Dear Ones:
Let's start spring quarter with creating the world of Vanya and Sea Gull to begin the first week.
That means:
1. What is the subject of Vanya? Time passing, a great middle class has become unproductive, loss (of chances at life, at meaning, at human relationships, at--?), missed opportunities, misplaced allegiances, the triumph of mediocrity, etc.
2.What does Chekhov say/dramatize about these subject (theme)?
3. What is the nature/source of the comedy of Chekhov's p.o.v. on this subject and theme?
4.Where is the irony of Chekhov's dramatization?
Come prepared to do this:
Create a farmer who bales hay all day long--and show that he does this to make money to send to his brother-in-law the professor.
He spends a day mending a broken plow rather than pay someone else to do it--so that he can send the money to the professor.
What books are in his study? Let him come into the study to add up all the accounts for the week. (Why is there a photo of his sister on his desk? Dramatize this, show it.) Before bed he will read--what The Brothers K? Schopenhauer? Finally, he falls in to bed too exhausted to read.
etc.
Create his niece who bales hay at his side--to send money to her father. Show me a woman who pays no attention to herself. She does for others, for her father. What keeps her going?
They work side by side in the field, weeding, pruning.
He shovels shit from the stables while she feeds the chickens with Marina.
They take lunch together. Life is hard, they have nothing, yet...
...Show me that together they have created meaning in their lives. (No attitudes, just respond to the stimuli of your world until you sense truly that what you are doing is worth while, is providing the grounding and the nourishment for the important work of the professor.)
When does the illusion begin to crack for Vanya?
Be specific as you create the experience(s) that lead him to: That man is a fraud! I have been hooked up to and giving lifeblood transfusions to a zero, a zombie. etc.
Create a doctor who has studied medicine in Europe. (At the time Russian medicine was medieval in comparison with Europe--no modern instruments, now sanitary hospitals. And in the countryside, even less--do some research.) The doctor packs up his tiny medicine bag (what is actually in it?) to minister to victims of typhus in a peasant village five miles away. (Need specific? Chekhov's short story "Peasants" will help) He takes his horse. The roads are quagmires. He packs a flask of vodka. Why? (My sister worked as a nurse for a few years. She tells of her conscious decision to pull away from the horror of maimed and dying people, of the staff's need to make horrible jokes about patients just to keep themselves from connecting with patients as human beings. etc.)
Take this doctor into the forest. Plant a tree. Plant another one. Check to see the new young green growth on the trees you planted in the beginning of spring.
Stand and look down the line of trees you have planted shimmering in the sunlight.
Do this until (big word) something in you floods your veins with a sense of purpose to blot out the empty gnawing of your work as a doctor.
Give specifics for: At the end of a long long day with the peasants, they take him to the railroad brakeman's cottage. (What exactly do you see when they take you to see the brakeman?) Clear off the kitchen table. Open you tiny medicine bag. Do they have cotton? a clean rag? How much chloroform did you bring? etc. etc.
Until the brakeman dies as you operate (be specific)....
What happens to the doctor? What have you experienced that you can bring to this crisis?
Create the professor.
Give yourself directions as I have done above.
Create the professor's young wife.
Ditto.
They decide to come to the farm. Why?
What happens?
Create through improvised situations, in details, in terms of real, specific stimuli. What is the goal you are aiming at here?
Create character, drama, through response to stimuli, to environment, to situation, to other people. Remember: true response to stimuli precedes emotion; precedes, motivates any words spoken.
Can some of you get together and be prepared to improvise the situation of Act I for Tuesday March 30?
Only after this kind of work do we begin to work on specific scenes, which are climactic moments in the ongoing movement of these lives toward the final curtain. Think about this: never play a 'scene'. Rather--play the play at every moment.
Act II -- Any of the two-people scenes (Please let us limit how many Sonia/Elena scenes we do.)
Act III -- All two-people sequences of Sonia, Astrov, Elena, Vanya. (Again, please limit the number of Sonia/Elena scenes.)
Act IV -- Any Astrov/Vanya/Sonia/Elena sequences.
Sea Gull
Can we do the same with the world and situation of this play as descibed above?
A group presents an improvised Act I
Then:
Act II
Nina and Treplev
Nina and Trigorin
Act III
Treplev and Arkadina
Trigorin and Arkadina
Act IV
Nina and Treplev
Once we are assured of these, we can add others.
We'll work on these through April 22.
Then on to Ibsen (Ghosts and Hedda) and Shaw (Individual scenes from several plays and then more from Candida and St. Joan).
Have a good break.
See you March 29.
DD