Rehearsal #13

No, no. I title the blog in jest. Nothing is too hard; hard is the point after all. But Act II, we decided, is probably the most difficult in the play. Maybe it’s also the most glorious. I think it’s the hardest because it contains the highest concentration of what have become Chekhovian clichés: arguments, unrequited love, complaints about death and illness, boredom. But as anyone who’s ever taken an undergraduate acting class can confirm, it’s also the Act that has the scenes that actors love to work on more than anything. Really powerful duets that you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. So it’s a joy and a burden at once.

As we worked on Act II today - an Act that happens in the dead of night during a summer storm - the grey clouds of New Haven descended onto the sunny blue skies that had started off the morning’s weather. If you’ve spent any time in New Haven, any time longer than a week, you know what I mean when I say the New Haven Greys. New Haven has its own shade of grey. It used to bring me down until I had a friend who taught me to love it. Just as it started to drizzle the greyest rain, she would always say, “I love this weather! Don’t you love it! New Haven!”…of course she was from Canada so what could she possibly know about weather?

Still. I do love the New Haven greys. And how romantic to feel them roll in as we plumb the depths of this strange, misty, thick and lovely 2nd Act of Uncle Vanya.

At the end of rehearsal we did the Sonya / Astrov scene, only to realize that the scene is about connection rather than lack of. Sonya and Astrov do find a connection between them; they just can’t come together completely. As we discussed that, I started to see a pattern form throughout this challenging act. The danger is to see it as a bunch of people fighting. The better path is to see how it’s about a group of people all trying to connect, almost making it, and just missing. It’s an act of near-misses. Of almost-works. When we see the characters about to connect, it’s only that much more heartbreaking when it falls apart.

Here’s a quote about Chekhov from Thomas Mann:
“The strange, helpless, stilted way in which his characters hold forth on the problem of existence almost borders on the ludicrous.”

Rehearsal #13
April 24, 2007

Dear Blog Readers
Today I have to talk to you about space.

We had a long and productive day of rehearsing. It’s the first day of the third week, and now that the whole play is staged, we can go back over what we’ve done, look at scenes all in a row, and start feeling out the bigger picture of the play.

Mark [Blum, who plays Vanya] [We make a lot of jokes about him being the titular character. That's funny if you put all the emphasis on the first syllable of the word, and maybe make your voice really high just for that syllable, and put some shoulder movement in it. Try it with me: titular. Hilarious, right?] [Hey, tiny pleasures in a sea of hard, hard work.]

So Mark talked about how now that he knows where Vanya is emotionally at the end of the play, it affects what he can do with the monologues at the top. He can’t play the end at the beginning. In this case that means if Vanya is facing real depression in Act IV, having attempted murder and then suicide, he has to start somewhere else at the top. He can’t be depressed and exasperated all the way through the play. Something has to change so he can get to that dark place in the end.

I was so excited to hear this, to think of all of us beginning to think of the story on the whole, rather than in separate pieces. Maybe I just have a big-picture kind of a brain, but this is always my favorite part of a rehearsal process. We look at the arc of the whole story, or the arc of a whole character, or of an Act, or of a scene, but it’s the full story now. This is the part that gets my blood going.

So far, this blog entry is just not about space at all. I’m failing you.

What’s important about SPACE is that we went to the theater today and ran some scenes from Act I on the stage! There’s no set, of course, and some walls are still up that will be taken down, but Gordon (wisely) wanted the actors to really get the feel of how truly big the space we’re dealing with is. Because the rehearsal room - though gorgeous and large, especially according to my paltry Manhattan standards [yes, I would love to pay you $200/hour to rehearse in your bathroom, thank you so much for allowing me to do so!] Still, this large rehearsal room is less than half the depth of the stage.

Well, it was a gorgeous experience stepping onto that stage. The energy lifted. They ran through scenes of act I with no props in their hands, no chairs to sit on, but a thrilling energy like the air was made of sugar. We were all grinning from ear to ear when we left for lunch. I once had a directing teacher who told me that he knew he would spend his life in this business because whenever he walked into a theater, even one he had never been to before, he immediately felt at home. Though some members of the Vanya company have acted on this stage before and some have not, we were all at home the moment we walked into that room. The vast space that Michael Yeargan has designed is going to be something thrilling. And now that the actors have that big space in their minds, something changes in their bodies, too.

So that’s space. It took a while, but I got there eventually.
Another late night chatty blog come and gone…

Rehearsal #12: Week 2 Wrap Up!

Finita La Commedia

Today we finished our second week, and we staged all of Act IV as well. Right on schedule, we’ve finished staging the whole play, and now we have 9 rehearsals in which we can go back over everything and give it another look. This is the time when the actors really start to know their lines and their characters, when you can see what staging works and doesn’t, when you pick some things apart and be pleasantly surprised when other things suddenly work. We start to put the real meat on the bones.

