341-3
April 9, 2004
Chekhov
Some Work Suggestions
1. In work alone, you improvise to create character, to establish the basic drive of the character.
Arkadina’s basic drive: I will be a star, I will be center stage, I will have my way. (‘I’m an actress not a [banker, sister, mother, lover]’) Improvise to motivate your spine, your being, with this drive.
Astrov: I want to matter, I want to help human beings, I want people to be better because I was here. Improvise a dream-fulfillment fantasy of his doctoring life—he puts on a spotless gown in a gleaming hospital with up-to-date equipment; clean and well-fed, educated patients come to his door, all of whom leave healthier, grateful, happy. Then create the reality. Discover his need to plant trees. (By the way, what do you do to make it seem worthwhile when everything that’s important to you fails you? If you want to create Astrov’s depths you must reach your own depths first.)
2. In work alone and with your partner, create relationships. See people out there in revelatory interaction that expresses their relationship:
Arkadina has Trigorin on her arm at an opening night party—he’s handsome enough and young enough and just celebrity enough to be worthy of her but not dynamic enough to take the spotlight. She easily carries on interviews, charms fans, sidesteps awkward questions. Trigorin smiles as best he can. He can’t wait to get out of the crowd and back to the hotel.
Arkadina and Treplef: Arkadina returns from a season in the provinces. Does she bring a gift? If she does, does it have anything to do with Trepleg’s real needs? Does she ask whether Treplef has written any new stories while she’s been away? What does she do?—perhaps Sorin has planned a surprise dinner party…. Treplef is never first in her life. (Who is always first?)
Astrov and Sonia: Astrov comes to the door because he has been summoned to take care of the professor. Inside the house (what is she doing?), Sonia sees him coming up the path. What does she do? Or, from the field, Sonia sees him come round the corner. Does she drop the rake and go running? If not, why not? Astrov isn’t a shallow person. He cares about others. Why does he not notice how much Sonia has come to love him? Create in behavioral, interaction terms. Why does Sonya not come deeply to resent Elena?
Hannah asked why everyone is enchanted by Elena. When I was in high school, the cousin of one of the girls in our group came to visit from the South. She had dark hair and green eyes and dimples. We called her ‘Scarlett’. She came for the summer and she enchanted everyone and entertained boys and girls alike, young people and grown-ups. We were all under her spell—all of us, including me, who couldn’t possibly have been hypnotized solely by her sexual appeal. For me there was a kind of grace in her body and a beauty in her voice –my first Southern accent in the flesh!--something exotic about her manner that was so different from anything I knew that I just loved being around her. She made no demands on me but let me orbit about her. Her cousin was a good friend of mine and she later told me that it hurt her to have me push her to the background while ‘Scarlett’ was there. But she understood, she knew, she felt the same way about ‘Scarlett’. Etc.
Astrov and Vanya: We’ve discussed this already in class in response to the improvisation of Act One. Spend time in actual improvisation with each other to create the shared experiences that are relived in an instant behind their words: we are the only two intelligent men in the district. Or How’s the professor? Or…? What literal fragment image of experience do they share behind the simple question, Sleep well? Etc.etc. The drama will be located in those shared experiences behind the words.
3. When you come together to work on a scene, spend little or no time talking about it with your partner. And take only as much time in out-of-scene improvising as you need to bring your character to that moment in his/her life. Perhaps improvising the last five minutes before the scene. Or the sequence over time of major experiences/climaxes that have led each of you to this moment. DO THIS STEP. Then get directly on to improvise the situation of the scene and discover what happens. What major climax does the scene get to? A realization? A decision? Consequent action taken? Be specific. Then everything you do must be getting the situation to that climax.
When work is done, analyze, clarify. Did you provide the stimuli that your partner needs in order for the scene to reach its climax? Did you respond to the stimuli your partner provided so that the character can get to the climax of the scene? Notice that I am not talking about your character and what your character is feeling and what your character’s complexities are etc. etc. At this point in the work process, you forget about your character and you must focus on the play, on what is happening in the scene, on what you and your partner must do together in order for this part of the play to happen, to take the drama one climactic scene moment closer to the end: for Sea Gull, it’s that gun shot. For Vanya, it’s….what? Do you see what I am getting at? It is this consideration that governs your choice about which, of all the possible things your character can truthfully do, is the most appropriate for this moment.
SO:
Where has Kostya been all morning while mama packs? Has he sensed a livelier bounce in her step the last few days? A more joyful lilt to her beautifully-trained voice? He loves her, he needs her approval and support. And yet a lifetime of neglect, of being treated like a hanger-on, of dismissal—and this summer’s series of insults (be specific, good heavens, they brought him to the brink of suicide!)—war with his love of, understanding of, and need for his mother. What’s he been doing while she has the whole house preparing for her departure? And don’t forget: he loves Sorin. Sorin’s love for him is a sustaining force in his life. Let him experience that attack of Sorin’s that brings him into the room. He doesn’t want to challenge his mother, but Uncle Sorin….
Arkadina: Why do you come into this room when packing is nearly finished? Why not go out to the veranda? Or to a cooler sitting room? Ever since the night of the play, when her antennae went up with Trigorin’s reponse to Nina, she has been on orange alert whenever Nina is around. Notice Act Two: At what point does she ask where Trigorin is? Notice too the end of Act Two. What is she doing? What exactly happens when she comes into the dining room in Act III?
