Word: chekhov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Loeb mainstage Thursday night. As I entered the theatre, I was just not in any condition to function as a journalist: I was physically exhausted and emotionally pre-occupied. In this context, maybe you can understand how remarkable it is to me that Leland Moss's production of the Chekhov play not only kept me awake for its entire three-and a-quarter hour duration-but sometimes even succeeded in making me forget everything else except what the actors on stage were giving to the audience...
ORDINARILY in this country. Chekhov's works have been performed by actors who subscribe to Stanislavski's "method." a revolutionary approach to acting which developed around Chekhov's plays in turn-of-the-century Russia. Method actors have trained us to think of Chekhov plays as having quiet, detailed surfaces under which internalized explosions almost imperceptively crupt. In Moss's Three Sisters, this now-standard approach to the playwright is turned inside out (and must be, since Grotowski's views on acting are in practice, if not purpose, almost diametrically opposed to Stanislavski...
...that lies a real problem. There is no getting around the fact that Chekhov wrote his play for Stanislavskian actors. The Three Sisters is (and this is a classi-fication, not a judgment) a "rich" play. While the work has explosions underneath much of its surface, some of the play is just surface. For the purposes of a "poor" theatre, the Chekhovian detail that is not sitting on top of emotional volcanoes is useless. No doubt Moss will encourage his company to try new things every night, and certainly one thing he will...
Thus, if a pillow is said to be a samovar, what it does is to be a samovar for as long as the actors say so, and by their use of it, the actors can show the non-Russian audience more completely what a samovar means to Chekhov's characters...
...because this immediately suggests a "finished" performance. With our show, we have gone through a process of discovery, and each night we will present what we have discovered so far. Ideally, I would like to continue rehearsals for four more months, in order to condense Chekhov's play into something which is really the most intense essence of the thing, something which would only take an hour and a half at the most to perform. Much of what the audience will see is only a means to that end, but I hope that in a few places there are flashes...