Since I haven’t written in a few days, I have miscellaneous thoughts for the readers. I hope without an order they can still be somewhat interesting. How about I put them in a list form to provide the illusion of order?

1) Literary Allusions: Today I noticed how many literary allusions there are in this play. More than in any of the other major Chekhov plays. Seagull has a fair amount of theatrical allusions, but Vanya has the literary ones - Turgenev comes up twice, and so does a mention of “like we’re in some kind of novel.” Since this is a play about people reconciling that dark contrast between their real lives and their dream lives, maybe the novels loom in their heads as either what reality should be or what it can’t ever be. Or both. What I wonder, though, is this: are these allusions giving us information about the characters - that they’re well-read? showing off to one another? - or is it a thematic clue. Is Chekhov himself making a comparison to a “Russian Novel,” or is it just the characters? I don’t know the answer.

2) Text / Sub-text: I think part of his genius is an understanding of how much sub-text we speak all day long every day. For instance, you ask me, “how was the show” and before I can answer “boring!” there are millions of images that flash through my head in less than a second. So I say “boring!” and it’s loaded with my memory of my bad experience at the show. I think Chekhov understood this about language, understood it in his bones. Every line the characters say has a tunnel of meaning that stretches out behind it. For every ten words there are ten million images.

3) Beckett: okay, look, I’m the furthest thing from a Beckett expert you could find. Just so you know that as a preface. Nonetheless, I will now proceed to make grand statements about Chekhov’s influence on him. [Indulge me, I'm only a grad. student for one more month, and then it will no longer be acceptable for me to wax on about things I know nothing about.] SO: I was really blown away today by the dialogue in Act IV, and how distinctly it reminds me of Beckett. As Astrov tells Vanya that it’s useless to wish for a better life, that this life is all we’ve got, I heard Endgame echoing in my mind: Use your head, can’t you? You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that. Then Sonya comes in at the end and insists, “We have to go on living.” It started to break my heart and give me chills the way a great Beckett play does. The images of nothingness, the great abyss…Chekhov could write that and still set his play in a drawing room. What a genius.

A very long blog…how tacky! I tend to get verbose late at night. Congratulations you for making it this far down the page.

Back on Tuesday for more Vanya Vanya Vanya …

Today, as we worked through the second Act and began staging the third, I was thinking about talking and listening in this play. The Professor complains that he’s not allowed to talk. Vanya’s mother Maria says she wants to talk, Vanya is tired of talking for fifty years, and Sonya worries that she talks about Astrov too much. [All of this, of course, from characters who talk to themselves with alarming frequency.] I don’t know what this means, but I think strong repetitions like that are a challenge and a gift in a play. How do you take note of those repetitions and carve them out enough in the performances so that the audience senses them, can draw the connection, but doesn’t feel berated by them? This is the Chekhovian challenge.

Gordon noticed that one of Vanya’s main characteristics is his willingness to make an ass of himself. Dramaturgically, that means comedy, but emotionally, it makes Vanya eminently loveable. I love this observation because it’s so deeply true, it fits so well into what I’ve always sensed about the character but never articulated.

Against the backdrop of Monday’s horrible tragedy in Virginia, certain lines stuck out to me today in ways they hadn’t before. This is the great privilege of spending your days in the rehearsal room with a great work of art: the days’ news or even your own life’s events aren’t extraneous details, but always more fertile information to throw into the process. When Yelena tells Vanya, “The world is not being destroyed by fires or…or criminals. The world is being destroyed by hate and envy.” I found myself thinking about the hatred in the shooter’s manifesto. His rage against his classmates, his envy of the world. Vanya dismisses Yelena’s words as petty philosophy, but I think she might be on to something in her own way.

Tomorrow Marco comes back and we go back to Astrov’s scenes in Act II.
good luck to us…

Rehearsal #7
April 17, 2007

Week #2 begins, and certain things are starting to sink in.

For instance, remember last week when I wrote about how quickly a company starts to come together? How you can mark the progression into comfort, as strangers turn into colleagues and then friends and finally a kind of family? Well today we crossed the boundary into real toilet humor. I will spare you the details — oh get your imagination out of the gutter, it was nowhere near as dirty as what you’re imagining. But I take it as a sign of positive progress that we laugh together like children over semi-dirty things.
That Mark Blum is a funny guy.

Oh, and other than potty-mouth jokes, there’s been lots of progress since my last write-up. Week 1 ended on an achievement-filled note, as we managed to find some staging for all of Act I, and a good chunk of Act II. Today we started up again at the top of Act II, made it all the way to the end, and saw some real forward movement. Thank goodness for the great big storm, now we can understand that second act a little bit better.

