The Missing Father
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage THE MISSING FATHER BY ALBERT BERMEL Because Chekhov's full-length plays each contain five to ten fat parts, they are always being coveted for all-star revivals of the kind Mike Nichols...
...None of the women could take over...
...Yet too much physical proximity cuts into the quaint formality of the household, observed, say, when Astrov apologizes to Sonya for not wearing a tie...
...A further difficulty inheres in the play itself...
...In the earlier version of the play...
...indeed, will not notice any difference...
...They tinkle monotonously—up a key, down a key-so that your ear is forced to anticipate them and resist memorizing them...
...or if Vanya runs at Serebryakov as though to assault him physically, when his resort to a pistol for violence dictates an unbridgable distance between himself and his enemy...
...And as a bonus you come out whistling the s wordplay...
...Anybody who liked her other Russian lady, Lara-of the abominable theme song in Dr...
...Although he is more susceptible to Elena's looks and would not mind having an affair with her on the sly, he evidently has a greater love for trees than for people...
...When it comes to stage rodomontade, the trappings of Romantic hyperbole, Plummer is a legitimate heir to Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and then some...
...a few answering giggles) the drama runs aground and has to be launched again...
...Nichols, a director of unusual discretion, knows how to let the actors give as much as they have...
...The director-choreographer, Michael Kidd, has enormously helped Plummer in keeping this and other scenes brisk and fluent...
...or if she removes his cigar-oh, phallic notation-from his mouth and strokes his brow after he falls asleep...
...Vanya's flamboyant contemporary, abbreviated to Cyrano, is back (Palace), but why with music...
...When Scott says he is "surrounded by odd people in this house" (a couple of quick glances toward the spectators at his elbow...
...The Wood Demon, he was the central character...
...For Fairbanks, despite his swinging from chandeliers (which Plummer does) and leaping on tables to strike wild poses (which Plummer does) and skirting sword points by half an inch (which Plummer does), may not, for all I know from those silent movies, have been able to speak verse with glorious precision, as Plummer does...
...The other male character who might fill in as a father is Vanya's neighbor, Astrov, the district physician...
...he will have to arrange something...
...But Astrov entertains feelings no deeper than friendship and respect for Sonya...
...The servants in his house and the workers on his land deferred to him for the settling of disputes...
...He propels himself by staggering on his toes, with arms flailing, in a quasi-balletic movement that sorts strangely with his nasally grunted lines...
...Yet when Williamson tackles Vanya's suffering and his resentments over his wasted life, the conviction seems slightly off...
...Astrov and Elizabeth Wilson's Sonya, a woman, as they say, of uncertain age...
...The sense of a family, a household, must be created, but Chekhov has purposely killed off the father ahead of time...
...The patriarch was a critical figure in pre-Revolutionary Russia, as we guess from the patronymics...
...You can throw in a weighty personality (George C. Scott), a movie reputation (Julie Christie), a quirky novelty (Nicol Williamson), and a sprinkling of distinguished elders (Lillian Gish, Cathleen Nesbitt, Barnard Hughes) -and Chekhov will take them to his large heart...
...he also ran a farming business...
...That formality leaks away if Astrov kisses Sonya good-by on the head...
...Vanya idolized his dead sister and believed his brother-in-law to be a consummate scholar and critic...
...Christie's Elena, on the other hand, is wildly off...
...Nichols has them touch and embrace one another a bit more than the directions suggest...
...Sonya loves Astrov, and if he would only marry her, the estate and family would find a capable chief...
...In Vanya Chekhov was still writing soliloquies and the actors handle most of them with brio...
...Vanya, tortured by his feeling of having been exploited, and by his hopeless love for Elena, Serebrya-kov's young second wife, is no more suitable for the father's role than is his brother-in-law...
...and Elena, that languid, lovely specimen of displaced womanhood, fights off all responsibilities...
...When the characters are not touching or hugging one another or talking mouth to mouth or maintaining eye contact, they might as well be in separate vacuums...
...His casting and tolerance return appreciable dividends in Scott's hypnotic, raspy-voiced Dr...
...The second time, as if to make the bullet unmistakably lethal, he cries "Bang...
...The handicap Nichols must work under, however, is the very box-office draw he and the producers sought in rounding up a group of disparate talents, most of them fascinating to watch but spiritually unable to meet...
