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Now in its fourth year at the Lower East Side's venerable Connelly Theater, The LITE Company's exuberantly ambitious Chekhov NOW Festival offers a full menu of Chekhovian delicacies from the full-course meal to the lightest aperitif. Not satisfied with simply re-mounting Chekhov's major, best-known plays and dramatizations of his better-known short stories, General Manager Daniel Matz, Artistic Director Adam Melnick, literary manager Peter Campbell, and Co. have assembled a wide variety of riffs and variations on Chekhovian themes that should engage both the seasoned connoisseur and the curious newcomer. Not that all eight entries in this year's festival are at equal levels of accomplishment and expertise (the single performance Russian-language "About Love" and the "Vodka Cabaret" are not reviewed here); in fact, the festival is wildly uneven. But that tends to add to its overall appeal. Leading the pack this year by several lengths is The Tinderbox Theatre Group's aching, eloquent presentation of "The Three Sisters". The most relentlessly dark and uncompromising of Chekhov's major plays, "Sisters" asks the question, "what are we willing to settle for in life? And, in the process, how much of our true selves do we bury and deny?" Typically, the playwright not only offers no answers, but leaves those actors brave enough to take on his plays to sink or swim with only his elegant poetry of ennui and longing to grab a hold of. There is no plot to speak of, no comfortable coda of explanation, no denouement. Only questions, and more questions. Director Cynthia Croot guides her ensemble flawlessly in seamless, fluid cohesion. Croot understands the tightrope Chekhovian actors must walk at all times, with farcical, absurdist comedy on the one side and abject tragedy on the other, and she keeps her cast balanced and focused throughout. As the three sisters, Angela Fie, Aimee Phelan and April Sweeney each has her moments without one overwhelming or overshadowing the others. Fie's throaty-voiced Olga is stoic and determined, as one would expect a schoolmistress and elder sister to be; Phelan's proto-flapper Masha is brimming to the bursting point with an ineffable frustration and desire, and Sweeney's kid sister Irina moves from bubbly ingenue to yet another tired victim claimed by a dead-end life. Among the admirable supporting cast, Robert Honeywell's diminutive Kulygin is a particular gem. Cast in the role of Masha's obliviously blissful husband, Kulygin is a role too often portrayed as a nattering buffoon easily dismissed. Honeywell gives his small town schoolteacher a depth and humanity beneath the blithe platitudes that is oddly endearing and, ultimately, heartwrenchingly real. If you see nothing else in this wide-ranging festival, by all means see Tinderbox's "Three Sisters". It may be some time before we see another production as all-around impeccable and well-crafted as this. If Olga, Masha and Irina wondered how they were ever going to get out of Palookaville and back to Moscow, Matt, Luke and Jon (say, do those names sound like..?) in Nick Salamone and Maury H. McIntyre's musical "Moscow" wonder if they will ever get out of this personal hell of a theater they are trapped in. In a Sartresque conceit Chekhov's absurdist progeny Beckett and Ionesco might also have appreciated, three gay men are stuck -- apparently for all eternity -- in an empty theater with a stuffed sock, a stick to knock it around with, and a sole copy of "The Three Sisters". When not slipping into sudsy melodrama of unrequited lust and longing amongst the three that is more daytime television than Chekhov, "Moscow" is an intriguing riff on the old "Three Sisters" standard. Clay Storseth, Alan Mingo, Jr. and Nic Arnzen as Jon, Matt and Luke possess strong presence and very pleasing pipes, although Arnzen's Alabama dialect comes and goes to the point of distraction and sounds more from "Dukes of Hazzard" than our 22nd state. But when you see an African-American man (Mingo)'s Masha professing her love to a rumpled, academic-looking Vershinin (Storseth), and it works, you have a practical application of the timelessness of Chekhov's characters and themes. Whether it is three 19th-Century women in rural Russia or three gay men in the twilight zone, we all as human beings have the same doubts and desires. And
