Idiots & Ivanov

When The Idiots Karamazovwas first produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1974, we put it in repertory with Andrejz Wajda’s mesmerizing production of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. The American Repertory Theatre’s 1999 revival of The Idiots Karamazovis now being paired with Yuri Yeremin’s production of Chekhov’s Ivanov. Why have we twice matched Chris Durang and Albert Innaurato’s lunatic farce with classical Russian works of literature?

I think the reason will be more obvious once you see these plays in repertory. Since The Idiots Karamazovis an affectionate assault on the entire 19th- and 20th-century canon of Western literature, it’s always best to have the targets firmly in your sights. David Mamet grumbled about Dostoevsky recently: “It’s difficult to read [him] because of all those characters; their names are too long. Some of their names are so long that just to read their names you have to start early in the morning and pack a lunch.” It is precisely this kind of tongue-in-cheek, thumb-in-eye Philistinism that characterizes Durang and Innaurato’s play – the revenge of the nerds on the lit. crit. syllabus that baffled, bamboozled, and bewildered the unsullied young minds of thousands of undergraduates. Nothing better personified the daunting nature of this reading list than the Russian translations of Constance Garnett, the English “translatrix” who turned her delicate hand and lady-like sensibility on the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov in versions (underestimated to my way of thinking) that became the stereotypes of heavy literary breathing.

Any play that makes Constance Garnett a leading character, pushed around in her wheelchair by a mute Ernest Hemingway, and later joined by such icons of literary modernism as Djuna Barnes and Anaïs Nin, is bound to appear somewhat offensive to those who jealously guard the citadels of culture. And any play that brings three of the four Karamazov brothers onto stage singing “Oh, We Got to Go to Moscow” is obviously going to raise the hackles on the necks of the lions who guard such venerable institutions as the New York Public Library. But the satire is often affectionate and even endearing.

I’m not sure about Dostoevsky but I feel certain that Chekhov would have been the last to object to the play’s parody of Russian literature. Chekhov himself was very fond of farces and satires. Indeed, he wrote some of the most hilarious vaudevilles in the Russian language – The Bearand The Wedding Proposalamong them. It was the comedian in Chekhov that led him to criticize Stanislavsky for failing to see the funny side of his work (Chekhov always insisted, for example, that The Cherry Orchard was a comedy and, in places, even a farce). Certainly, the hordes of buffoons, nitwits, and clowns that populate Chekhov’s plays – Ivanov included – testify to his conviction that life was absurd more often than it was tragic. And the same edge of absurdity is often being honed in many novels of Dostoevsky, where the action sometimes grows so extreme that it verges on comic hysteria. Plays such as Ivanov and novels such asThe Possessed may be the satiric butt of plays such as The Idiots Karamazov. But they are closer in style and temperament than may immediately be apparent.

Jayne Atkinson and Kevin Kline in the 1998 Lincoln Center Theatre production of Ivanov.This attempt to pair or contrast styles and temperaments is one of the animating impulses behind the idea of repertory theatre, which is a system designed to call the attention of the audience not simply to the individual play, but to the play’s position in the season as a whole. In the commercial system, you go to a show. In the not-for-profit system, you participate in the ongoing life of a theatre. In other words, one of major differences between a commercial offering – say the latest musical hit on Broadway – and a repertory selection is that the one exists independently of the auditorium in which it is currently playing, and the other, at least theoretically, is an organic part of the institution that produced it. That The Phantom of the Operawas first performed at the Majestic Theatre in New York is not of great significance. But productions such as the Royal Shakespeare CompanyNicholas Nicklebyor the Moscow Art Theatre Three Sistersor the Berliner Ensemble Arturo Ui cannot be separated from their origins in permanent company work.

When these works are produced in rotating repertory, the audience has the advantage not just of enjoying a single night in the theatre, but of watching the development of the company’s actors, directors, and designers from play to play, and from season to season. For one of the beauties of the repertory system is the affect it can have on the spectator, who is metaphorically, and sometimes literally, drawn onto the stage – not just a passive observer, but as an active participant in the process of the work. Another advantage, demonstrated in the repertory of The Idiots Karamazovand Ivanov, is the way it allows a theatre to satirize itself, and desolemnize the entire theatrical occasion.