Theater Review

Helen Edmunson's adaptation of Tolstoy's epic flows like wind through ripe wheat, and so does Ilan Ronen's production.

By HELEN KAYE
Anna Karenina Adapted by Helen Edmundson Directed by Ilan Ronen Habimah/Arison January 23 Helen Edmunson's adaptation of Tolstoy's epic flows like wind through ripe wheat, and so does Ilan Ronen's production. Scene transforms into memorable scene, wooing, teasing and assaulting the emotions. Ronen and the company do it all with no more than moving curtains and a few chairs. As in the novel, Anna's ultimately destructive affair with Vronsky is set against idealistic Levin's life-affirming struggle with the need both to marry Kitty and to grow up. In the novel Anna and Levin barely meet. Onstage they are each other's witnesses, asking, "Where are you now?" to set time and place. Cinematic in scope, this Anna Karenina is pure theater from the choreographed set-piece formality of a society ball; to the delicious irony of Karenin and Anna seated at either end of a long, non-existent table; to Levin and his peasants in unison scything hay; to sweet intimacy as Dolly sets out five pairs of little shoes at the river's edge; to the hooded menace of Death. Yevgenia Dodina's lambent Anna enthralls the eye and the heart. Alex Ansky's thin-lipped, emotionally repressed Karenin is her perfect foil. Dorit Lev-Ari and Hila Vidor appeal as Dolly (Levin's sister) and Kitty. Uri Hochman's Stiva (Anna's brother) is sensitively complacent. Unhappily, Rami Heuberger's Levin lacks conviction and as Vronsky, Yuval Segal came alive only in the second act. Equally unsatisfactory, Yelena Kelrich's costuming sometimes looks makeshift, and does not make any statement. And it is more than time for Habimah to start on schedule.