Assisting can be great because otherwise it’s so rare to get to watch another director handle time and manage staging. Everyone will handle it differently. In this process, Gordon strikes an even balance between giving the actors free reign to find their own moves, and pushing them along at times when they get stuck. It’s a balance beam walk - we must tell the story through the staging, find what fits for the actors’ bodies, and appease a three-sided audience, all at the same time. In the process of it, though, you start to see a play begin to take shape. The staging is a skeleton, the characters the flesh, and the story points are the blood that courses through the body’s veins.

Hey no one said it’s easy work. But at least we get to make some dirty jokes along the way. Tomorrow we’ll dig into Act III…

Rehearsal #4
April 13, 2007

Today we put most of Act I on its feet. I think everyone was surprised by how quickly we could get through the scenes. It feels good to lay down a first draft and know that we’ll come back to the scenes soon to continue the work. Like a layer cake or a brick wall, we work one level at a time, laying down a base coat and then layering on top of it as we learn more. Maybe that metaphor is wrong - maybe instead of building on top of, we’re burrowing into, digging deeper and deeper into the complex interplay of this nine-part orchestra. Whichever it is, build up or dig in, it’s a process we’re taking in steps, and today was a big one forward.

We talked about Astrov’s struggle between his own mind and his feelings. He says that his feelings are dead, but perhaps it was a conscious choice, a defense mechanism against the brutalities of love and real human connection. As Gordon put it, Astrov feels like his central life force, his enthusiasm for life itself, has faded. That may actually just be the experience of growing older for every human being, but Astrov won’t accept that. He’s taking it personally, and it’s driving him a little mad. [Maybe he sees himself as extraordinary, going through a crisis that stands outside the regular human experience. See yesterday's post…]

I like to think of this character who takes the psychological changes of aging as a personal offense to himself. There’s something dramatic and charming in a man like that. Chekhov always has the ability to make characters that I can imagine falling in love with in real life. Well, maybe I am Sonya after all. Or, as Gordon said on one of our first days, we all have all of these characters inside us somewhere. I think it’s true.

For the record, I’m embarrassed by some of the typos in yesterday’s blog. If I knew anything about “computers” or “the internet” or “technology at all” I would go in there and fix them. Luckily for us, you can be a total technological imbecile and still post your daily musings on a semi-public forum! [I think Anton Pavlovich would have been thrilled to know it.] And there will be a short lull over the weekend as I shuttle back and forth to New York between rehearsals. Never fear, we’ll start up again in earnest on Tuesday.

a happy weekend to everyone…

Rehearsal #3: April 12, 2007

A great director told me recently, “a week in the theater is like a year in regular life.” It’s true, and the closer you get to tech that sense of a time warp is only exaggagerated: you think, how will we ever be ready for an audience in that short of amount of time? two days? four days? less than a day? And you always are ready, somehow. Not as ready as you’d like, maybe, but in some way, ready.

Though we ‘ve only had three rehearsals for Uncle Vanya, still it feels like a week has gone by. Yesterday I wrote that the cast had started to feel like a real group, by now that’s ancient history. You can’t remember the day when we felt like strangers - though that was Tuesday. Soon enough you’re fighting like a family…

Today we spent our last day at the table, and once again we read through the entire play. Towards the end of Act III, I thought about how nice it is to sit over three days and read the whole play, together, over and over again. So everyone is absorbing all of it, even the parts they may not be in, so we’re all becoming familiar with the work in its entirety before we dig our hands into it scene by scene. As much as we’re reading it, we’re listening to it, and hearing it can be as valuable as the discussions themselves.

For me the thematic highlight of the day - was Jenny’s [Dundas, the actress playing Sonya] observation about ordinary and extraordinary people. She noticed that throughout the play, characters are afraid of their own ordinariness, and admiring other characters for what they see as extraordinary qualities. Some admire the Professor, some admire Yelena, but those two are no more happy than the others. They fear their own normality as much as anyone. In Act IV Astrov tells Vanya that he’s not insane, he’s just normal. To be this sad is to be a normal human being. Astrov can say that to Vanya, can see it in him, because it’s his own great fear and obsession, too. (There’s a little bit of Dostoyevsky in this ordinary / extraordinary, man / superman motif. Which is extra great because it’s always thrilling to connect Russians to other Russians, right?!)

I think Chekhov understood that these characters’ main problem is not actually their ordinariness, but their obsession with it. Each of them blindly pins glamour onto someone else, at the expense of their own happiness. They are blind to each other’s suffering, and so they all suffer alone.

