Los Angeles Times

BackBackStage West
LA Weekly
NoHo LA
The Tolucan Times

Los Angeles Times Thursday, October 11, 2001

Chekhov leaves two men hanging in the comedy "Dear Anton"
by Jana J. Monji

"Our Own Dear Anton's Abandoned Story Cycle Presented by Ivan and Burkin (100 years after they left their village)" is the kind of title that evolves when collaborators can't agree and have a lot of pent-up emotion brewing. Ivan and Burkin have had a century of simmering complaints.
In Joseph Skibell's farcical comedy by that long appellation, Ivan (William H. Bassett) and Burkin (Michael Kuhlman) are joined by Vladimir (Michael Albala) in this hilarious ShapeShifter Productions presentation at the Raven Playhouse.
On several occasions, Anton Chekhov attempted to write a novel. In this particular case, he began with three linked short stories.
In Skibell's fanciful tale, when Chekhov gave up the novel, he left his two main characters without a sense of closure. At least Anna Karenina got an ending, Ivan and Burikin opine as they bicker and critique each other's storytelling abilities.
Burkin verbally bullies his older and slower companion, Ivan, whom Bassett plays with blinking consternation and dignity under a flowing mane of snowy white hair, complains but mostly yields to his younger colleague.
Skibell created Vladimir, a philosophy student and novelist, to help finish the interlocking stories,

adding another opinion--one more educated but just as self-important as the original twosome. Albala's Vladimir preens and poses while Bassett's Ivan pushes his own interests while prodding Ivan-- just as one would expect a teacher would treat a wayward or uncomprehending child.
The stories told by this trio vary-- from a coffin maker's lamentable life in a village where no one dies to the saga of Ivan's brother who longs for a great estate with gooseberry bushes. None are told without interruptions.
Skibell's characters speak to the audience and comment on each other, stepping and stumbling in and out of Chekhov's literary framework. At one point, Burkin plays Ivan (since Burkin reasons Ivan can't play hinmself if he's narrating), leading Ivan to wonder if he really looks so silly.
Virginia Morris fluidly directs this intellectual exercise on Ricard Scully's basically blue set. On the wall are frames with no pictures inside. Common articles serve as stand-ins for other objects. A wooden spoon becomes a bow and a bellows becomes a fiddle. This emphasizes the makeshift quality of the threesome's endeavors.
Skiell's magical reinvention of Chekhov has a moral, of sorts, but its as whimsical as the thought of a Russian odd couple nattering on from one century into the next, searching for a resolution to their dielmma, unable to return home.