"...charming entertainment"

June 28, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Chekhov's one-acts, all written a decade before his full length plays became successful under the sensitive direction of Stanislavski, are at times little more than skits. They show us a theatrical genius stumbling into the greatness he would later achieve.

They provide charming entertainment and are inhabited by characters of depth. They are all comedies (as he insisted even his late great plays were), yet even in these little sketches, his genius for developing characters frustrated by everyday life beguiles us and elicits our compassion.

Audiences familiar with the later, more famous, plays will find much to intrigue them in the one-acts now playing at Shakespeare and Co.'s Spring Lawn Theatre under the competent and lovingly tender direction of Normi Noel.

The situations, mainly plotless, are based on the frustrations of everyday life, in which a husband is hen-pecked or an actress past her prime emotes alone on an empty stage.

The best of the four plays now running at Spring Lawn is "The Brute." It gives both director and actors the most to work with and ends the afternoon on a hilarious note. In it, Diana Prusha, Miles Herter, and Bob Lohbauer (all of whom have appeared in earlier plays during the afternoon) show us how talented and versatile each can be.

As the recently widowed Mrs. Popova, determined to mourn her dead (but unfaithful) husband, Prusha is imperious, defiant, and ultimately pliable, yielding to the bewildered but sincere proposal of Smirnov (Herter) who finds himself swept from wanting to shoot her into wanting to wed her. They are ably abetted by Lohbauer as the servant Luka.

Prusha also shines in "Swan Song" in which an aging actress, alone on a bare stage, half drunkenly laments her lost life as she emotes, grandly, Shakespearean roles she is no longer young enough to play.

Herter as harassed bookkeeper in "The Celebration", a somewhat uneven and not quite realized play (although the actors are valiant and talented) is outstanding in a role very different from that he plays in "The Brute."

"The Harmfulness of Tobacco" is a monolog conceived as a lecture given reluctantly by an inept man pushed into the ordeal by his domineering wife. He rambles and we learn more about his wife and four unwed daughters than we learn about the evils of nicotine, and as in the scene of the aging actress, we feel compassion for the very real character who stands before us, his life as flawed as his waistcoat. Spenser Trova handles this role well.

Although these comedies lack something (mood, ambience, nuance?) that makes the great Chekhov plays really great, they give such insight into where that greatness was coming from that they are well worth seeing.

Their current production at Spring Lawn is one in which all concerned - director, costume designer, set designer, and the actors - treat the little plays with the talent, respect, and minute care to detail that they deserve.