Latest news with #Chekhov
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Beware: We Are Entering a New Phase of the Trump Era
In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov's 'The Seagull' at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv. We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one's country, one's city, one's skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase. And then the show goes on. This isn't a theater review, and I'm not here to tell you why you should go see the play, 'Seagull: True Story.' I have too many social connections to Alexander Molochnikov, the exile Russian director, and anyway, the current run is sold out. I'm interested in something else: that moment when the shock fades and the (figurative) show goes on. I think we are entering that moment in the United States. Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn't sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships. I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022. Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as 'foreign agents.' The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Russia Today
7 days ago
- General
- Russia Today
Moscow targeted by major Ukrainian drone assault (VIDEOS)
Ukraine has launched another major drone raid on Moscow and suburban areas, with a total of 42 UAVs being shot down overnight across the entire region, local officials have said. The attack damaged buildings and prompted temporary flight suspensions, but no casualties have been reported. Air defenses intercepted drones across 12 municipalities in the early hours of Wednesday, according to Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyov. Three residential houses were damaged in Troitskoye, a village in the Chekhov district south of Moscow, Vorobyov said. Emergency services were working at the scene and residents affected by the attack would receive assistance, he added. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin confirmed the drone raid on the Russian capital, which came in several waves starting at around 12:30am. The Russian Defense Ministry said air defense systems had shot down or intercepted a total of 296 fixed-wing drones across Russia between 9pm on Tuesday and 7am on Wednesday. Russia's aviation regulator said flight operations were temporarily restricted at Moscow's Domodedovo, Vnukovo, Zhukovsky and Sheremetyevo airports, as well as at regional airports in Vladimir, Ivanovo, Kostroma, and Yaroslavl, to ensure safety. Restrictions were lifted later in the morning. In Zelenograd, a district on the northwestern outskirts of Moscow, an explosion shattered the windows at Elma Technopark while a nearby car caught fire, according to pictures shared by the Shot Telegram channel. The outlet also posted a video appearing to show the midair destruction of a UAV. The drone raid was caught on camera in multiple locations, with clips often featuring drones flying at a low altitude and explosions. A video shared by Baza showed residents in Ramenskoye, outside Moscow, taking cover under trees during the attack. Ukraine has recently significantly intensified its drone raids on civilian infrastructure deep into Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry has said that the attacks are being supported by Kiev's sponsors in Europe and are aimed at disrupting the ongoing conflict settlement process. According to the ministry, more than 2,300 drones have been intercepted over the past week, mostly outside the frontline. Subsequently, Russia has responded with precision strikes targeting exclusively Ukrainian military facilities, including drone production sites, warehouses, airfields, radar stations, and ammunition depots.
Irish Independent
08-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Mary Kenny: My family felt like relics of a dying Ireland when a hotel bought our home but I've found room for it in my heart
Celebrations are being held to mark the Sandymount Hotel's 70th anniversary Anyone familiar with Dublin's Aviva Stadium – we once just called it Lansdowne Road – will have noticed the prominence of the nearby Sandymount Hotel. This comprises a terrace of fine Victorian houses occupying virtually all one side of the adjacent Herbert Road. The hotel complex, whose 70th anniversary will be marked today, forms part of what used to be my family home. The takeover seemed like a Chekhov play: we were remnants of an older Ireland, stuck in a past that was fading, while a new, entrepreneurial spirit was rising, embodied in the hotel's expanding agenda of buying each residential home on the road.
