Love in Limbo

By T.E. Kalem

A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY

by Ivan Turgenev

Though one was mainly a novelist and storyteller and the other a born play wright, Turgenev is sometimes regarded as a precursor of Chekhov. But even the similarities between the two great Russians are deceptive. Chekhov drew a bitingly comic profile of the follies that his provincial characters are prey to; yet he shared their pain. Turgenev fired off comic volleys that riddle his provincial characters' vanity and pretension; but when his people bleed, he casts a cold and worldly eye upon the scene. In Chekhov, longing is the arrow of love, usually un requited; in Turgenev, idle fantasy is the fuse of sex, equally unrequited. Boredom is a palpable force in Chekhov, more of an indifferent landscape in Turgenev.

His best-known play, A Month in the Country, completed in 1850, is being revived at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J. The company's reach exceeds its grasp by no small margin. Turgenev's setting is a vast country place filled with idle, frustrated souls who can turn a draw ing room into a tinderbox.

Natalya (Tammy Grimes) is a brittle, self-centered wife. Consumed by ennui, she finds her estate-owning hus band Arkadi (Robert Symonds) a total bore. She whiles away the lazy hours with a sophisticated neighbor, Rakitin (Paul Hecht), whose one-man-talk show masks the desire he feels for her. A coltishly appealing young man named Aleksei (Mark Lamos) is brought in to tutor Natalya's son. One look at him and Natalya half falls, half dives into the vortex of love.

Since this is a play in which talk is often used to hide rather than reveal emotion, Natalya's passion is well camouflaged until she discovers that a similar chemical reaction has set in between her 17-year-old ward Vera (Amanda Michael Plummer) and the tutor. As Natalya schemes against Vera like a soap opera villainess, every sort of womanly hell breaks loose. In the end, Vera, Rakitin and Aleksei depart, leaving Natalya sad der but, one suspects, not a whit wiser.

If the play sometimes seems as richly secretive as a bank vault, Michael Kahn's obtuse direction fails to supply the cast with the 'combination that would unlock its hidden treasures. As a coarse, blustery doctor whose best medicine is home truth, Louis Zorich does manage to establish a comic territorial imperative of his own.

With a metallic inflection and a singular indifference to the nuances of text -- as well as to the presence onstage of her fel low players -- Tammy Grimes bestows on Natalya a private life that Noel Coward might have en vied.

-- T.E. Kalem

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