seven weeks in which he wrote Mother Courage—there are no entries at all.⁷ This deeply insightful play was Brecht’s reaction to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and an attempt, through its anti-war leitmotif, to stall the outbreak of world war. The editors and translators John Willet and John Manheim maintain that it is one of the most “spontaneous” of all of Brecht’s plays. Moreover, they say that it has “virtually no trace of any preliminary work or preparatory reading” and that “for once no mention of any other collaborator, nor any element of borrowing or adaptation” are evident.⁸

TINA HOWE & DRAMA OF THE UNINTELLIGIBLE PART 1

January 5, 2016 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

An Interview with Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson

In the “Language Issue” of The Dramatist (Jan/Feb 2016) Tina Howe interviews Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson. The subject is inventing languages. Both Washburn and Hutchinson have created and utilized imaginary languages in plays.

No stranger to make-believe idioms, Tina Howe leads a remarkable discussion. One that goes beyond an appreciation of what’s murky, unclear, and ambiguous in the theatre. As an interviewer she is articulate, manic, and uniquely qualified.

Tina Howe is best known for zany and irreverent plays that explore feminine terrain with Ionesco-like absurdity. During the interview the three women lapse into fluent playwright-speak, a language of its own, that is a pleasure to read. If you have the opportunity, read the interview in its entirety. It’s well worth it.

Howe ingeniously peppers the interviewees with questions, a half-dozen at a time. This strategy opens up a broad field of inquiry for Washburn and Hutchinson to respond to. One that fits the subject of order growing out of chaos. Quickly both of the interviewed playwrights hone in on what they want to say.

Tina Howe and Imaginary Languages in Drama (alain kementieva fantasy)

Germ Idea for a Play in Zurich

Anne Washburn describes the genesis of her play The Internationalist. The play grew out of an experience she had while visiting Zurich as a document manager for a Swiss re-insurance company. She recalls hearing a story told, in English for her benefit, by a Swiss colleague.

–about a woman who thinks her cat is being attacked by a fox and rushes out into the backyard to save it, and wrestles what she thinks is the cat away from the fox and then discovers that she is holding a weasel instead, and the fox is looking at her in astonishment, and the weasel is looking at her in astonishment, and then the weasel and the fox exchange a look. It’s just a wonderful story about communication and miscommunication.

Then another colleague follows up this story with one that begins in English but lapses into Swiss-German and never returns. This story puts Washburn into the position of guessing at its meaning sonically. Intuiting a hypothetical, personalized fictive meaning according to the rhythms and cadences of the story told in Swiss-German.

PLAYWRIGHT INTENT–CHINA DOLL PART 3

December 23, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

Playwright and Reviewer Gap

For most plays there’s a gap between what the playwright intends and what the reviewer receives. For CHINA DOLL the gap between intent and reception has been unusually wide. Even though some reviewers cried “obvious,” they didn’t glean the less than obvious contributions toward the theme of Mamet’s play.

It seemed to many that CHINA DOLL is just a one-sided parlor drama in which David Mamet forgot to include other characters and wouldn’t let Al Pacino’s character get off the phone. They missed the machine-gun dialogue they’d come to expect from Mamet. They wished for the things ordinary Broadway plays have.

Maybe someone can answer this. Do reviewers really not understand the plays they don’t like? Or is it aggressive helplessness? Faux-floundering that condemns in the safest possible means? “I just didn’t get it.” Rather than debate a sociological theme or psychological insight that a play like CHINA DOLL has put forward, reviewer haplessness puts the blame squarely on the playwright.

If this is true, why? Maybe it’s because dismissing a play as horrible is easier, less dangerous and dirty, than debating. Attacking a play for its look and feel risk nothing. Posing an argument is dangerous for some, beneath the dignity of others. An argument reveals too much and no one in good taste reveals too much. Better to attack the surface, the “touchy feely” aspects, of the production. Many reviewers seem furious that CHINA DOLL isn’t pretty. Trouble with opinions is that when they appear in print they masquerade as facts. The reviews say CHINA DOLL is horrible, therefore it must be a fact. Jonathan Mandell of the DC Theatre Scene comments:

David Mamet’s CHINA DOLL involves two dramas. There’s the one on stage starring Al Pacino as an old billionaire in the something of a cynical primer on wealth and political ambition. Then there’s the pile-on against the show: The reviews have been the worst anything on Broadway has gotten this whole year. [. . .] With only a few exceptions, the reviewers have sounded hostile, one calling the play “garbage.”

