Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Russia)

“Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Note-book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.K. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1921)

The trouble is, a mischievous man ends up the ruler of the country, with similar men as his minions.

This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Premieres)

Jan. 31, 1901— When the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) prepared its third production of an Anton Chekhov play, its actors were baffled, complaining that the script was “not a play, but only a scheme; there are no roles but only hints.” At its premiere on this date, audience reaction was bifurcated, with 12 curtain-calls after Act I “but only a half-hearted one after Act IV.”

In the century and a quarter since, Three Sisters has taken its place in the world’s theater canon, though directors and actors still sometimes struggle, as they do with Chekhov’s other plays, with the delicate balance between rueful comedy and drama.

I myself have witnessed the divergent results from the Russian doctor-turned-writer’s “hints.” Though critical reaction was divided at the time, a 1997 Roundabout Theatre production looks better in retrospect, with a starry cast featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Lily Taylor as the titular siblings and, in supporting roles, Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, David Strathairn, and Justin Theroux.

On the other hand, a smaller-scale 2011 production at the Chautauqua Institution, as I noted in my review, was fundamentally misconceived, filled with “directorial encrustations [that] covered and practically suffocated” it.

This dramedy did not—does not—need such embellishments. Simmering in the playwright’s consciousness for nearly the prior 20 years before the show premiered, it limned the decline of three Russian sisters as they dealt with financial pressures, professional dissatisfaction, and cultural enervation amid an isolated provincial town.

And, as University College London Professor Neil Stoker noted in this May 2019 blog post, the play is suffused with Chekhov’s awareness, for half his life, of the tuberculosis slowly destroying him, heightening a sense that “people were not just struggling with the imperfections of their own and others’ natures, but with arbitrary, relentless and invisible killers that made any apparent worldly success futile.”

In the summer of 1883, while staying at a dacha in south Russia, Chekhov had become fascinated with the Lintvarev sisters, three women of intellect and warmth who stimulated his imagination.

Eventually, he sketched a scenario in which he differentiated their fictional counterparts: the oldest, Olga, a schoolteacher burdened with financial responsibility; Masha, the bitter middle sister, who finds refuge from an increasingly loveless marriage through an affair with a Russian colonel passing through; and Irina, the youngest, whose innocence is lost under the weight of circumstance.

Moscow, their childhood home, looms as a symbol of the sisters’ perceived loss of cosmopolitan enlightenment, entertainment and vivacity.

Chekhov wrote Masha with the MAT actress Olga Knipper—who became his wife later that year—in mind. She ended up outliving her husband by half a century, and on her 90^th birthday—now under a Communist regime that had upended the way of life she and Anton had known so well—she could still recite lines from the play that had been molded around her.

The third of Chekhov’s four full-length plays, Three Sisters was, like the others, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who used it as a template for his ideas on naturalistic acting, psychological realism, atmosphere, and indirect action.

Even though MAT was well on its way to becoming “The House of Chekhov,” the playwright and director often clashed on how to stage the play, with Stanislavski stressing a harsher realism, leading Chekhov at one point to depart from rehearsals in a huff for Nice, France, convinced as late as three days before the premiere that the show would fail.

What united the collaborators, despite their differences in tone, was a sense that their characters and subject matter—ordinary Russians of different classes and occupations, unsure and paralyzed over how to act in a time of shifting socioeconomic change—required a changed treatment of plot and atmosphere.

The large, melodramatic gestures of royalty, for instance, would be replaced by smaller moments that might precede or follow major events. So, as in Three Sisters, audiences see not a duel onstage but its build-up and shattering aftermath.

British actor Ian McKellen, who, according to The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, has “played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his generation,” has underscored an aspect of these plays he began to absorb nearly 70 years ago: “more than any other dramatist, Chekhov brings actors close together on and off the stage. If they fail to respond as a company, the plays don't work.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1970 British film adaptation of Three Sisters, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring, left to right, Louise Pernell, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Watts.)

