341-3
March 30, 2004
Chekhov
Congratulations!
You all got together and you improvised Act One of Uncle Vanya—overnight!
First: you imagined the whole thing played in a strong major key. Good for you. Avoid the tendency to turn these people into whining moaning minor key types. They don’t know they’re in a Chekhov play. They love life. They want to live. They are vibrant people. You could still use a little Russian dancing before you go into the improvisation. A little kicking of feet into the air and shouting. They want to live. The drama comes from life throwing obstacles in their way, pushing down on them, trying to suck the energy and the will out of them. But they keep the struggle going right to the end. “We have to work, we have to work.” My mother says, ‘I wouldn’t mind dying. I’m too much of a coward to kill myself. So what do you do? You have to live.” And she says it in strong, solid, objective, common sense tones. No self-pity. No minor-key dramatics. Just down-to-earth truth. Period. Give your Chekhov people this solid, Slavic strength to begin with. Then let them individualize themselves from it. Elena can be right-on objective: ‘I’m just an incidental ornament in life.’ Period. No pity, no weeping.
You established essential character traits and then you got on with it, you let them play, let yourself respond, react, interact. Continue to work on this. It’s the best way to make major discoveries about acting and about drama. Use your work with others to tell you what further character traits your character needs. Then work alone to create more detailed characteristics, to establish other character capacities. But when you come back together, you forget all that and you let yourself create the environment, the situation, the drama, through sensory response to significant details. You play together, you discover the drama of Chekhov musical instruments playing against and with one another.
You must now work to create relationships. The same way as you work alone: You bale hay all day, you do the day’s accounts by an oil lamp in the study all evening, on the way to get ink for the well, you pause by your sister’s photo, touch it; you fall asleep reading by candlelight one more chapter of Crime and Punishment. The next day you hitch up the buggy (all the hands are in the field mowing the hay) and take this month’s profits to the bank to convert into a note to send to the Professor. Meanwhile the actor working on Astrov has been doing the same kind of work. (Blake must create the need to drink. When Marina says, ‘How about a little vodka?’, his first response is “Ooo, yeah, give me just a little one.” But before that response gets to play through, he sees something in her eyes, hears something in her voice that makes me say, ‘No thanks’ and then ‘ and I don’t drink every day.’—to which, by the way, she must have a response….)
Now get together and improvise/create their relationship. Improvisation is disciplined trial and error, is “thinking through” an idea in actors terms. Let the play guide you. Here they are: two intelligent, educated, passionate men—surrounded by Waffles and horse dealers and railway workers and peasants. They talk politics and literature—and they are passionate about both. Vanya makes Astrov at least promise to read the latest installment of Brothers Karamazov. Astrov prefers Turgenev and he can argue why. They both know what’s going on in the local county council: Isn’t there a plan to cut down that wooded area two miles east of the farm and put a new road in? They agree, they disagree, they are passionate. Why doesn’t Astrov volunteer to become a member of the council that makes decisions about forestry? Why doesn’t Vanya go to the next public meeting about taxing buying of fertilizers? Instead Astrov and Vanya get together and kill a couple of bottles of bourbon and rail against the ignorance and the venality around them.
Anyway, you must create the relationship between Vanya and Astrov before you work in any more detail on ‘scenes’. When Vanya’s mother mentions the pamphlets she just got, Astrov knows exactly what Vanya is thinking and he sends his line toward Vanya, even though he seems to be addressing the mother. (Vanya and Astrov shoot each other silent knowing glances through much of Act One. Not in an adolescent way, but in a sharing, glad-there’s-someone-who-understands way.) Do you see what I mean? It is this relationship that is being dramatized in that first scene between them. Incidental exposition is happening, but the focus for the audience is the more-than-a-decade-old relationship of these two men. Create it first. Then let it play during the scene. No director can give you all the images and pieces of images, the fragments of experience, the ideas, etc., that pass between people, beneath lines, before lines, playing around the edges of words spoken, feeding the subtle inflections with which words are sent in the ears of the others. But it is of this life-stuff that the director will help you shape the production you communicate to an audience.
We began to discover the source of Chekhov’s comedy today, too. Let us continue to focus on that. Many of the scenes we work on separately are dramatic climaxes of the plays and we can forget then that Chekhov has great humor and comedy in his plays. Work together, plan to do group scenes as well as two-person scenes, and Chekhov will lead you to make some pretty terrific discoveries about acting, about creation, about art, about theatre—about humanity.
Let it play.
This is one of the greatest lessons Chekhov can teach an ensemble of actors. Come together with each of your musical instruments tuned to concert pitch, each of you having worked to strike at least the dominant driving spine of the character, and then discover the Chekhov orchestrated music: let it play, let it happen, let yourself respond. Discover how much of the character’s inner life, inner thoughts, inner landscape of images and experiences, are actually in you to be touched off by the stimuli of the situation (and then go back to solitary work to fill in those gaps). Don’t worry now about cutting people off or talking simultaneously, etc. Those things happen in real life all the time. When you are working now, you are working to discover the layered fullness of the life that lives behind Chekhov’s lines, so that the lines burst forth from a strong passion of responses or ride lightly over responses or play against a response…or…or…or…. You are creating the drama (the subject of this year’s work) that you will at later stages of rehearsal cast into the clearest communicating form possible (which is style, the subject of next year’s work.)
This is the way you must rehearse, work on the scenes. Yes, bring the scenes into class in as finished a way as possible, but not yet with anything ‘set’. And your character must still be free to respond, to take action, to take the situation in another direction, etc., at any moment. There’s a real delightful tug-of-war going on onstage with those Chekhov group scenes: everyone is responding, physically, vocally (whether they have lines or not), everyone may at any moment grab the ball and take it toward their own finish line. Keep in mind: words finally come out, they don’t suddenly appear.
So please please please. Work hard this quarter. Work harder and more concentratedly than you have yet. Let Chekhov help you discover how to work alone to create character through sensory response to environment. How to work to create relationships through sensory response to environment. How to improvise to create situation through sensory response to environment. And then, finally, how to work on a ‘scene’, to create the drama of the situation that has resulted in strong opposing forces taking these people and this situation a crisis point: the end of the play is the final climax. The end of each act is the major crisis point that all of the action of each act is leading to. Each scene is driving to a climax that is taking the situation closer to the end. Improvise and discover.
Today’s work was a good indication of how much you have learned about working and creating. I don’t think you would have been able to do what you did today if this were the first week of fall quarter. So take pride in the class’s accomplishment and let it point the way toward hard work and more accomplishment to come.