The Chord is Broken and Won't Get Fixed: The Cherry Orchard at T. Schreiber Studio (3/23/10)
Can You Say 'Joie de Vivre'?: Memories of Limonade
tous les Jours at The Cell Theater (3/24/10)
The
Chord is Broken and Won't Get Fixed
3/23/10:
On Thursday Night, March 18, I saw Anton Chekhov's The
Cherry Orchard in the 4th week of its 6 week run in the Gloria Maddox Theatre at the T. Schreiber Studio, 151 W.
26th Street, in New York. It is directed by Terry Schreiber. In the interests of full disclosure, he also directed
me in Pinter's The Birthday Party in 2005 and has been one of my two master teachers ever since. Terry has a
wonderful technique in which he has his advanced students immerse themselves in the work of one playwright a semester.
Terry is a man who wears his passion for the theatre on his sleeve. He loves it all. But his love and understanding
of all writers is not created equal. None is less equal than his love of Chekhov. Working on scenes with him from
the 4 great full length plays and the various one-act "vaudevilles", hearing Terry's analysis of the various Chekhov
biographies, on the historical and cultural context of his time, and his relationships with the great figures in the Russian
theatre of that age is the greatest treat I've ever had in a classroom. It is very hard to believe that anyone on the
planet has a greater love for that body of work, has spent more time thinking about each moment, each relationship, and each
flicker of life and all its myriad tragicomic possibilities.
In the 1990 he did a complete cycle of the
four plays at his studio and the people who were around then still speak of the experience on both sides of the non-existent
footlights in hushed tones of sheer awe. And so it was with the greatest expectations that I went to see The
Cherry Orchard, not my personal favorite among the four, but the one that is usually described as Chekhov's greatest
achievement.
I left the theatre scratching and shaking my head.
The production was not what I'd expected. Quite simply, I didn't get it. It took that wonderful critic Martin
Denton in his review in NYTheatre.com to explain it to me. I now believe that Terry Schreiber has done something very
new, very different and very brave. It is precisely in the ways that it most irritated, confused and angered me that
it succeeds. If I didn't get it as I watched it, it is because I failed to check my baggage at the door. My teacher
is still teaching me.
If you grew up in a leftward-leaning home and community as I did, The Cherry Orchard
occupies a very special and specific place. Along with Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest which was 9 years
earlier and Shaw's Heartbreak House which was published 15 years after The Cherry Orchard (and Chekhov's
death), the play shows the utter bankruptcy of the aristocracy at the apex of its social system. But Madame Ranevskaya,
her family and her circle are not the silly souls whose last vestige of currency is their prized wit as in Wilde, nor are
they the oafish, callous buffoons of Shaw's portrait. Rather in the play as I grew up with it, and as I've always seen and
imagined it done well, they are people whose very civility and allegiance to the way life has always been lived has deprived
them of the wherewithal to live. They have become gossamer and candy floss, ready to be blown away on the next great
wind. And Chekhov seemed to know what he did not live to see, that a very great wind indeed was getting ready to blow
them and every vestige of their world off the planet. Although these people are teeming with incalculably rich quirky
life, they lack the vitality to survive. The only character who clearly has such vitality is Lopakhin, the son of a
former serf on the Ranevskaya estate who has become a successful businessman and who tries continuously to show Ranevskaya
whom he clearly likes and admires what she needs to do in order to avoid destruction. That she is incapable of taking
his advice is not his fault and in the end he becomes owner of the estate and does what reality and reason demand: He
orders the beautiful cherry orchard cut down and so becomes the instrument of putting an end to the world they have known.
For those of us who believed that the Russian aristocracy brought
about its own destruction and by their own actions and inaction made the Communist Revolution an inevitability, that's what
The Cherry Orchard was about. For all that we learned about the Terror, the crimes of Stalin, the purges
and the Gulag, we still believed that the Revolution was an historical necessity mandated by the fatal failure of the aristocracy
to come to grips with reality and winds of history. Chekhov's great play was Exhibit One.