Tomorrow we get up on our feet for the first time.
stay tuned…

Rehearsal Blog #2
We must work! [at the table]

Well yesterday’s blog took more of an abstract turn, so today I’ll stick to the literal. As in many rehearsal processes, we begin with table work. For any of you non-practitioners out there who might be reading this here rehearsal blog, table work means we sit at the table together and read the play and talk about anything we want to talk about.

Table work, I think, is especially important with Chekhov. You need the time at the table to get on the same page. What period are we in? What does it mean to be Russian? What do we do with these constant ellipses in the dialogue? With the right group of people, table work can feel like what we dreamt college might be: long, stimulating conversations around a conference table. [Unfortunately I spent most of college staying up all night rehearsing performance art in dark basements and sleeping in the daytimes, so if that's what it was like, I missed it.] Needless to say, this group is the right group. It was a good day!

At the top of the read, Gordon announced that anyone can stop the read to ask a question. So we read through the play and stopped whenever we needed to - the feeling in the room was relaxed but engaged. We talked about boredom, and how it’s really a form of rage. We talked about beauty: Gordon mentioned that beauty is a theme that runs throughout the play. Beauty and its effects on others; how the presence of beauty makes us feel about ourselves, how it can make you sad in a way. Beauty can be a reminder of all that we don’t have. I found myself thinking about what a remarkable character Yelena is (by the way, a lot of this blog will probably turn out to be, “and then I realized, Chekhov is sooouououooo good!” I apologize for that in advance, but there’s just no avoiding it.) Here is this gorgeous woman, and her beauty literally casts a spell on everyone around her, but when she opens her mouth to defend herself or to speak at all, she is complex and profound and unhappy and tormented and often kind. We’re forced to see beauty from its other side. I guess I always expect the pretty girl characters to either be boring ingenues or evil witches. Yelena, of course, is anything but. As mentioned above, Chekhov is soouououooooo good…

Today rehearsal was filled with laughter. We are getting to know each other, getting comfortable, becoming a company.

Tomorrow we read the play again…

To start a rehearsal blog for Uncle Vanya…you just can’t help but wonder what Vanya might put in his blog…or Sonya… “Dr. Astrov came by today and I’m in love. Woke up early to cut the hay. Nana made the most delicious dumplings. yum yum.”…

Hello Long Wharf Rehearsal Blog!
I’m Shira Milikowsky, I’m assisting Gordon Edelstein on Uncle Vanya, and that makes me the blogger of the month, too. I will be your direct line into the intricacies and adventures of Uncle Vanya. I’m so pleased to be here —–

About me: I’m a theater director, currently finishing my MFA at Columbia University, where I’ve been for the past 3 years. Before that I was an undergrad at Yale, and I’m almost-weirdly happy to be back in New Haven again. There’s something about this town that I just love. (Maybe it’s the burrito cart on Elm & York…) To learn a little more about me, or see pictures of some of my work, go to www.myspace.com/smilikowsky

Even more than cheap burritos, though, I love wrestling with the genius and mystery of Chekhov. And to do it with a group of smart, talented, impressive artists? So far it’s a dream.

Here are some of my impressions from day 1:

There’s something about that first day of rehearsal.
It smells of adrenaline - like a weird foreshadow of opening night –
And you can detect it more when you’re an outsider.

My first day at Uncle Vanya was really my first day at Long Wharf at all, so I spent a lot of time hugging the wall, or hovering behind Gordon or Eric, trying to overhear as many conversations as I could at one time. Taking it all in. (eavesdropping? no!) You know that feeling when you’re in a new place and you obsessively observe every element of it, every character? The simple act of watching and listening becomes a full body experience: incredibly intense, and literally absorbing.

Gordon started the morning off when he talked to everyone at the Meet & Greet* about what it is to embark upon a great play. It’s a different experience when the play you’re about to start is one of the GREATS. It’s daunting, and that’s the point of it. Maybe that’s its purpose in the world. Hours later when he was on an entirely different subject, he said that the best performance feels like a rehearsal. It feels like a rehearsal because you’re going for something, striving, rather than simply doing. I think these two ideas go together: that is, the best way to tackle a great play is to be fully conscious that you’ll constantly be going for something - going and going and going - which is a different experience than constantly achieving something. We won’t be setting goals and conquering them. We will, together, run this crazy marathon towards the ever-elusive deepest meaning of Uncle Vanya…

A little heady for a blog…and when Gordon said it, it sounded less abstract and more just plain wise. And enthusiastic. Like so much of what Gordon says - I’m starting to learn - it spilled over with infecting enthusiasm.

it’s a big rehearsal room, and it’s filled with people that I’m already in great awe of.
this will be a real adventure…

*In case you don’t know - how could you possibly not know? - a “Meet & Greet” is the social event at the start of the first rehearsal where everyone from the theater meets everyone in the production. Here at Long Wharf it comes with bagels. Which I appreciate.