MAMET & PACINO REDUX—CHINA DOLL Part 2

December 14, 2015 / think twice / 0 Comments / Sticky

David Mamet, WHO is CHINA DOLL?

In the smart new Mamet play, who (or what) does the title refer to? A great question! Unless I’m mistaken, the words “china doll” are not spoken. I took it that the title refers to the girlfriend Francine Pearson. Or, more precisely, Mickey Ross’s perception of her. How Ms. Pearson “appears” in his psyche. How he has fashioned her in his mind.

In the first act of the play, Ross lays it out in simplistic terms. Francine didn’t marry him for looks or for youth. She married him for money. He never factors in that there are subtle factors for which a person might marry. He tells Carson that a beautiful woman will always be able to entertain many offers and she will simply choose the best offer. Ross beholds Francine as a beautiful and brittle object. She is a figurine needing his protection, a valuable chess piece for him to move around his psychic game board.

In Beckett’s important work Endgame, Hamm’s first words are “Me . . . to play.” In CHINA DOLL, Mamet dramatizes the final moves of Mickey Ross, the play’s Machiavellian anti-hero.

Shakespeare's King Lear, a mirror for Mamet and China Doll

Fool (Richard O’Callaghan) and Lear (Tim Pigott Smith in The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s KING LEAR. In CHINA DOLL by David Mamet, Ross is Lear-like for his rage and folly.

Characters in Endgame are inspiration for Ross and Carson in Mamet CHINA DOLL

Hamm (George Roth) and Clov (Terrence Cranendonk) in Endgame produced by the Cleveland Museum of Art (2011), photo by Peter Jennings. Beckett’s Endgame is the absurdist model for CHINA DOLL by David Mamet

Pacino and Denham in CHINA DOLL by David Mamet

Ross and Carson ( Al Pacino and Christopher Denham) in CHINA DOLL by David Mamet at the Schoenfeld Theater (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

AKA Ann Black, in this Mamet Play, Chess Piece? Conspirator? Spy?

And because his fiancé doesn’t appear in the play, we are invited to imagine her at the end of a phone call. An Aphrodite of our minds. Even there, her imagined presence offers more than Mickey’s picture. The false name that she uses in the hotel in Toronto, Ann Black, is telling. Miss Pearson is more than she appears.

“Black” may refer to her chess piece color and hint at darkness and subterfuge, a hidden agenda. She doesn’t explain why she used a false name when he asks her. Ross doesn’t press her for an answer even when it becomes clear that his legal problems may have nothing to do with tax evasion.

CHINA DOLL by MAMET: A THINK TWICE DRAMA REVIEW

December 9, 2015 / think twice / 10 Comments / Sticky

CHINA DOLL Passengers: We Are Experiencing Turbulence

It began with the announcement that Al Pacino would appear in CHINA DOLL, an original play by David Mamet on Broadway. Fans who will go see Pacino on the big stage no matter what, whether it’s Shake-speare’s Merchant of Venice or Mamet’s American Buffalo—snatched up tickets for the fifteen week run that began at the Schoenfeld Theater in October this year.

That was the pro-Pacino buzz.

And as if from some law of drama physics, a counter-buzz met the pro-buzz with comparable force. This buzz was generated by speculation that the legendary-but-aged Pacino (75) couldn’t remember his lines. Rumors fixated on technical prompting devices that gave his memory assistance. Deriders of CHINA DOLL didn’t have to see the play to form an opinion. They’d heard all they need to know. The anti-Pacino buzz.

Finally, after two months of previews, CHINA DOLL opened in early December. Finally we’ve gotten past the glare of the lead actor’s stardom and honed in on Mamet’s play. Finally we won’t have to listen anymore to the vultures and boo-birds who get off on rooting for someone to fail. The critics have considered the play and set things right. Right? Hmmm. Wrong.