What Terry Schreiber
has done in this production is nothing short of turning all that on its head. There is very little that qualifies as
tragedy here. It is an antic, comic rendering of the play, alternately boorish and bitter. We are greeted by a
very spare set, the Ranesvky's nursery with almost no furniture or set dressing. There are no trappings of a great,
even a once great estate. From the opening lines everything seemed to proceed at break-neck speed, not at all the elegaic
pace I anticipated. We never are allowed the luxury of seeing the beauty of life as it was once lived on the estate through
their eyes. Even Ranevskaya's grief over her lost, drowned son seems sentimental and rather like a dress that she puts
on when appropriate or needed to deflect attention from her refusal to address the reality of her circumstances. There
is nothing remotely heroic about her.
But just as surely
there is nothing heroic about Lopakhin, perhaps even less so. He is still trying to lay out a plan that can save Ranevskaya
by giving her the capital she will need to live out her days in comfort and to provide for her many dependents, at the cost
of the cherry orchard which he reasonably states is already lost. But there is something cloddish about this Lopakhin. He
seems awkward and uncomfortable in his own skin. He seems less like the New Man that both 19th Century socialists and 20th
century communists were so fond of thinking of as the world's salvation and more like a shrewd Russian peasant who knows that
time and history are on his side. In the end, as he returns to the estate from the auction at which it is being sold for debt
he seems indecently light-hearted when he reports that not only has the cherry orchard been sold, but that he is the purchaser.
He is petty and vengeful. There is no hope for the future: the New Man will crush all that was beautiful in the old life
under his boot even as he sweeps the human detritus who once owned him and his ancestors out of their home. And neither the
New Man or the old aristocrats have in fact ascertained that the faithful, ancient and addle-pated Firs has not been taken
to the hospital as they think but rather left locked up alone, as doomed as the doomed house that imprisons him: The good
people of Russia abandoned by their old masters and their new ones to await their fate.
The theatre craft in support
of all this is all singing from the same page. Hal Tiné, who has proved that he can design beautiful and ornate sets
time and again in so many productions at the Studio (including the aforementioned Pinter plays), on Broadway and elsewhere,
is unstintingly spare and harsh in his earth-toned, unadorned modular set which goes from Nursery to garden to ballroom and
back to Nursery with a minimum of fanfare. Denis Parichy's lighting doesn't give an inch to the flickering amber candlelight
which usually illuminates the first and final acts. Dawn Testa's costumes deny us a sense of any particular period. Whether
by design or sloppy execution (and I suspect the former) Bronwen Carson's choreography and the dance-accompanying portions
of Chris Rummel's sound score deprive us of the one piece of unadulterated beauty and elegance to which I would have thought
we were entitled, the final ball on the eve of the auction which comes across instead as feverish and frenetic. There is
something Brechtian about all this as though Schreiber wants to make it impossible for us to empathize with any of these people
lest we miss his point. The performances are also utterly faithful to the director's intent. Julie Garfield as Ranevskaya
is a silly, shallow, dithering, self-absorbed wastrel. It is as impossible to like her as it is to deny the tremendous skill
and remarkable tools she brings to bear to make sure that we don't. Her performance was astounding in that she was so truthful
in rendering her character that I never believed her, not when she professed her love for her thieving, cheating lover, nor
for her lost son, nor for any of the lost souls who looked to her for sustenance. Jamie Kirmser's Lopakhin was equally consistent.