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a Dismal Autumn Twilight in Czarist Russia)

“A crowd of coach-men and pilgrims was sitting in Uncle Tikhon's tavern. An autumn downpour with raging wet winds that lashed across their faces had driven them to seek refuge there. The tired, drenched travelers sat listening to the wind, dozing on benches by the wall….

“Outside the tavern door splashes of rain flew around the dim, grimy lantern. The wind howled like a wolf, yelping, as if to tear itself away from its tether by the door. From the yard came the sound of horses snorting and hoofs thudding in the mud. It was dank and cold.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “In Autumn,” originally printed in 1883, reprinted in The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine (1999)

Well, with this kind of terrible weather—not to mention life under the Czars (and later, under the Communists, then under Putin)—you can understand that the tavern patrons are a miserable, even sodden, bunch.

But one in particular—a man of about 40, wearing “a wrinkled summer coat covered with mud, calico pants, and rubber galoshes without shoes”—has his own personal reasons for begging Uncle Tikhon for a drink.

This was not one of the stories that Chekhov had collected in his life. But already you can see, from this short description, how he was learning to write concisely but vividly. A year away from earning his medical degree, he had also learned to observe the outward signs that pointed to a human being’s physical and mental condition.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a Love-Struck Strongman)

“Maxim Kuzmich Salyutov is tall, broad-shouldered and well-built. His physique, you can confidently say, is athletic, his strength phenomenal. He can bend coins, pull up young trees by the roots and lift weights with his teeth, and he swears that no man would dare wrestle with him. He is brave and courageous. No one has ever seen him scared of anything. Other people, though, are scared enough of him and turn pale if he is angry. Men and women squeal and blush when he shakes their hands: ouch! His fine baritone is so powerful it deafens you. A rock of a man! I’ve never met anyone like him.

“But when Maxim Kuzmich, this prodigy of nature, this ox-like force, was declaring his love for Yelena Gavrilovna, he resembled nothing so much as a squashed rat! He turned pale, blushed, trembled and was in no fit state to lift up a chair when he had to squeeze the words 'I love you!' from his large mouth. All his strength disappeared, and his large body turned into one big hollow shell.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “A Woman Without Prejudices,” originally published in 1883, reprinted in The Comic Stories, translated by Harvey Pitcher (1999)

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a ‘Soft April Night’)

“Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.”―Russian short-story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), About Love and Other Stories (1895)

This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Gets Mixed Reception in Moscow Premiere)

Jan. 31, 1901—The three title characters at the heart of Anton Chekhov’s newest play may have yearned endlessly to go to Moscow, but the playwright himself might have been forgiven for wanting to stay as far away from the city as possible when news reached him while he was touring Italy of the dismaying reaction to The Three Sisters.

The audience’s wintry reaction may have been sparked to no small degree by the theater company tasked with giving life to the playwright’s words, the Moscow Art Theatre. The troupe had been instrumental in steering audiences to Chekhov’s attempts at a “new drama” with The Seagull and Uncle Vanya.

But this latest “drama in four acts”—even less dependent on plot and more reliant on character and atmosphere than his two recent successes—was proving harder for him to write, even though—perhaps even because—he had molded the character of the talented but moody middle sister, Masha, on an actress in the troupe with whom he was romantically involved, Olga Knipper (who eventually became his wife).

When the actors and producers gathered to read the just-finished play, then, they shook their heads. How were they going to work with this? This was unplayable, with “no roles, only hints.”

Once they swallowed their misgivings and sought to stage it, the results seemed to bear out their skepticism. At this first performance, there were 12 curtain calls after Act I but only a half-hearted one after Act IV. Critics expressed mysticism about the central dilemma of the play: Since the sisters were wealthy enough, why couldn’t they just buy tickets and go to Moscow instead of complaining about not doing so?

