I CANNOT TELL A LIE

I'm sorry, I don't have much that's substantive on my mind today, but I wanted to post because it's starting to get obnoxious leaving up that crowing Fringe Fest thing.

I suppose I one thing I could do is congrate David Epstein and the Invisible City people on their lovely production of The Cherry Orchard, running at manhattantheatresource right now. These guys really do consistently good work - a lot of homies of mine really shone in this one - and this is one of those funnier Cherry Orchards, which is a real mercy on the audience.

Epstein pulled a real sweet move near the end, at the moment when everyone's about to leave and Lyubov decides she wants to sit in a chair and look around at her former home a bit more. This moment usually eats the audience alive with impatience. We're all set for the play to be over and suddenly this drama queen of a character wants pity herself a little longer. You can usually see and hear the ripple of impatience run through an audience at this moment, no matter how good or bad the production is. But what David did was he had all the other characters on stage, leaving in unison, and when Lyubov says "Let me sit a moment longer," everyone one of them stopped in their tracks and silently groaned, also in unison. This effectively transferred the impatiance of the moment from the audience to the characters onstage, and what the audience was left with was a terrific comedy moment. I thought that was cool.

Wallace Shawn nearly ruined The Cherry Orchard for me a few years ago when I first read his monologue masterpiece The Fever. The narrator of The Fever recalls going with friends to see Chekhov's play:

"We stared at the stage. Moment after moment the character's downfall grew closer. Her childhood home would at last be sold, her beloved cherry trees chopped down... Shewould be forced to live in an apartment in Paris, not on the estate she had formerly owned. Her former serf would buy the estate. It was her old brother's sympathetic grief that finally coaxed tears from the large man in the heavy coat who stood beside me. But my problem was that somehow, suddenly, I was not myself. I was disconnected. Why, exactly, were we supposed to be weeping? This person would no longer own the estate she once owned... She would have to live in an apartment instead... I couldn't remember why I was supposed to be weeping."

This amplified for me a problem I already had with the play, that maybe a lot of American audience memebers have. By most avaliable standards, Lopakhin is the most admirable character on stage. Everyone else is infuriating in their inability to take the most basic steps to look after their own happiness. I've always found myself basically pleased at the end of any Cherry Orchard I happen to see. I think, "Well, Lopakhin earned what he got, and everyone else deserved what they got. If you don't take steps to protect yourself, you will be overrun, simple as that."

But I guess as I've gotten older I've become more and more aware of the ways in which people, including myself, don't always look out for themselves properly, out of either laziness or fear or weariness or a lack of judgement or a lack of foresight or any number of reasons. Perhaps in The Cherry Orchard, as in many of his plays, Chekhov was surveying the various ways in which people neglect the things thay need most and trying to understand why.

This doesn't invalidate Shawn's narrator's perfectly legitimate class-based critique of the play, but it perhaps it points to some ways for audiences to empathize with these characters even though they're wealthy, idle, and excruciatingly self-destructive.

*******

I haven't posted in a little while. Mostly these days my life is dictated by my search for a job, my search for a roommate, and Fleet Week, which at the moment is like pushing a very large, very heavy boat into a river. Once we get it into the river, the water will carry it and the main concern will be steering. But right now the concern is lifting the fucking thing the few inches off the ground we need to carry it over the bank and into the water.

More soon.

--SlowLearner

Comments

[Dorothy]

Glad you posted. Thanks for these thoughts. Interesting stuff.

[Jason Grote]

I'm a fan of both Shawn and Chekhov, but I think they're both right. The really brilliant thing about Chekhov, when he's done right, is taking these characters who by rights should be totally unsympathetic -- I mean, we're talking about the petit-bourgeoise in a feudal society, here, serfs are bascially a half-step up from slaves, not to mention that his characters tend to be narcissistic, depressive, and melodramatic people -- and making us weep for them.

I think productions of Chekhov that actually do this are rare, mind you. But I always thought I hated Chekhov until I saw my first one. I have since seen a few...