From her earliest years, Howard-Gibbon enjoyed drawing freehanded sketches, some of which survive today.

The motif which is to be cut-out freehanded is defined by a border path around the motif.

Unfortunately, the flat-footed version that opened last night under Mr. Edelstein's direction, from his own freehanded adaptation, seldom conveys the urgency of the play's genesis.

Michael Frayn, who has translated Chekhov's four major plays and has also written his own freehanded adaptation of Chekhov, "Wild Honey," admonishes that it is "a presumptuous enterprise" to rewrite someone else's play.

In Deloss Brown's freehanded adaptation, which opened last night at the CSC Repertory, the story is broader and more farcical than the original, but remains faithful to the heart of "Heart of a Dog."

Bright-eyed and curvacious, with fingernails as unmanicured as his, she has shown the same freehanded spirit in her paintings and sculpture that he has in his later photographs and films, except without his European-Jewish angst.