that, at its core, is what this trip to "Moscow" is all about. Ever wondered what a trainwreck looks like onstage? A really big, messy trainwreck where there are no survivors? Then look no further than The Jovial Crew's high-speed, head-on demolition of "The Cherry Orchard". Without even the shred of a conceptual throughline or sustained line of thinking, the gags and gimmicks ricocheting randomly about this "Orchard" seem at best the bleary-eyed result of a late-night undergrad dorm room beer bust. Nothing approaching deconstructive theater or even moderately clever burlesque is anywhere in sight here. The clues to the approaching calamity come early, with an opening lip-sync of Screaming Jay Hawkins' "I Put A Spell On You", a great old tune that has absolutely no connection with any of the themes of Chekhov's play. Throwing a whammy on someone? Possessive, controlling desire? Rising up out of coffins? Where do these relate in any way with anything that happens in the play? They don't. But then, neither does much of anything else that happens here. Deconstructing -- or even trashing -- the classics can be a lot of fun and at its best, informative, both of the original text and of the zeitgeist from which the tweaked version is spawned. But effective textual anarchy requires both a firm grasp of the original and a clear concept of why and how it is being dismantled, neither of which director Darren Gobert seems to have even the slightest clue. Of the game and able cast made to suffer along with the rest of us through Gobert's frat-boy party of a production, Alex Greenshields' Gayev and Peter Judd's Firs manage best to maintain a Chekhovian essence to their characters. An amazing accomplishment, under the circumstances. Hopefully,
no one seeing this slash&burn violation of a great play will mistake
it for the real thing. That crotchety old valet, Firs, manages to exact some revenge for the years of ridicule and disrespect suffered at the hands of his employers in "The Ghost of Firs Nicolaich". The time here is...is...well, Sam Mossler's original play is more than a bit murky on that detail, but the place is definitely the old Ranevskaya estate from "The Cherry Orchard" sometime after it was purchased by the nouveau riche ex-serf Lopahkin and the orchard chopped down and subdivided into condo tracts. The present owner of the villa, Sonya (Becca Tracey) languishes in true Chekhovian fashion while servants Carlotta (Anne Brendle) and Grisha (John Gregorio) bicker over who keeps moving the furniture that seems to, well, move itself. Playwright Mossler -- who also plays the ghostly Firs -- has a low-key, taciturn writing style that doesn't seem to be pursuing anything particularly deep-dish yet is by and large engaging. In a particularly sly nod to Western befuddlement over the Russian penchant of two-dozen-plus names for every character, Sonya repeatedly calls Carlotta by other names. When finally called on it, she exclaims in exasperation, "I don't see why we have to have so many damn names!" Mossler's plot -- such as it is -- involves the quest for a medium to exorcise the ghost of Firs from the villa. The medium turns out to be Varya, the adopted daughter from "Cherry Orchard", who has gone from a serious young woman to a histrionic wacko. Other characters show up along the way, including Sonya's strident younger sister Varushka (Meaghan Love), their gonzo, non-sequitur spouting father, and a young Leon Trotsky (Bryan Brendle, whose hair is just so Trotsky), who drops in with a hookah and some really good dope. Later, the Volga rises up and submerges everything. Now, about when all of this is supposed to be happening...Mossler and director Tim Herman give us all kinds of conflicting clues: the women's dress suggests 1912-15 while the gramophone and music suggest early 1920s, as do the references to the hammer-and-sickle and the Cossacks. The most direct reference is when Trotsky announces he is 22, which would make it about...1901, when the "Orchard" was but a gleam in Anton Pavlovich's eye and three years before the original play premiered. Ah,
well. Pass the hookah. The Festival's sponsoring LITE Co. contributes one of three productions with a dramatization of Chekhov's classic tale of a casual fling with lingering repercussions of desire and misery, "The Lady With The Dog". As adapted and directed by Literary Manager Peter Campbell, this "Lady" is ingeniously staged with some cleverly skewed perspectives, but Campbell pares his scenes and propels his cast at such a breathless anecdotal pace that he approaches but a series of dizzying blackouts, making it difficult for Flavio Romeo's Dmitri and Jen Daum's Anna to establish and maintain the continuity and arc of the story. Although there is chemistry between these two, Campbell doesn't seem to be much interested in his characters. The driving force here seems to be, "how quickly can we get through this?" Updated to the present day, there is no indication, for example, of Dmitri's consideration of women as "the lower race", nor the telling implications of his observation that "the lace trimming on (women's) underclothes reminded him of fish scales." Similarly, Anna's deep, all-consuming and desperate loneliness, so essential to the core of her character and actions, is left largely unexplored. Daum
