La
Mama at The Courthouse, April 24 to May 10, 2003
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
There is something haunting
about Breath by Breath written by Peta Tait and Matra Robinson. The play fabricates a
collision of two periods of time and two events during the later life of Anton Chekhov,
the Russian playwright.
In 1900, Chekhov
lives in the Russian provincial town of Yalta. A company of actors rehearse a play and Chekhov falls in love
with actress, Olga Knipper. The second more
ethereal story is set six years earlier. The past bleeds into the present as
the actors prepare their play.
In 1894, in Yalta, there is unrest. The men of
the town council want to evict all Jews from the town. Their violent expulsion from
the region is based in fact.
Malak (Robert Jordan) is both a member of
the Jewish tribe and Chekhov's mus in the play. He drifts like a
wraith into Chekhov' vision during 1900 and compels the playwright to see the
horrors of 1894.
The play draws on the
style of Chekhov's writing and the revolutionary acting style of Constantin Stanislavski's
Moscow Art Theatre. Chekhov wrote plays
about ordinary lives and people of his era. But ordinariness can also produce
heightened emotion, real pain and horror.
The ensemble gives fine
performances. As Chekhov, Neil Pigot finds a balance between the vulnerability of the consumptive
playwright and his passionate nature. Anastasia Malinoff plays Olga, his lover, as delightfully
erratic and loving, a modern woman who wants both love and a career in the theatre.
Adrian Mulraney is compelling as the unpleasant mayor who
seeks racial cleansing for his town. Bruce Kerr plays the oppressed Jewish workman with
warmth and bob Pavlich creates a frightening truth in the mercenary who murders
the Jewish men in the local quarry.
The production is designed
and directed with simplicity and sensitivity by Meredith Rogers. The stage is almost empty but for a few
chairs and an abstract metal and stone water well.
A scrim of sheer
white and lacework provides not only a sense of the period but a vehicle fro
projections of Chekhov's home in Yalta.
Evocative live music
( Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey) echoes gypsy tunes and classical music.
This is a mysterious
and interesting play that deserves seeing.
By Kate Herbert
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