Yepikhodov

John Jimerson, Tristan Zara, is happy to be back at Burning Coal.

Previous Burning Coal productions include The Rainmaker, Starbuck, Moonlight, Fred, Blue, Adagio, and The Cherry Orchard, Yepikhodov.

Other favorite local productions include All My Sons, Jim Baylis, The Worcester Group's Diary of Anne Frank, Willem Dafoe, Amadeus, Salieri, Vogue Men's Fashions, John, and Thug, Dr.

Sweet, at Honest Pint.

Exit.

I may confess to you, Yermolai Alexeyevich, that Epikhodov has proposed to me.

Ah.

I don't know what to do about it.

I can't bear to wait a minute.

Something else now.

The clerk, Epikhodov, proposed to me after Easter.

Always the same.

This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries, namely the assurance that his characters have their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us.

The Russian Chekhov has in his plays this gift supremely, so that at the close of The Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard, we are left speculating deeply upon what happened afterwards to Giev or Barbara, to Masha or Epikhodov.

With Conrad's sea captains, as with Chekhov's Russians, we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we are told about them.

This independence springs partly from the author's eager, almost naive curiosity.