and Romeo take their moments where they can and remain admirably focused
throughout the frenzied pace, but the question remains: Chekhov's
story has been around for 103 years and a classic for most of that
time. There are reasons for this. Why not take the time to explore
them? Why the big hurry? Chekhov NOW's Artistic Director Adam Melnick stages Judythe Cohen's adaptation of "Rothschild's Fiddle" with mixed result. Not one of Chekhov's better stories, the themes and conflicts of "Rothschild" lie mostly on the surface, with little of Chekhov's trademark subtext at work here. A bitter, miserly old bigot of a coffin-maker named Yakov (Tom Ligon) finds solace in playing his fiddle. His wife dies. After bequeathing his beloved fiddle to Rothschild, a Jewish fellow musician whom Yakov goes out of his way to racially dis, Yakov dies. End of story. It's an uninspired tale, and Melnick's insistence upon flat, wing-to-wing blocking (there is little, if any, diagonal use of the stage) doesn't help. What
is inspired is Cohen's adaptation. By dramatizing visions of the life
this bitter old man may have had while playing his fiddle (Chekhov
has the old boy merely sit and ponder at the river), Cohen breathes
some much-needed theatricality into a rather ordinary story and provides
both the visual and dramatic highlight of this production. "Showing life as it is in dreams." Treplev's observation has never resonated more fully than it does in "Gull", EB&C's starkly haunting adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull". Director Ellen Beckerman, the "EB" of EB&C ("C" is apparently everyone else), moves her actors in and out of a designated space on a bare stage. Character's lines are directed outwardly, presentational style, with the actors rarely looking at one another. Mix in the grad school-flavored program notes with references to "taut, restrained physicality" and "butoh-esque fluidity" and you've got all the necessary ingredients for a long night of sheer torture at the theater, right? Wrong. In fact, the very opposite is true. Minimalizing the blocking, costume, setting, and even character interaction serves to highlight Chekhov's text rather than obscure or detract from it. And this is not a reading; Beckerman's minimalist but concise choreography forms a kind of dreamlike text sculpture, the likes of which we've never before seen, with Chekhov or anyone else. "Gull"'s cast is uniformly solid throughout, with Colleen Madden's Arkadina and Margot Ebling's Nina particularly strong. Ebling delivers Nina's always problematic "I'm a seagull/no I'm an actress" speech with a mixture of anger and longing that is, like the rest of this production, powerful in its potent economy. Effectively
framed with excerpts from Chekhov's wife, Olga Knipper's, letters
to him, "Gull" is a beautifully conceptualized and realized work. The LITE Co.'s final contribution to the festival is a sliver of "The Anna Project" a work-in-progress based upon Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be Anastasia, youngest daughter of the executed last Tsar. Be advised it may take longer to read the program notes than to see what LITE has up on its feet at this point, and so it is not yet possible to even speculate upon the project as a whole. What was presented November 10 showed a very promising mimed beginning that slipped alarmingly into goofy, skit-like vignettes completely at odds with the moody, haunting opening. Here's
hoping that as this project continues to develop, "Anna's" creators
will steer back towards the intriguing Anne Bogart/Twyla Tharp/Mary
Zimmerman opening and away from the Saturday Night Live. One final note: if you get to the Connelly early, Chekhov NOW gives you more to do than fiddle with your ticket stub. Check out the anteroom off the stage entrance and take in the extensive information on Chekhov posted all around the room, including a timeline of his life (one prominent omission: no mention of Chekhov's groundbreaking and life-shortening 1890-91 trip to Sakhalin Island) and reminisces of contemporaries, most prominently Maxim Gorky. So get there early and take a lap around. Or, simply obey the directive at the modest but potent-looking bar: ANTON SAYS: DRINK! And be sure to say hi to Kanako, the most excellent house manager.
"The Fourth Annual Chekhov NOW Festival" continues at The Connelly Theater, 220 E. 4th Street, NYC through November 24. 212.414.7773 for running dates and times of individual shows or visit Chekhov NOW on the Web. Copyright © 2002 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
