Enjoy technology, Bill Kellar writes, but don’t write off the universities.
This week’s podcast from The Arabist on de-Qadhafization
The Lit Saloon on a French theatrical adaptation of Alaa al-Aswany’s Chicago
Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s identifies with Peggy Olson – no, actually Holden Caulfield. Huh?
How to Architect demonstrates how to write like an architect one letter at a time.
Alice Rawsthorn defines design.
I just read the script and I can’t wait to see this play in November. Read up on playwright Katori Hall in The New Yorker (abstract) and The New York Times. Reading the play (and, I imagine, seeing it) makes this clip from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech all the more moving.
A French Russophile coined the famous quote, “We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat,” and Nikolai Gogol likely had an influence on Chekhov, born 50 years after the realist pioneer.
But it is Chekhov’s overcoat – or, perhaps, his iconic pince-nez – from under which modern drama originally emerged, at least according to The New York Review of Books, reviewing the Classic Stage Company’s 2011 production of The Cherry Orchard. Writer Giles Harvey references a characteristic speech from the play in which Madame Ranyévskaya wordily rebukes her brother for his empty talk:
It is a typical moment that showcases Chekhov’s greatest artistic discovery, one without which much of twentieth century literature would be unimaginable: that plays and stories could be made out of life’s dross, the anti-drama and non-events that comprise so much of day-to-day life for most people.
Translator Paul Schmidt echoes the same idea in the introduction to his volume of Chekhov plays:
What Chekhov accomplished, in a kind of miraculous progression through those four last plays, was gradually to cut away the melodramatic moments of the ‘plot,’ or shift them offstage, leaving finally only his characters’ helpless, unheeding responses to those moments.
And suddenly the whole fabric of nineteenth-century theater collapses. The rule of causality, the idea that every act is subject to consequences, that morality is a matter of rectitude or retribution – all that vanishes . . . Chekhov’s own description of what he was up to is best: ‘What happens onstage should be just as complicated and just as simple as things are in real life. People are sitting at a table having dinner, that’s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.
German choreographer Pina Bausch died just a couple of days before this film was to begin shooting. Wim Wenders, best known for the 1987 feature Wings of Desire, has nonetheless created an utterly mesmerizing 3D tribute to a genius of the body.
Watch the trailer above or here.
A so-called “problem” play bears little resemblance to a “problem child” – in the topsy-turvy realm of theater a problem becomes an invitation to limitless reinvention and amusement. No matter how many times the problem is “solved,” it begs a new solution to suit a new “now,” thus the enduring debate as to the proper mood of The Cherry Orchard, despite indications that some productions have satisfactorily resolved the most basic dilemma in the author’s favor.
A 1976 production, the cast of which included the young Meryl Streep (pictured above), “is not only a comedy, it is a comedy played as a tragic farce,” gushed Clive Barnes in The New York Times:
Because the players in this charade of decaying death are people rather than puppets you are touched, and because they are even clowns rather than people you are amused. When you are both amused and touched something very special happens to our hearts – they are uplifted to the giddy, bitter laughter of the gods.
Peter Marks, writing in 2002 about the only English-language film adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, neatly identifies the central challenge in adapting Chekhov: Characters’ “predicaments are often tragic and funny at the same time. In the wrong hands, the wry humor undercutting the sadness is lost, and all the tension melts away, leaving a stagnant puddle.”
Authorial intention, though it may loom large in the minds of some directors, clearly matters less when the author is no longer alive to be dragged red faced and shouting from the theater. An ideal Chekhov production today (and tomorrow) is, necessarily, a movement away from the original creation – from Russian into English (or another language), from parts written for specific actors in the Moscow Art Theater to sometimes radically new, contemporary incarnations, from the earliest naturalistically melancholy interpretations to “‘Alice in Wonderland’ absurdity”.
More adventurous adapators have ventured still further, exploring the wider circle of lives evoked by the play or those of the author himself and his family, such as Jovanka Bach’s Chekhov & Maria. In 2010, playwright Dan Rebellato described several such productions in The Guardian:
Helen Cooper’s portrait of the unhappy Mrs Vershinin, or Brian Friel, whose Afterplay imagines the meeting of Sonya from Uncle Vanya and Andrey from Three Sisters. Reza de Wet’s Three Sisters Two and Nic Ularu’s The Cherry Orchard Sequel place Chekhov’s characters in the tumult of the 1917 revolution. Other plays have wondered how Arkadina reacted to her son’s suicide and how the sisters would actually fare if they ever got to Moscow.
Rebellato himself penned Chekhov in Hell: “The first scene gives us the death of Chekhov; in the second, he is startled to wake from a 100-year coma and takes a bewildered tour of contemporary Britain, from lapdancing to reality TV, feng shui to Twitter.”
Image: Meryl Streep as the maid Dunyásha in the 1976 production of The Cherry Orchard at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.
Image: The original poster from the debut 1904 production of Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. Click on the image to read a review of the production originally published in The Manchester Guardian on 28 December 1904.
Even cut free from its roots, Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard carries with it, as freight, the tragedy overhanging its author’s life. Chekhov’s tuberculosis progressed with such exquisite slowness that it resembles a metaphor of itself, a dim, gloomy background that – first intermittently, then increasingly – intruded onto Chekhov’s determinedly cheerful foreground.
By the time of The Cherry Orchard‘s composition, Chekhov’s illness had become so severe that even writing four lines a day gave him “intolerable pain,” he confided to his wife. And yet, even as pain advanced, death remained offstage, inconceivable, intangible to the point that Chekhov, mere months before he succumbed, raised the possibility that he might go to the front of the Russo-Japanese War and serve as a doctor.
Years earlier, Chekhov had remarked on this wondrous remoteness of death. In 1888, he’d spent the summer in a cottage on the Lintvaryov family’s estate. One of the Lintvaryov’s daughters, a doctor, was then dying of a brain tumor. Chekhov wrote:
“What seems strange to me is not that she is about to die, but that we do not feel our own death and write [stories] as though we would never die.”
During the action of The Cherry Orchard, the characters hear the strange, sad sound of a bucket falling down a mine shaft, which is typically interpreted, as “pronouncing the new industrial order that will ruin the feckless family,” in the words of biographer V.S. Pritchett.
And yet, this bird-like cry, receding just as quickly as it ascends, also evokes unexpected awareness of mortality, that sense of emerging, sometimes without clear cause, from the blissfully unconscious stream of life and breathing in the cold certainty of its end. The foreknowledge of our own, inevitable passing away haunts us all, but it also slips by us, first because we can no more hold it in our minds than we can capture the air in our hands, and also because it manifests itself at precisely that instant when we are most powerless to mindfully receive it.
In the same way, Madame Ranyévskaya and her family are aware of the threat to their beloved cherry orchard but can do nothing to save it; all they can do is pass the time acting out their universal shadow play of joy and pain.
Image: Anton Chekhov in 1887, 1898 and 1904.