Chekhov had his own ideas of what the matter was with the play. Though it admittedly had a longer-than-usual gestation period, he attributed most of the production’s problems to the Art Theatre’s co-founder, K.S. Stanislavsky. While the playwright preferred that the poignancy of situations emerge from understated acting, Stanislavsky wanted those scenes overplayed.

It would help, Chekhov decided, if he were on hand to right the production. Returning from Italy, he revised where he thought it appropriate, but placed much of his effort on attending rehearsals, where he could explain his intention and conception of how the roles should be played. He took a particular hand in producing Act III.

That September, the revamped production of The Three Sisters opened to a far more enthusiastic reception, with Chekhov especially gratified for receiving two curtain calls right after the section he had handled, Act III. Twenty-two years later, the Moscow Art Theatre brought it to the United States in another ecstatically received production.

Since then, the play has joined The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard as his most performed—and most artistically successful—plays.

None of this is to say, however, that the problems inherent in staging The Three Sisters have been permanently solved. Much of this difficulty stems from the acute perception by Adam Versenyi, dramaturg of the PlayMakers Repertory Company of the University of North Carolina, that The Three Sisters “has its own geometry that uncovers its chain-of-events, its ideological orientation, its characters but does so beneath the surface by presenting us with the cycles of the seasons, and the continuous movement from day through night that defines our daily lives, not their exceptional moments.”

Not all productions have been unable to navigate that landscape. I found Laurence Olivier’s movie adaptation from the 1970s, for instance, to be inert. At the other end of the extreme was a performance I saw a decade ago at the Chautauqua Institution (reviewed here) that was filled with bizarre directorial encrustations.

Perhaps the happy medium was achieved in an all-star Roundabout Theatre Co. production from 1997 featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Lily Taylor as the title characters, with other roles fully inhabited by Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, and David Strathairn. In it, the dilemma of characters trying to break free of their enervating provincial lifestyle emerged in all its quiet but devastating melancholy.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Suffering)

"There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live."—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Three Sisters (1901)

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a ‘Sultry and Stifling’ Summer Day)

“A sultry and stifling day. Not a cloud in the sky…The sun-scorched grass looks bleak, hopeless: there may be rain, but it will never be green again…The forest stands silent, motionless, as if its treetops were looking off somewhere or waiting for something.” —Playwright/short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “The Huntsman” (originally published July 1885), in Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000)

“The Huntsman” is not part of The Undiscovered Chekhov, a collection of 43 previously untranslated short stories, but it falls within the same period of creation: 1880 to 1887. When Anton Chekhov came to write this tale, he was already aiming for something more ambitious than the quick pieces he dashed off for popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines when he was not tending to his medical studies and, later, his patients.

“Write as much as you can! Write, write, write till your fingers break!” the young author wrote in a letter a year after this short story. By the time he was done, Chekhov had learned how to quietly break the hearts of readers and playgoers around the world.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on How the World Perishes)

“The world perishes not from robbers, not from fires, but from hatred, hostility, from all these petty squabbles.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts (1896), translated by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2018)

It’s funny how, despite numerous times reading a great work of art or seeing it performed, certain lines jump out at you as if you’re hearing them for the first time. Such was the case last night when I was watching one of my favorite plays, Uncle Vanya, in a marvelous PBS broadcast of Richard Nelson’s adaptation.

In the above quote, Yelena is upbraiding the title character for his recent peevishness, choosing to overlook a fact by now obvious to her: that Vanya’s drinking and intemperate outbursts have been triggered by the notion that this young beauty he adores is possessed by his brother-in-law, a retired academic whose pomposity he can no longer abide.

Even with all these ironies behind Yelena’s attempt to affect Vanya, though, the essential truth of her statement has become more and more apparent this past week. 

Even with fires in the Amazon increasingly the likelihood of global warming (an outcome that would alarm and dismay another Yelena admirer, Dr. Astrov), the world in recent days has become more mindful than before that public policy is inordinately affected by outbreaks both of tribal hatreds and leaders’ incomprehensible temper tantrums.

