What We Talk about When We Talk about Chekhov
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…