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.
No comments:
Post a Comment