He never gave in to tenderness or sentimentality. There was one moment, the aborted marriage proposal to Varya, which made
me uncomfortable because I felt that the work was showing. He almost crawled across the stage as he tried unsuccessfully to
force his knee to bend to Ranevskaya's will. It felt like an idea. Had the production been even more thoroughly deconstructionist
than it was it might have worked, but for me on that evening it didn't. However, I quibble. For the most part he was thoroughly
in control of his instrument and used it with great skill in conveying a man whose success had never salved his wounds. His
victory lap at the play's end, his vengeful, spiteful laughter on becoming the master where he had once been property, was
repellent, distasteful and little short of brilliant. Aleksandra Stattin's Varya was unremittingly embittered, but never
mournful in spite of her black dress. I thought she bore her anger with great dignity. She never seemed to believe for a
moment that happiness could be her lot and the anguish that usually attends the proposal scene was completely absent. She
knew she was playing a losing hand but like her mother, like Russia's entire ruling class, seemed unwilling and unable to
change the game or break the rules to achieve a different outcome. Peter Judd's Firs was the only character in the entire
play with whom I felt sympathy, and this was certainly Schreiber's intent. He was the pure victim, the only character who
was not undone by his own folly or revealed by his own cupidity. It was lovely work in every way. The remainder of the characters
were faithful and largely thankless servants of the direction. Rick Forstmann as Gaev, Robert Pusillo as Simeon-Pischik,
Alec Head as Yephikhodov, Julie Szabo as Charlotta, Laine Bonstein as Anya, Parker Dixon as Yasha and Marcus Lorenzo as Trofimov
all brought complex and specific details of their lives to bear in saying things profound and inane that kept events flying
along to their inevitable conclusion. I sometimes felt that the pacing was working against them, rather like a 33 1/3 RPM
LP being played at 45, but for the most part it worked in support of the production concept.
In the end, I felt like the stool
had been kicked out from under me. It was like finding out all over again that the noble liberals who went to fight the fascists
in Spain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were just dupes of the Comintern, that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg really were
spies. This Cherry Orchard suggests that the sins of the fathers will not be expiated by the sons. Rather
it tells us things about the human condition, who we are as people, that no matter how true we'd really rather not know. It
robs us of the poetry of revolution and leaves us despairing of human nature.
Can
you say 'Joie de Vivre'?: Memories of Limonade tous les Jours
03/24/10:
This spring here in New York we will have an opportunity that is supposed to be denied mortals: A second
bite at the apple.
This spring, from April 3 - 17 at The Cell Theatre in Chelsea, 338 W. 23rd Street will
be home to "Limonade tous les Jours". Tickets are available at Ticket Central, Although the production has
not begun performances yet, rest assured this is one not to be missed.
Over the course of a lifetime
you will have a handful of transcendent experiences in a theatre. That is a promise. Were it not true, no one
would ever go to theatre and Thespis, the ancient Greek actor who history tells us was the first would be diva to step out
of the chorus line and speak solo lines to the audience thus inventing this thing called theater as we know it, wouldn't even
be a footnote. Nothing is worse than bad theatre; a bad movie isn't even in the same class of painful pastimes.
The majority of what ones sees even if you were diverted and entertained by it along the way has dissolved by the time you
hit the street. The reason why theatre has survived for 2,500 years, the reason why we keep going in spite of rising
ticket prices and falling expectations, is that now and again, perhaps about as often as the NY Mets win championships, something
happens to you in a theatre that takes over your whole being. Your intellect, all your senses, and all your energy are
enlivened and completely absorbed by what is happening between you, the other members of the audience and the actors.
It happened to me when I saw the APA Phoenix Company do "Three Sisters" in 1964, when I saw Hal Prince's Candide
in 1974, when I saw Christopher Martin's "Miss Julie" in 1998 and again when I saw "The Ice Man Cometh"
in London in 1999. It didn't happen again until I saw "Limonade tous les Jours" in the spring of 2007 in the
least likely setting for such an experience imaginable.
On Saturday May 19, 2007, I was sitting in the class of
my other Master teacher, Austin Pendleton, at the venerable and invaluable HB Studio, when he announced that a student in
his MFA directing class at the New School University, Diana Basmajian, was having final rehearsals that weekend prior to a
showcase uptown at the 59 E. 59 theatres, of Charles Mee's "Limonade tous les Jours". Austin said that he'd
be appearing in it along with two actors from the masters acting program. He also said that we could see that afternoon's
rehearsal for free. Never one examine a gift horse's dental work, I trekked the 100 yards or so down Bank Street.
We were ushered in from the warm sunshine of a lovely day in May into what has to be the coldest venue in the history
of theatre. I'm not speaking of the ambient temperature so much as a window-less off white cinderblock bunker with folding
chairs. It would have been fine as a group fall-out shelter but promised very little as a theatre. My expectations were
further dampened, if such a thing were still possible, by the appearance of a low-end boom box on a folding table which, I
took it, would be the source of the soundscape for the show. I didn't even know the name "Charles Mee" at
the time and knew very little of the MFA programs at the New School. While watching Austin work is always a treat, I
settled in for a slog with respect to the production as a whole.