Theater Review: Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard,’ Presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co.

More than a century after his death, Anton Chekhov continues to offer beguiling vistas and unforeseen quicksand for unwary theater companies. The Cherry Orchard, the version staged by New York's Roundabout Theatre Co. which just closed a week and a half ago at the American Airlines Theatre, is no exception. It can feel so contemporary in depicting class divisions, the illusions by which people live their daily lives, and their pain on feeling increasingly cut off from nature. But the playwright’s close, unhurried attention to character can lead to a mistaken desire to “juice” up the play, and its tragicomic balance can be easily upset.

The Roundabout production illustrated this to a marked degree. Not knowing Russian, I can’t comment on the quality of the translation by Stephen Karam (who provided the Roundabout with a prior triumph with his own The Humans). But so much of the rest of this production was uneven.

Chekhov’s final play, first staged the year of his death (1904), is a dramedy involving mortality and the crisis of the old order, an aristocracy that we know is doomed. The stand-ins for this enervated class are Lyubov Ranevskaya, returning to her provincial childhood home from abroad after the failure of a relationship, and her older brother, Gaev. Both idle away their time in nostalgia and melancholy about their better days growing up on the estate, unable to address the massive debt that will lose them their home.

It was no fault of Diane Lane that this production did not take flight. The film actress was alternately foolish and touching as a spendthrift aristocrat all too bound up in memories of her home—many involving her dead son. John Glover, as Gaev, made the most of a character that can feel maddeningly ineffectual to audiences.

As Lopakhin, Harold Perrineau represented an example not so much of color-blind but color-conscious casting. It was impossible to watch his parvenu developer, the son of a serf, without thinking of this African-American actor coming to prominence only about a half-century since the epic civil-rights legislation of the Sixties. Perrineau made the most of his big scene, when Lopakhin, wild with joy over how far he has come but still feeling an awkward fit among the landed gentry he’s about to displace, gets drunk.

This drunk scene, though, also demonstrated some of the problems in the overall conception by Simon Godwin, who, at the National Theatre, has become one of Britain’s leading directors. The focus on Lopakhin’s awkwardness should have been enough to drive this scene, but Godwin has blown up the action in a distracting manner, with a large, loud party.

Meanwhile, Godwin made another choice, with the conclusion, that veered in the opposite direction. As in the original play, the beloved old retainer, Firs (played here by the appropriately beloved theater legend, Joel Grey), is forgotten and left to die alone in the abandoned house, a tragicomic symbol of his employer’s ultimate carelessness. 

But, in ending on a dying fall, this otherwise noisy Cherry Orchard missed the most significant sound effect in Chekhov’s stage directions: the sound of an ax, beginning its fatal work of destroying a forest—and an entire sociopolitical system that fails to see its own collapse.

Theater Review: N.C. Hunter’s ‘A Day by the Sea,’ From the Mint Theater Co.

Over the last half-dozen years, I’ve come to rely on the Mint Theater Company to present wonderfully staged productions of unfairly forgotten plays. But a second rental increase in three years forced this jewel of the Off-Broadway theater scene out of the West 43^rd Street building it had called home for the last two decades. Fortunately, it found another domicile only a block south, on West 42^nd Street, in the Beckett Theater on Theatre Row.

Five other theater companies share space in the complex with the Mint, but for playgoers, it is a more comfortable, pleasant environment. At the same time, the space still allows playgoers the feeling of eavesdropping on a very small group of people—an essential quality in sustaining the aura surrounding its current production, a revival of N.C. Hunter’s serio-comedy of the 1950s, A Day by the Sea.

This is not the first time that the Mint has turned its attention to Hunter: A couple of years ago, it mounted another success of his on London’s West End, A Picture of Autumn. But now, with this production, it is making a sustained case for taking him seriously and reviving his reputation once and for all.

