Goodman Theatre.
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Santo Loquasto’s sumptuous provincial villa is impeccably detailed and awesomely spacious and elegant. His fashion-plate costumes all but create the characters. James F. Ingalls’s lighting puts sun and moon to shame. But never has a more splendid frame held an emptier canvas. Succumbing to sitcom sterility when it doesn’t erupt in histrionics, Robert Falls’s alternately broad and shallow Goodman production has little to add to a seminal play and in fact subtracts much. Chekhov worked in the half-tones that make us human–but here his poignant, unquietly desperate characters, trapped in a backwater burg where time erodes hope, are reduced to actors indulging every wretched excess, unrestrained by any directorial vision beyond traffic control. No wonder no one gets to Moscow.
I made some errors in my review of Fanshen (March 24). Credit for the stage combat should go not only to Carlos Tomayo but to Debra Minghi. Max Shapiro provided the lyrics, not the music.