Now I do know the name of Charles Mee and more.
He was the Signature Theatre's retrospective author for the 2007-2008 season. I do not know him but I love and applaud
his sense of intellectual property rights. He has published all his plays in their entirety on his website which he
calls the (re)making project. He says that there is no such thing as an original play and invites other writers to pillage
his work, not to "just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like
better", but pillage them as he has pillaged "the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and
stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet" in order to build their own, entirely new pieces.
He then adds the proviso that if you wish to perform them, the rights are available and provides the link to his agent.
Fair enough. Well done!
Although his plays were well-received
in the Signature season, I find them uneven. It is said that "Limonade ..." is his most accessible.
Perhaps that explains my affinity for it.
He starts out in the text simply enough (although outside the cinderblock
bunker it might give a designer pause):
"[Outdoors.
A hundred slender young chestnut trees.
Late spring.
Blue, blue sky.
A cafe table.
Ya Ya, a young French woman, sits at the cafe
table.
Andrew, an American man in his fifties, enters, looking out of place,a video camera in his hand.]"
The temperature in the bunker began to rise precipitously as soon as we met Ya Ya played by an extraordinary
Australian actress, Eleanor Handley, spewing great hunks of more life than this young woman conceivably ought to have lived,
in fractured English with the most delicious and perfect coquettish French accent. She informs Andrew who she does not
know that the friend whom he came to meet won't be coming. Played wonderfully by Austin, Andrew is the soul of distraction,
uncomfortable in his or anyone else's skin, living life by skimming its surface, never engaging, asking little, getting little,
"crawling toward death" as Shakespeare put it. Ms. Handley's Ya Ya is the very opposite, living life
without any governor. Her failed marriage to an older man has not taught her to retreat but rather to continuously advance
with undiminished audacity. The chemistry between these two was as electric as it was unlikely.
There is
a third character, a true descendent of Thespis, who sometimes observes as we observe, sometimes plays a Greek chorus by singing
a song which comments upon the action, and sometimes engages the duet. In the script the role is described as a Vietnamese
waiter, a castrati to boot. Given that even in NY coming up with trained Vietnamese castrati actors isn't easy, it isn't
clear how bounded one need be in casting this role. In the production I saw three years ago, the role was played
beautifully by Laura Gourdine, an African-American woman of many sublime talents. Her singing and dancing in a very
eclectic collection of styles was superb, and her joyousness was infectious.
The style of the show was so well
integrated, so encapsulated in every moment and every exchange, and the arc of the play so clearly set forth, that I knew
Ms. Basmajian's hand was very much in evidence in an extremely salutary manner.
I was riveted to the entire play
from end to end. I went home and told my wife that we had to go back together on Sunday so that she could see it.
She can be a stern critic and generally has too many things competing for her attention on a Sunday afternoon. As we
watched the show, I could tell by the look on her face that time was standing still for her and the tears in her eyes were
truly tears of joy. Can you say "Joie de Vivre"?
For this production, Ms. Basmajian has made the
choice to revert a little closer to Mee's stated intention and cast the Vietnamese Waiter with a male actor, Anton Briones.
I've heard him sing and he's a good one.
I am very excited to be able to get back to Paris and have another go
round with these people.
THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH
To
make room on this page, I’ve been forced to archive the older items. If anyone cares to catch up on my comments on performing
Goldberg in Terry Schreiber's production of Pinter's “The Birthday Party” (February, 2005), reactions to the Birmingham
Rep performance of “The Birthday Party” in Cambridge, England and my visit with Sir Harold Pinter (April, 2005),
my comments about Sam Shepard’s "Fool for Love” (December, 2005), appearing in new plays by newer playwrights
(September, 2006), appearing in Austin Pendleton's production of Arthur Miller's "The American Clock" (November,
2006), On Playing Major Roles in Feature Films (February, 2007), BFA Playwriting Showcase (May, 2009), The Norman Conquests
(May, 2009), or Under the Radar: Undergraduate Student Films (November, 2009) please Click here to Email me a request.