Washington Post
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Andrew Scott and Hugh Bonneville lead dueling takes on ‘Uncle Vanya'
A half dozen or more Chekhov plays have hit major stages this spring, with renowned actors biting off big roles — or all of them at once, in the case of Andrew Scott — and invigorating the writer's legacy as a preeminent chronicler of the human condition. This month, Cate Blanchett concludes her West End run in a cheeky, modern spin on 'The Seagull,' while her 'Tár' co-star Nina Hoss leads the Brooklyn transfer of a British take on 'The Cherry Orchard' that's both intimate and bombastic. Now, the Northeast Corridor is telling a tale of two Vanyas, with Hugh Bonneville of 'Downton Abbey' headlining a broad and airy 'Uncle Vanya' at Shakespeare Theatre Company, while Scott shape-shifts in 'Vanya,' a London-born solo version shot through with melancholy now running in New York's West Village. Both are fresh, plain-spoken adaptations but could be two entirely different plays if they didn't share the same source material — the genius of which partly lies in its malleability. There are infinite ways to live a life — or to endure, as Chekhov's characters often feel they must — but only a handful of guiding forces when you really boil it down: Desire, purpose, money, death. (Anything missing probably falls under the first.) You can laugh or cry about it, and Chekhov demonstrates the pleasures and necessities of doing both. Humor is played to the hilt in artistic director Simon Godwin's staging at STC, which swiftly assumes the rhythms of a drawing room comedy. There is a haut bohemian vibe to the country estate where Bonneville's Vanya and its other perennial residents are compelled to entertain a couple of intrusive city folk: his late sister's widower, the vain intellectual Alexandre (Tom Nelis), and his beguiling, much younger new wife, Yelena (Ito Aghayere). The doctor, Ástrov (John Benjamin Hickey, soulful as ever), is called to tend the former's gout, but lingers to admire the latter's beauty. It's obvious up front that Sonya (Melanie Field), Alexandre's daughter and Vanya's niece, is smitten and the doctor oblivious — she practically nips at his heels like a puppy. Vanya, here an especially slobby slave to impulse, openly confesses his love for Yelena, who shoos him like a slobbering dog. The stage is set for disappointment all around, though you wouldn't know it for much of the show. The prevailing mood of leisure betrays only brief hints that they're all quite miserable underneath. That's because in this telling most everyone says exactly what they mean, whether the streamlined dialogue of Connor McPherson's translation encourages them to not. Subtlety and subtext seem to be out for a leisurely hike. McPherson shifts the setting from Russia to the Ukrainian countryside, where there's a polyglot feel to the ensemble, from Bonneville's British tongue to the booming vowels of Craig Wallace, who lends the family's penniless dependent an unusual assurance. Vanya's mother (Sharon Lockwood), known here as 'Grandmaman,' even gets a French saveur. This collection of disparate cultures — in a story that's ultimately about home — gleans cohesion through design. Robert Brill's romantically distressed set (peeling ivory paint, plush upholstery, faded wood), and the elegantly layered costumes by Susan Hilferty and Heather C. Freedman, add appealing depth and texture where the performance style favors a flat directness. Bonneville's Vanya is an amusing cad, disarming his resentful gripes with humor that's more charming than it is rightfully pissed off. His performance is an absolute pleasure. But it means that Vanya's pivot to indignation — when Alexandre proposes selling the estate — is too abrupt to buy. He does not ultimately seem like a man who'd try to take anyone's life into his hands. Joyful though it is, the production's levity costs it believable gravitas as fates descend into resigned ambivalence. Misery in Chekhov so often arises from secret or frustrated longings, which simmer just below the surface, and then boil people from the inside or erupt with scalding intensity. Here, the players are either too easy to read (poor Sonya) or a bit too good at keeping that turmoil under wraps until the moment it bursts into view. There are benefits to this approach: The co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where Godwin's staging premiered in February, is delightfully buoyant and easy to follow. Little guesswork is required to intuit how anyone really feels. But a thread goes missing when we don't feel like confidants to Chekhov's characters, privy to the inner conflicts they otherwise keep hidden. Scott has the benefit, in this regard, of being the only one onstage in 'Vanya,' adapted with fleet economy by Simon Stephens and directed with ease and ingenuity by Sam Yates. Every exchange feels like a secret confession. Every character trembles with something they dare not say out loud. There's coyness, intrigue and even palpable eroticism between thwarted lovers who never appear side by side. Somehow, it's also funny as hell. Scott's embodiment of each character is so vivid and distinct that you can imagine the whole array of them present at once — and how they would respond in a scene, even in their phantom absence. One of the intoxicating effects of his performance is that it allows you to observe a whole constellation of desires, worries and regrets mapped out by a single body. It's a testament to the actor's protean emotional range and readiness that he's able to illuminate so many shades of life. It's also thrilling proof that Chekhov captured the very essence of what it means to be human. Uncle Vanya, through April 20 at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harmon Hall in Washington. About 2 hours and 35 minutes with an intermission. Vanya, through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York. About 1 hour and 50 minutes without an intermission.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring
Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar. A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project ('The Laramie Project'). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film 'The Zone of Interest,' fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, 'Six million people didn't murder themselves.' Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.) This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee ('Cambodian Rock Band') is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.) Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall ('The Constituent'), this retelling of the Kinks' rise won the Olivier Award (Britain's equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include 'You Really Got Me,' 'Lola' and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.) The title role in Chekhov's lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville ('Downton Abbey'), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the 'Paddington' movies or Bernie in 'Notting Hill.' In Simon Godwin's production of Conor McPherson's adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.) The playwright Larissa FastHorse ('The Thanksgiving Play') turns her satirical wit to the world of nonprofits and the minefield of identity politics in this workplace farce, which pits the heads of two Native American organizations — one Native (Shyla Lefner), one white (Amy Brenneman) — against each other. Michael John Garcés directs. (April 3-May 4, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.) The exclamation point in the title is a clue to the cheeky, heightened tone of this world-premiere comedy by Keiko Green, about a pair of extinction events: the death of the Earth and, more immediately, the death of Greg, a middle-aged guy with a protective wife, a drag-artist kid and a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer that — for a while, anyway — sparks new life in him. Tinged with grief, touched with magic, the play was a finalist for this year's Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Zi Alikhan directs. (April 5-May 3, South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, Calif.) An infamous catalyst for World War I animates this new play by Rajiv Joseph ('Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,' 'Dakar 2000'), about three young men, living under the oppression of empire, who are tapped to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, his wife. Blanka Zizka directs. (April 15-May 4, Wilma Theater, Philadelphia.) This poetic, tender, funny play by a.k. payne, which won this year's Blackburn Prize, is about two estranged cousins who grew up close on the same unpromising street: Mina, who left for the Ivy League, and Sade, who left for prison. Back in the neighborhood for the weekend, for the funeral of yet another relative who died too young, they eat Cookie Crisp cereal, watch cartoons on BET and make a space to be themselves as they dream of utopia. Tinashe Kajese-Bolden directs. (April 16-May 18, Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles.) Zora Howard ('Stew') has called her new play 'a meditation on rage,' but it is a comic drama — intended as a constructive, even transcendent, response to anti-Black racism and police violence. In the play, a 2022 finalist for the Blackburn Prize, a couple (Caroline Clay and Raymond Anthony Thomas) witness their neighbor (Keith Randolph Smith) being pulled over as he gets home. Then events turn surreal. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs. (April 19-May 18, Goodman Theater, Chicago.) Knud Adams, who directed the world premieres of the last two dramas to win the Pulitzer Prize, stages this quiet new play by Jiehae Park ('Peerless'). It begins conventionally — with a park bench, occupied by a man and a woman who have spent half a century together — but becomes far more cryptic and contemplative as it unfolds over a year. (May 2-June 8, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.) A boy with an agile imagination finds a duffel bag of cash that he thinks his dead mother might have sent from the beyond in this new family musical, adapted from Frank Cottrell Boyce's novel and his screenplay for the film of the same name. With music and lyrics by Adam Guettel ('Days of Wine and Roses') and a book by Bob Martin ('The Drowsy Chaperone'), it is directed by Bartlett Sher. (May 9-June 15, Alliance Theater, Atlanta.) Queer romance is in the air in this new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney ('Moonlight,' 'The Brother/Sister Plays'), about a couple who fell for each other when they weren't looking for love. Now complications ensue. Does it give away the ending that real-life couples may apply to get married onstage during some performances? Signs point to happily ever after. (May 16-June 15, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.)