TIME TELLING WITH CHEKHOV

October 17, 2015 / think twice / 2 Comments / Sticky

Time and The Mystery of the Broken String

One of the most important stage directions in theatre history appears in Anton Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD. It is the middle of Act II and the characters have assembled in an open space near an abandoned chapel. Madame Ranevskaya has delivered a revelatory monologue about her past, in which she recounts the punishments she has received for her sins—a fate that includes a husband who drank himself to death with champagne, then love on the rebound with a cruel younger man, and—most painfully—her little boy drowning in the river.

The former tutor of the lost child, Trofimov, counters with a speech about human progress. Lopakhin discusses his business, Yepikhodov strolls by playing his guitar, and Gayev gushes about the setting sun. “Oh wondrous nature, cast upon us your eternal rays, . . .” Varya and Anya plead with him to stop. Spoofing Gayev and his pool-playing references, Trofimov quips, “We’d rather have the yellow ball in the side pocket.” They all sit in silence, except for the mumbling old servant Firs.

And then . . .

Suddenly a distant sound seems to fall from the sky, a sad sound, like a harp string breaking. It dies away.

Much has been written about the symbolism of the broken string and how important it is to gaining access to Chekhov’s dramatic work. That the sound seems to fall from the sky, precipitation-like, a singular note of portent—gives credence to its cosmic relevance in the world of the play.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Madame Ranevskaya asks, “What was that?” and shivers and grows nervous. Lopakhin’s theory that the sound is an echo from a faraway mine shaft speaks to his bent to exploit nature for monetary gain. Gayev ventures that the sound came from “some kind of bird . . . like a heron” fixing it within a pastoral context. This is trumped by the eternal student Trofimov hearing it as the cry of another bird, the more intellectual owl. The elderly Firs chimes in and then adds scope. “It’s like just before the trouble started. They heard an owl screech, and the kettle wouldn’t stop whistling.” Gayev asks Firs, “Before what trouble?” and the old man answers: “The day we got our freedom back.”

Firs is referring to Czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 and the shift away from the feudal system. A view commonly held by scholars is that “broken string” results from the tension created by the older more-natural order (as symbolized by the setting sun, screeching owl, and Ranevskaya’s tragic river) and a newer more man-made order (yellow ball in the side pocket, whistling kettle, and the arrival and departure of Ranevskaya and Gayev by train that frames the story).

The tension between the infinite and the finite, between the natural and man-made order, begins in THE CHERRY ORCHARD with the play’s first line. Lopakhin’s opening words are: “The train’s finally in, thank God. What time is it?” From here Chekhov created a play of astounding temporal complexity. Four acts later he underscores his breaking-string effect by repeating it in the play’s conclusion, the final stage directions.

Ranevskaya’s estate has been sold. Firs discovers that he is locked out. The eighty-seven year old servant, a human timepiece and representative from a bygone era lies down on the front porch. He very possible dies. The distant sound occurs, in this instance, just before the quiet that precedes the sound of an ax cutting a cherry tree.

think twice drama

theatre art redux

Tag: Shakespeare

VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S “THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN”

THE PLAY THAT SHOWS NABOKOV’S EARLY GENIUS

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 4

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

[This is the fourth part of a series. Please scroll down to read the first three installments.]

Source Materials/Subject

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, Part 3

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers on Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Dramatic Effect/ Spectator

TAKING COURAGE FROM THE STURM UND DRANG, PART 1

The Influence of J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers On Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children

Introduction

TINA HOWE & DRAMA OF THE UNINTELLIGIBLE PART 1

An Interview with Anne Washburn and Chisa Hutchinson

Germ Idea for a Play in Zurich

PLAYWRIGHT INTENT–CHINA DOLL PART 3

Playwright and Reviewer Gap

MAMET & PACINO REDUX—CHINA DOLL Part 2

David Mamet, WHO is CHINA DOLL?

AKA Ann Black, in this Mamet Play, Chess Piece? Conspirator? Spy?

TIME TELLING WITH CHEKHOV

Time and The Mystery of the Broken String

Suddenly a distant sound seems to fall from the sky, a sad sound, like a harp string breaking. It dies away.

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