ARTicles vol. 2 i.1: Chekhov in America

Anatoly Smeliansky: Perhaps we should begin by explaining why the director Kama Ginkas and the designer Sergey Barkhin have been working together for the past fifteen years.

Kama Ginkas: There’s actually a lot that pushes us apart–there has been from the very beginning of our “love affair.” It seems we’re always moving in opposite directions, but there’s something essential that’s important to both of us. Everything that attracts us to one another separates us. I lack light-heartedness and I am stupidly serious. I’m missing a lot of qualities that I find in Sergey, and vice versa. That’s why we work together–we make up for each other’s deficiencies.

Sergey Barkhin: Kama thinks like an architect, and I am an architect by education, so he understands what I do. I’ll come up with something apparently useless and strange, but Kama understands the value of strange elements that can’t be put to use right away. He knows that those things can produce new meanings.

KG: My first encounter with Sergey was a disaster. I was directing Hedda Gabler in Moscow and he was my set designer. I didn’t understand him at all. I am a very goal-oriented person, but Sergey starts fantasizing about themes that have no relationship to my goal. He knows everything about everything–he’ll talk about history, geology, philosophy, geography–topics that don’t seem to be related to our productions. So we come from completely different angles and then suddenly we find a meeting point.

AS: Working on a play is one thing, but working with a short story, as you are with “Lady with a Lapdog”, is another. Does that make a difference to you?

SB: For me it does. From the perspective a set designer, prose is like a shapeless, fluid cloud. When the director replaces Chekhov or Dostoevsky as the author, he sees the entire production in his head and demands from me something that I can’t see in my mind’s eye right away. So we have to walk in the dark for a while, trusting each other. After many years of working together, I know how Kama might play with the text, and which direction he might take with his actors. I know the rules of his game. In the case of Lady with a Lapdog, the design already existed from previous productions in Russian, Finland, and Turkey. But the whole production needed to be adjusted to the new space, to this particular architecture. The search for the design was important, because a new space can change a lot in a production.

AS: Kama–your adaptation of “Lady with a Lapdog” is highly unusual, because instead of dispensing with the narrator, you’ve assigned his text to the actors.

KG: I stole that device from stand-up comedians who use it a lot in their sketches and parodies.

AS: The technique first appeared in the satirical theater of the early twentieth century. One of the cabaret theaters that used it was called “Theatre of the Distorted Mirror.”

KG: You see, because you’re a professor, you immediately found historical authorization for my theft! I liked the playfulness of this technique, and realized that through this kind of parody you could achieve an unexpectedly dramatic effect. In the mid-seventies I knew I wanted to apply this device to Chekhov’s prose, but in those days I wasn’t allowed to stage his short stories. I wasn’t allowed to stage much of anything. When the bureaucrats heard that I wanted to work with Chekhov’s prose in such a way, they thought, “this Jew is going to ridicule the Russian classics!” The crucial aspect of this technique is to transfer the narrator’s voice to the characters. This produces what Brecht called an “alienation effect”–it’s purely theatrical, because it eliminates any semblance of naturalism.

AS: As you’ve mentioned, this is your fourth production of Lady with a Lapdog. Will the A.R.T. version be very different from the production you created in Moscow?

KG: Yes and no. Nothing has changed in my understanding of this short story or in how it should be played. I liked many aspects of my Moscow production, but there was a lot that we didn’t achieve, which I want to work on here in Cambridge.

SB: The A.R.T.’s auditorium and stage are beautiful. The stage is very wide, like a boardwalk, and it gives the actors new, unusual problems to solve.

KG: When I was staging Lady with a Lapdog in Helsinki, they made a documentary film called Three Days before Opening Night. It captured something important about my profession, because it showed that the director is preoccupied with very concrete tasks. It doesn’t matter where he is–nothing changes his pursuit. I don’t know American audiences well, but I am sure that what moves me in this story will touch people in this town and this theater.

AS: So you think this story is universal?

KG: Absolutely. When I first started working on “Lady with a Lapdog” in the seventies, I thought the story was about me. But now, years later, I see that in any country, in any age, in any man or woman, the story evokes the same feelings. It’s a story about a relationship between two people, a story about love–a love that is as strong as death. The man has had many relationships in his forty years and he thinks that he knows everything about love. Suddenly he realizes that he has no idea what love really is and when he’s tested by true love for the first time, he can’t live up to its demands. The inexperienced young woman, who has married but has never known true love, turns out to be much stronger and more fit for the challenge.

AS: In one of Nabokov’s lectures on Chekhov, he celebrates “Lady with a Lapdog” for its subtle shifts in tone and mood. Is it possible to convey such subtle changes in the theater, which is such a bold and rough art form?

KG: I think so, though the text, like any true poetry, is very hard to translate. We’re using a brand new, very nuanced translation that we’re tweaking in rehearsal to convey those subtle, Chekhovian modulations. Every word, every comma needs careful attention. But once the actors have formulated their objectives correctly, they suddenly make an abundance of unexpected discoveries about their roles. Elisabeth Waterston is a very young actress, but I think she’s very gifted and I can predict that she’ll have a serious future in the theater. Stephen Pelinski is more than just a good actor. He has something that connects him with the best Russian actors and makes him different from the Swedish, Finnish, and German performers I’ve had a chance to work with. The actors connect their own experiences, their whole beings, to the nuances and currents of Chekhov’s text, and actually experience the full, unexpected, crushing force of the love that he describes. When you see that on stage, you start to believe that the art of theater is not so rough, and is actually capable of translating and conveying very minute details.

Dr. Anatoly Smeliansky is Head of the Moscow Art Theater School and author of more than a dozen books on Russian and Soviet Theater.