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Courtenay Holds Court

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Tom Courtenay, making a rare appearance on B'way, talks about Uncle Vanya, Chekhov and show biz

Tom Courtenay is talking about how we humans squander our time on earth, we fritter away the precious seconds of our existence.
It is, the British actor says, a pervasive theme of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya; the feeling among the major characters that their lives have been wasted is a very contemporary sentiment and the ease with which we relate to the idea is a prime reason the play remains gripping for audiences more than a century after its creation.
"Everybody feels that at some point," Courtenay says. "It's a very human thing to feel, however successful you may be."
The very successful Courtenay has come from his home in London to New York to portray the title role at Circle In The Square in the classic Chekhov play about disillusionment and the failure of hope among the residents of a late-nineteenth-century Russian country house. And like the play, Courtenay himself seems to have aged well.
Sitting in his suite at a midtown Manhattan hotel, in pale green T-shirt and informal slacks, with his longish salt-and-pepper hair, the trim, fit native of Hull, a port city about 220 miles north of London, looks considerably younger than his 58 years. Pare the hair apply perhaps a dab of Just for Men and the outgoing, talkative performer could almost pass for the young, working-class actor who burst on the London and celluloid scenes in the early 1960's portraying angry British working-class young man in The Loneli-ness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Liar, and who achieved international film fame in Doctor Zhivago. 
Courtenay has been on Broadway twice before with superlative results. His previous appearances let to Tony Award nomi-nations, in 1977 for Simon Gray's Other- [{image}] wise Engaged and in 1982 for his riveting performance as an alcoholic backstage aide to a failing Shakespearean actor in The Dresser. Later this year, he is slated to return for a fourth visit in Moscow Stations, his highly acclaimed tour-de-force one-man show, for which he won the 1994 London Evening Standard Award as Best Actor for his portrayal of a dissolute and drunken intellectual.  
The production of Vanya, Courtenay says, originated with Braham Murray, artistic director of the Royal Exchange Theatre Company in Manchester, England, where the actor has performed frequently. Murray broached the idea, and Courtenay loved it. "I have always had an affinity for Russian things," Courtenay says. "In fact, my first major role was as Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull at the Old Vic."
Murray had been in touch with Theodore Mann of Circle In The Square, and they decided to put together a com-bined English-American cast, which includes James Fox, Amanda Donohoe (formerly of television's "L.A. Law") and Werner Klemperer.  
The Royal Exchange is a theatre-in-the-round; Circle In The Square has for years had seats on three sides of the stage. For this production, at Murray's suggestion,
by Mervyn Rothstein

Transcription Notes:
I was not sure how to put the image on the first page. (left side with actor)