ARTicles vol. 2 i.1: Humor and Paradox

The American directorial debut of Kama Ginkas brings to the American Repertory Theater one of the world’s most inventive directors. And it brings him in tandem with the author who has been with him the most in his 36-year career–Anton Chekhov. Since he first staged a dramatization of Chekhov’s correspondence in 1968, Ginkas has come back to the greatest of all Russian playwrights seven more times, although only once has he directed one of the plays.

It is telling of Ginkas’ vision, as well as his cultural heritage, that the dramatic possibilities of novels, stories, and poetry have so fascinated him. Such adaptations have long been a staple of the Russian repertoire. The difficulties that directors of the Soviet era encountered with badly-written, ideologically top-heavy plays encouraged them to find more responsive material in the prose of the past. As a result, an intricate culture of dramatization arose. Furthermore, after graduating in 1967, Ginkas spent most of the next twenty years battling censors who did not like the kind of art he made and who took great pains to ensure that he could not make it.

One of the primary sources for Ginkas’s productions has been classical Russian prose–most often the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the short stories of Chekhov. These works, with their subtle psychological insights, their elaborate internal monologues, and their highly sophisticated language provide him with the kind of unconventional material that allows him to sidestep many of the typical theatrical clichés of plot and characterization and break into new theatrical territory. Referring to his early fascination with unorthodox texts in his book Provoking Theater, he explains: “‘You say x, I say y. You say x, I say y. You say x, I say y. I say y.’ You cannot just stage that. You must think up something to go with it. That gets my juices flowing. It makes you find a form, a new kind of theatre.”

Over the years, Ginkas has evolved a new kind of theater that evokes in his audience what he calls a “physiological” response. His goal is to get his audience to react through instincts and emotions before the thought process has a chance to respond. He is able to do this because he is an extraordinarily sensitive observer of human nature and a master of coaxing actors into revealing more about themselves than is usual in traditional theater. Every production Ginkas stages includes a few gestures, a few brief moments of interaction, or a handful of spoken intonations that strike spectators suddenly as revelations about the human condition. For a fleeting moment or two, what is happening on stage doesn’t seem like theater at all, but has the aroma of real life, replete with all its paradoxes, risks, and dangers. “I want what is happening on stage in my show to become a fact of your life,” Ginkas says. “If only for one second.”

Speaking of his 1995 Finnish production of Lady with a Lapdog, he adds, “I wanted Anna Sergeyevna’s final moment of touching and stroking the rough walls of a boat to make you, my spectators, tremble as you do when caressing someone you love and desire.”

When working on his first Chekhov production, Ginkas discovered a man who differed vastly from the traditional image of a kind, gentle writer in a pince-nez. He discovered a writer who struggled fiercely with private demons in order to achieve equilibrium in his art. He discovered an artist of irony, intellectual courage and sober, unflinching insight. The Chekhov that Ginkas found was, perhaps, a little like Ginkas himself and even more than a little like Dostoevsky, excerpts of whose novels Ginkas has staged with success.

“Even when I staged Lady with a LapdogI was staging Crime and Punishment,” Ginkas writes about his Finnish production. “Chekhov’s idea of crime is that Gurov–the protagonist–had existed senselessly, without meaning. He lived forty years and was punished by Life which brought him love.

“Love as punishment. Love as a trial. As a test. As punishment. That is very Russian. And very much Chekhov. Gurov is crushed by love. He does not measure up to it. As we often fail to measure up to life’s demands. Life demands that we live to the maximum. It expects us to measure up to all of life’s complexities.

“For the first time ever, Gurov ran up against life in the form of love. Gurov, as we know, had many beautiful women. Now he meets one who is not all that pretty or intelligent. She is quiet, provincial and a little silly. That is the humor and the paradox of Chekhov. Chekhov is a genius in that he never has goddesses of fate doing the punishing. It is not like Aeschylus. Nobody gets his eyes put out. Nobody sleeps with his mother or kills his father. Gurov is simply crushed when he himself does not measure up. That is Chekhov’s crime and punishment.”

At the same time, few directors are as playful and attuned to humor as Ginkas. All the ruses, jokes, pranks, and surprises that theater makes possible are present in his productions. While the two lovers in Lady with a Lapdogare struggling with lives turned upside down, they are repeatedly interrupted by two Chaplinesque figures who, time and again, undercut the tragedy.

Ginkas continuously delights in the incontrovertible fact that everything we see on stage is artifice. Working with designer Sergei Barkhin, Ginkas distills the essence of a European beach resort–we see sand, we see a boat, we see the deep blue sky. But these are artistic suggestions, not realistic illustrations. It is in this push and pull, back and forth, between the real and the make-believe, the comic and the tragic, that Ginkas works our prejudices loose and leaves us open to discovery.

John Freedman is the theater critic of the Moscow Times, and co-author with Kama Ginkas of Provoking Theater (Smith and Kraus, 2003), from which some segments of this article have been adapted.