...Rostand's language is already all song and recitative, as is the glittering new translation in rhyme by Anthony Burgess that definitively does in the old Brian Hooker version...
...What will now happen to him and Sonya, and to his old mother...
...In Vanya Serebryakov technically controls the title to the estate...
...Chekhov's Russia simply does not yield itself to this sort of intimacy...
...An early environmentalist, he abhors the depletion of the Russian woodlands and their wild life-and must feel appalled by all the logs the designer has used in the set...
...These gestures of passion and compassion are appropriate for modern American, not Chekhovian, society...
...Earplugged, one can truly savor the moment when Roxana is singing from her balcony to Christian while Cyrano looks up at her as the third, unnoticed corner of the triangle...
...Sonya prefers taking to giving orders...
...as he pulls the trigger...
...Gorky built his plays around that paternal owner and disposer, whereas Chekhov invents dramatic structures in which the characters all reveal themselves to be undepend-able substitutes for him...
...The famous Olivier production of Vanya at Chichester had a stage that was lifted, made remote...
...It forms the lowest level in a sloping theater, with the audience sitting close to its perimeter...
...But they are not a company and the play's wholeness, the marrying of its parts, becomes defective...
...Zhivago-will be happy with this one too...
...Actually, "music" is not quite the word for the scale exercises compiled by Michael J. Lewis to smother the words...
...She decorates her surroundings prettily enough in Tony Walton's gowns and whatever the feminine is for a Cossack overcoat, but so would a statue...
...Sour and unintentionally clownish, he tries to shoot Serebryakov, twice, and twice he misses...
...It was settled on his wife (Vanya's sister), now dead, and should by rights pass on to their daughter, Sonya...
...The actor-in-your-lap treatment works fine for certain plays...
...So here you have the most spectacular histrionics in town...
...They do not sustain a life that fills the stage...
...for years he worked like a dog to keep the estate solvent...
...he is even unfit for his role as uncle...
...The interpretation makes a pleasurable change from the aridly self-pitying Vanyas who usually clog up the action...
...Vanya's mother buries herself in radical pamphlets...
...But there are whirling sword dances set off by a series of still compositions that make imaginative use of Desmond Heeley's costumes and John Jensen's craggy sets...
...He was proprietor, counselor, judge, and monarch...
...Part of the difficulty is the stage itself...
...The show-stopping episode is predictably the duel, with Cyrano wounding Valvert systematically at the end of each improvised stanza, lunging like a tiger every time he completes the rhyme...
...Out of his own meager income he paid off about a quarter of the mortgage...
...Not only was he the paterfamilias...
...Nichols has organized a comfortable and spirited evening of solo turns...
...When Vanya tries to declare his love for her, she reproaches him for not reconciling everybody, something he would be able to do only if he were his own father...
...But Serebryakov, who lives elsewhere most of the time, proposes to sell it, invest in securities and buy himself another place in Finland...
...On Stage THE MISSING FATHER BY ALBERT BERMEL Because Chekhov's full-length plays each contain five to ten fat parts, they are always being coveted for all-star revivals of the kind Mike Nichols and the Circle in the Square management have just assembled in Uncle Vanya (Joseph E. Levine Theater...
...Unfortunately, the duel comes near the beginning and Kidd finds nothing to top it, not even the sequence where Cyrano woos his beloved cousin Roxana on behalf of Christian, the inarticulate lump she is smitten by...
...As Vanya, Williamson goes head down for the comedy, and does win laughs...
...Both these actors are banked fires who can on occasion turn into flaming pillars, and some of the other performances are so thorough and thoughtout that they defy adverse criticism: Hughes as the irritated, irritating old invalid, Professor Ser-ebryakov, and Conrad Bain as the ineffectual Telyegin ("Waffles"), who strums a nice, plaintive guitar...
...Well, says the unpatemal Serebryakov in effect, he hasn't really thought about them...
...Nonetheless, this accumulation of slag cannot muffle the beauty of Rostand's story, and Christopher Plummer brings his hero to enchanting life...
...Since nobody inside the play can serve as a paternal figure, the task falls by default on that outsider, the director...
...The orchestration supplies further distraction with rhumba-ish thump-thump cross-rhythms sounding like "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady-hardly a surprise since the same arranger did both...
...Vanya, the son of the family, and Sonya, his niece, have managed the property between them, keeping the accounts and sending them on to Serebryakov, who didn't look at them...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 14
