article
ARTicles vol. 7 i. 3: From the MXAT with Love
JAN 1, 2009
A second-year dramaturgy student longs for Moscow
“If only we could go back to Moscow!”
Chekhov’s Three Sisters wailed this lament at the dawn of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, the second-year actors and dramaturgs from the A.R.T./MXAT Institute at Harvard share the sentiment. This summer we returned from three months in the hallowed halls of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Coming from the commercialized American stage, we students were overwhelmed by Moscow’s theatre culture. Hundreds of subsidized theatres produce work on a gigantic scale; the Moscow Art Theatre alone has a full-time company of one hundred actors. The American acting students, raised on a tradition of psychological analysis, proceeded to sweat their way through a crash-course in the physical Russian technique.
Students not only take lessons but also bring our own production to share with Russian audiences. This year it was The Discreet Charm of Monsieur Jourdain. Dimitri Troyanovsky’s (another Institute graduate) freewheeling version of Moliére’s The Bourgeois Gentleman played a sold-out run at the Moscow Art Theatre School, and was the first American production invited to Moscow’s Your Chance Festival.
It is particurlary meaningful for me to be back in Cambridge now, working on The Seagull – a play that received its first successful production in the MXAT building where I experienced such an important part of my theatre training last spring.
Sean Bartley is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