A Day by the Sea focuses on Julian Anson, a stuffy, workaholic mid-level Foreign Service diplomat,

who finds himself, after two decades of ceaseless striving, in becalmed waters. Taking a break from his posting in Paris to visit his mother at her seaside home, he discovers that an expected promotion won’t be coming to him after all. The rejection leads him to intense self-examination about his shallow private life as well, a process only magnified by the arrival of his childhood friend Frances.

At first glance, Frances would seem exactly what Anson would not want: a widow with two young children who had become the kind of scandalous woman that respectable people run away from. She had worshipped Anson until her late teens, when, realizing his focus on college and his career path had become all-consuming, she ran away to marry a much older man who had since died. More recently, against her better judgment, she wed a younger man who killed himself. His suicide note, forgiving her, was printed in the newspapers, making her notorious.

Anson’s late recognition of her love—and his determination to make amends for his long-ago neglect—leads him to think he can reshape their future by taking up where they left off. But matters are not so simple, as Hunter considers the sad impossibility of returning to the past.

The interplay among the characters here is deeply sensitive and nuanced, and one gets the distinct impression from reading about Hunter that this play is all of a piece with his other work. But so deeply has Hunter been forgotten by the theater world that one is stunned to find that once he was very highly regarded indeed—that is, until Kenneth Tynan dealt a grievous blow to his reputation.

The strong influence of Anton Chekhov in Hunter’s work especially provoked the British drama critic. A Day by the Sea seems almost tailor-made for this criticism, with several elements suggesting the playwright’s particular attention to Uncle Vanya:

*It depicts a middle-aged male’s melancholy upon abruptly realizing that his life’s work doesn’t really amount to much;

*It features a doctor of great intellectual gifts who is increasingly lapsing into alcohol; 

*A plain but kind woman pines helplessly for the doctor;

*An attractive woman causes the males around her to lose their minds;

*An elderly man wakes up periodically to say comic, often inappropriate things;

*The playwright presciently worries about both man’s encroachment on nature and an unseen but sensed upheaval in the future of his nation (for Chekhov, a revolution that will destroy the aristocracy; for Hunter, the Suez crisis that marked the end of Great Britain as an imperial power).

Far more than other contemporary West End practitioners of the “well-made play” like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, Hunter suffered grievously at the hands of Tynan, who championed the “angry young man,” often fiercely political theater of John Osborne. It didn’t help that Hunter's stress on character development rather than plot make for a pace that can charitably be described as leisurely. 

The latter fault has not disappeared. But the strength of the play also appears more readily than Tynan gave it credit for: naturalistic dialogue that gives virtually the entire cast of 10 at least one opportunity to sharply define the laconically expressed but very real disappointment of middle-class characters who sense that, like the tide, the promise of their early lives has ebbed. 

Much of this is due to veteran actor-playwright-director Austin Pendleton, who has demonstrated his range convincingly this fall by staging another British play from the Fifties vastly different in tone from this one: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, at the Pearl Theater Co.

Pendleton has elicited striking performances from his cast. Julian Elfer subtly marks out Anson’s transformation from buttoned-down bureaucrat (someone with “a lot of porridge in his veins,” according to his own mother) to a more questing figure who tries to recapture his youthful sense of confidence, purpose and idealism. Katie Firth renders Frances with a dignity and realism about her severely constricted choices after a series of life mistakes. 

Polly McKie brings poignancy to the role of the affectionate but lovelorn 35-year-old governess to Frances’ children, seeing in the prospect of marriage to hard-drinking Dr. Farley a last chance for both of them. And, as the doctor, Philip Goodwin unleashes a ferocious rhetorical outburst that at once castigates diplomats for the failures that result in war, explaining much about his personal downward spiral. 

 

A Day by the Sea closes this coming Sunday. Once again, the Mint has done well by a theatrical work that has been inexplicably and shamefully consigned to the margins.