About Arkadina’s capacity for anger. Notice the sequence after Treplef storms out in Act One. What touches off her anger (which has been smoldering all evening)? What must happen, what must the audience experience, for Dorn to say: Jupiter is angry? Then Act Two: When she doesn’t get her way, get her horses, she throws a grande dame tantrum, yanks Trigorin away from his fishing and storms into the house. Her anger here is degrees more intense than in Act One. It results in direct action whereas in Act One, she stifled it before it did. Everyone follows her into the house: imagine/create what happens in the house. Sorin would probably agree to sell of some of the land to buy some more horses if that’s what it took. What’s being dramatized? Whatever it takes, Arkadina will get what she wants. That “We’re staying!” is a triumphant announcement.
By the time we get to the departure in Act III, we are prepared for what it will be like when she unloads her big guns on someone. She has had the entire summer to build up boredom (an active, explosive state) and short temper. She’s already steaming about Trigorin and Nina. Treplef has pissed her off with his childish suicide attempt. Old sick Sorin insists on accompanying her to the station and has the bad tact to have an attack just before she’s ready to leave. Improvise and create these realities so that she’s ready to explode when Treplef confronts her about Sorin. Then it won’t seem like a shallow shouting match when he finally sets off the dynamite. And by the way, she gives him a chance to retreat: He complains about Trigorin. She takes her hands from him, goes cold for a moment and says, ‘Leave it alone’. Why doesn’t he leave it alone? Why doesn’t he realize that he should be quiet and change the subject?
And Jupiter explodes. Jupiter destroys. Jupiter wins.
And Arkadina and Treplef are never close again. Notice how removed he is from her in Act Four.
Arkadina is a wonderful, charming, delightful, entrancing woman. Yes. But she is a star. She is vain and selfish. Stardom has made her vain and selfish. She must be if she is to stay on top. That doesn’t mean she’s malicious or a villain. But she does terrible things to people who cross her. And if you are to create her, you must face that reality. What is Chekhov saying about stardom? About art? About youth trying to make its way into the commercial profession of celebrity? What must Nina abandon in order to survive? Nina is going to make it to the adult side of the battle of the generations, but at what cost? (We watch her come to those realizations during Act Four.) Why does Treplef not make it? And, by the way, where does everyone’s attention go the very next moment after the last line of the play? (Whose comfort has everyone been most concerned with throughout the play?) Why does Dorn have the last line?
Astrov and Sonya.
Why doesn’t Sonya tell him to lie down and take a nap before leaving?
When they do talk, why doesn’t she start the conversation? Why does he start it with a comment about her father?
What if there was not liquor in the sideboard? Sonia gets Astrov to the sideboard, gets a piece of cheese and some bread for him. He looks at the bottles. Empty. What would he do next?
As it is, he drinks and then says, ‘Nobody’s here. We can talk frankly’. Why? What has happened?
Why don’t they stand in silence?
Why doesn’t he say, ‘I’m sorry about the hay. After all the work you’ve done all summer. The rain has ruined it.”?
Etc etc.
You are missing the moment-by-moment whys, the little decisions that are made on the surface and in the deep layers of consciousness and in the muscles and in the brain, the heart, the guts—all those little responses that touch off possibilities of action, that lead to choices, and further stimuli and realizations, etc. etc. It’s hard to write about it, because it happens sometimes almost instantaneously, but happen it must. It’s the interconnectedness of all those responses and decisions and actions that are the logic of Chekhov, that are the drama of a Chekhov play.
The action of this scene must be as specific as the action of the Arkadina/Treplev bandage scene, even though the external actions of that scene are more obvious in their forward direction. What does the Sonya/Astrov interaction lead to? How does it get the play one huge step closer to ‘We must work, we must work and We shall rest, we shall rest. ?
4. You bring your prepared work to class. By this time, YOU MUST HAVE ALL THE LINES LEARNED. You must create a clear line of action that carries the scene from its opening interaction to the climactic clincher. Yes, keep the scene free enough to be able to be worked on in class. But so far, we have had far too much meandering and paraphrasing and losing of our way. That is for the first stages of your work together. By class time, present your discoveries, your creation.
To this end: eliminate all those little pauses in your lines and at the ends of your partner’s lines before you speak. Often those pauses are there only because you need time to find a response that will justify your next lines. What I have been trying to convey all year and what this essay partly focuses on is this: those images, those emotions, those experiences that provide the forward-going fuel to carry a scene along are found in the life lived by the characters before the scene happens. Create those realities and the power of those experiences before you come to the scene. Then the interactions/stimuli of the scene will touch off responses, will release the power and intensify the current that is carrying you along. Otherwise, we just get stop and start and you lose the audience because they are focusing on the drama that happens between and among characters, not on your individual character, and those little starts and stops absolutely kill the forward motion of the drama. And that is why, at this point in the work process, you must focus all your work on the drama too.
This is where outer technique comes in. Start your lines strongly and build them to the last word, which you punch or clinch or snap in order to land the line and release the response of your listener. Along the way to the end of the line toss up the important word or phrase without which the line will not make sense. When you get to the end of your line, swell the last word, punch it (and just the tiniest of arrests as it lands) then go about your business—at which point your partner immediately arrests you by topping in on that last word with a strong first word of his line which he will build in the same way, giving you a swelled last word for you to top in on and arrest him as he proceeded to go about his business. In this way, together, you build sequences and sequences build entire scenes. And scenes build acts. And acts….
Sometimes doing the technique may stimulate the deeper inner currents. But technique without that deeper current of real responses is just hollow externals. Create the reality, create the current that is carrying you all along. Then use technique to cast that reality into form, which is meaning. Face this paradox of acting: It must be utterly true to human life and it must have the form of perfect artifice. The character simply responds as a human being would respond, while the actor behind the character steers all to follow the rules of form. Character responds in the moment, actor keeps her eye on the score, the goal of each sequence, each scene, each act. (Any good athlete does the same thing during a well-played, powerful, emotional game: Eye on the ball, concentration on the straight line to the score.)
Until you cast truth into form, it has no meaning, it is not art.