{"id":12479,"date":"2009-10-23T16:32:43","date_gmt":"2009-10-23T20:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/10\/23\/12479.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:52:49","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:52:49","slug":"book-report-uncle-vanya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/10\/23\/book-report-uncle-vanya\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Uncle Vanya"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The second of the three simultaneous auditions was for Uncle Vanya<\/i>, which I read in Carol Rocamora’s translation in Chekhov: Four Plays<\/a>. I can’t really speak to how good the translation was—reading Michael Frayn’s introductions<\/a> to his translations but not his translations themselves has led me to a very strange place regarding Anton Chekhov in English. Or Tchekoff. Or Tchekhov. Anyway.\n

I still don’t really get the play. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of stuff I get about it—Jean himself is miserable, and the way in which his misery is brought to a head is both plausible and theatrical. The various crushes, one way and another, make a good deal of sense. And the doctor, who combines a grandiose idealism with a petty thoughtlessness the way some people do in real life and many of us like to think all idealists do, is in some ways a memorable character. But mostly, these are depressing people who behave badly, and I don’t see why people keep wanting to spend time with them.\n

Of course, I felt that way about Seinfeld<\/i>.\n

I do wish that I had managed to see the local production that I wasn’t cast in. Although I suppose that it’s not somehow petty on my own part to want to see what they went with, when I would otherwise not be interested in the show, or at least not interested enough to go out and see it. But that’s how it is. And anyway, I was kinda busy, what with my own rehearsals, so it didn’t happen.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger still doesn’t get it, but there are a lot of things Your Humble Blogger doesn’t get. Never did, and never will, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18900,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12479\/revisions\/18900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}