Cherry Orchard Fiasco

Diane Monaco dmonaco at pop3.utoledo.edu
Tue Apr 30 12:00:40 PDT 2002


At 02:58 PM 4/29/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>Warning to all: the current adaptation of Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" with
>Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates is a piece of garbage. It was so bad, I
>actually went home right after and read the play. That reading revealed
>that Cacoyannis (the director) managed to gut the script of every
>politically significant line in it, and the resulting production is an
>tepid mess of existential mooning.
>
>A much better effort was Malle's "Vanya of 42 Street" (now on video): a
>low-budget but very able rendering of "Uncle Vanya."
>
>If there are other films of Chekhov plays, please let me know. A few years
>ago, I saw a Russian film of "Lady and the Dog."

Thanks for the warning. I'm sorry to say that I have never seen any Chekhov plays on film but I have read a number of his plays including The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, and Happiness beginning in a high school World Literature class...I later read Three Sisters and The Lady with the Dog...all great! Anyway, this class was taught by a wonderful teacher from the Ukraine (with a Russian last name who also taught Russian language classes at the school) and she exposed us to many of the great non-Anglo writers -- Hesse, Kafka, Boll, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Pushkin... -- she did have a clear bias toward German and Russian writers. This was one turning point for me.

[related to the Ayn Rand thread from a short while ago] After this wonderful high school lit class experience but before college, I had a summer job working with a young woman who read and re-read The Fountainhead the entire summer...well, needless to say she convinced me to read it (also Atlas Shrugged) and guess what I thought? I didn't like what I read but I don't think I understood why until college. The problem I have is the idea she has that there are absolute truths about so many things and that one can just get at these truths through reasoning. Everything is so undoubtedly black and white for her and more importantly she side steps the whole issue of socially constructed everything even reasoning!

Diane



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