VIRTUE, DESIRE, DEATH, AND FOOLISHNESS—An Evening of Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
William Parker
ccSCOOP Review
07-16-09 - 1:05 p.m. - In 1886, Anton Chekhov wrote a letter to his self-destructive brother, Nikolai, berating him for his lack of culture. Nikolai, an artist who illustrated many of Chekhov's short stories, was destined to die three years later of tuberculosis, a disease that haunted both brothers. In the letter, Anton cites this characteristic of cultured people: "They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see."
Everything in Chekhov deals with what the heart aches for but does not see. It is the key to understanding what made him the greatest of playwrights. It is what allows the best actors to take flight in his characterizations and imbue them with such emotional force. Great actors love Chekhov because there is so much to play, so much to realize.
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And his humor, his irony, his sense of yes/no, so often overlooked in bad productions of his plays, was a major factor in how he dealt with the life and death of the soul. In another letter, written to Alexander Kuprin, he spoke of his desire to create "new forms" that could express "the sad comicality of everyday life... everything mixed up together: the importance of the great and the base, the tragic and ridiculous." Like Jane Austen, his work is all subtext.
The admirable and ambitious Walking the dog Theater's production, Virtue, Desire, Death, and Foolishness—An Evening of Short Stories by Anton Chekhov, takes some of his tales and transforms them into a series of sketches—some of them playable, some not. In these stories, Chekhov’s flights of fancy rule, all literalness dissolves. Ultimately, his thoughts were how they would play in the reader's imagination. If he would have wanted them to take life on stage is another matter entirely, because, once made literal, they lose the quality they were intended to have for the reader.
The ensemble is terrific, and ultimately it is this kind of ensemble playing that is the most satisfying to behold. It is in the matter of style where major problems emerge. The director, Melania Levitsky, has encouraged the actors in some sketches to assume Russian accents, which hurts matters considerably. The Russian-ness of the characters is best expressed in the moment-to-moment work of the actors (something in short supply here), not in ridiculous-sounding accents that distract the actors and take away from what we most want to see: the relationships between the characters. We see this a lot when anything by Tennessee Williams (a romanticist like Chekhov, and someone completely analogous in tone and feeling) is staged. Great actors who are up to performing his work know that "going southern" with accents and mannerisms is a poor substitute for moment-to-moment work and focus on the character's needs. For Russians, relationships are everything. It is precisely this that needs to be brought to life on stage.
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