Seeing Everybody: Actors on Chekhov
Originally published in Lincoln Center Theater Review
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I never watched horror movies before lockdown. Huddled in my apart ment as Covid-19 ravaged the country, I found myself scrolling past family favorites or romantic comedies and be coming well-versed in the canon of Halloween's Michael Myers and Ghost face from Scream, thinking, "At least my life isn't that bad." To my surprise, I even found myself looking forward to the CBS miniseries The Stand, an adaptation of Stephen King's tale of a deadly flu virus that wiped out 99 percent of the human race, enjoying each episode of a story that felt much too familiar. Rather than seeking escape, I was finding comfort in the (bizarrely) realistic. In a strange way, watching someone else's apocalyptic story made my own easier to bear.
That desire for realism was wide spread and not limited to TVand movies. As the theater industry was slowly revived and blockbuster musicals opened on Broadway, more somber, serious shows-many of them written or in spired by Anton Chekhov, the master chronicler of the every-day-took residence throughout the city.
There was Uncle Vanya, performed in a downtown loft, and The Seagull, set in present-day Woodstock. A high-tech adaptation of The Cherry Orchard included a robot in its cast, and Uncle Vanya was featured prominently in the Oscar-winning movie Drive My Car.
What is the attraction, one might wonder, of staging or seeing a simple story of everyday folks that ends on a despondent note? After experiencing years of political turmoil, economic uncertainty, and physical trauma, why would anyone want to watch Vanya and Sonya drown in regret or the three sisters' family slowly disintegrate, knowing they will never reach Moscow?
It's exactly that everyday appeal that draws us in, says Ethan Hawke, whose Chekhov credits include Treplev in The Seagull, Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard and the title character of Ivanov. "The design is not to entertain. The design is to really take on Shakespeare's challenge of holding a mirror up to nature, and if you can really capture the boredom and stupidity and lyrical beauty and hurt of all those contradictory emotions when you get them all onstage, it's hypnotic."
His plays draw us in because we know them. We understand them because we've also lived them. Who hasn't felt Vanya's misanthropic regret or Masha's restless dissatisfaction? And after years of life in which truth has been stranger than fiction, it can be strangely comforting to watch some one else suffer.
"A common joke about Chekhov is his plays aren't about anything, and that it's just a bunch of sitting around doing nothing and talking about things. A very superficial analysis could potentially land us in the place where we recognize more of our own personal experiences during lockdown and during isolation," says Hari Nef, who recently played Sasha (based on Masha) in Thomas Bradshaw's Chekhov adaptation, The Seagull/Woodstock, NY. "I've been really surprised by how many people that I've run into after doing The Seagull have come up to me and said it was the best play they ever saw or how much they loved it."
It was the minutia of everyday life that grounded Nef's performance as a depressed woman suffering from unrequited love.
"With Masha, you're going to be playing a caricature if you're playing every moment for sadness or for yearning or for depression," Nef says. "I had to focus on [things] other than the core absences and sadness. I had to figure out how a person with depression gets not just from day to day but from moment to moment. I think, especially if you're an actor who's struggled with those things, that can become very personal, but also it's kind of permission to just do something that you would do."
Chekhov never could have imagined, and probably would scorn, this world of 24/7 news, nonstop social media, and reality TV. With larger than-life characters crowding our every day, the quiet existence of his characters is compelling.
"I think Chekhov is so pure, and I think that's what he was after. He wasn't writing from a conceptual place, or even like a plot place. He's such a humanist," says Scott Elliott, founding artistic director of The New Group, who directed The Three Sisters in 1997 and recently directed The Seagull/Woodstock, NY. "I think that playwrights love Chekhov. I think that Chechov is one of the few writers that are translated into English that writers really respond to the subtext of it. They knew the psychological nuance of what those people are feeling seems to translate well to modern life."
Like modern life, Chekhov's plays do not conclude with happy endings, or really any endings. Instead, their stories drift to the background as the curtain falls, no climactic death or double wedding to tie up loose threads.
For Hawke, the ambiguity of Chekhov's writing is part of its appeal.
"The character's journey [is] incomplete, much like life. Our lives don't work with a clearcut beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes good things happen and we don't feel great about them, and sometimes bad things happen and we feel challenged and inspired," Hawke says. "Often there's a feeling of dissatisfaction while you play it. Chekhov often ends with a question mark. The whole play is a series of question marks, and that's why they're fun."
The questions Chekhov posed could not be answered during his life, and they remain unanswered today. But as we adjust to a life post quarantine, following months spent indoors, meditating on life and fulfillment, we now possess a new ability to under stand them.
"I definitely think a pandemic was a time of emotional reckoning for a lot of people, and I think that the months and years subsequent to it were moments of release for people," Nef continues. "I think that people were able to implement the conclusions that they came to while standing still relationships ended, people moved."
It's hardly a novelty when art mirrors life, or when Chekhov's writing speaks to a world in upheaval. As the Great Depression swept the country and World War II swept the world, more than ten Chekhov plays were seen in New York. Decades later, as the United States joined the widely opposed war in Vietnam, six Chekhov plays ran in eight years.
"I was doing The Cherry Orchard in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the night Obama was elected," Hawke recalls. "When Lopakhin says, 'I bought the orchard where my grandfather was a slave,' his words reverberated and bounced off the walls of the Harvey in such a powerful way." When performing the play in Spain, when unions were struggling, "The play exploded," he recalls. "The reaction was so much different than it had been anywhere else. You just, you felt it because it's something that was bouncing off the news of the day and bouncing off people's hearts in a different way."
Before 2020, I never would have thought I would sit through a horror movie, let alone relate to the main characters. But there's something special in relating to the final girl who survives, who you know you will see in a sequel. The universal themes-hardship, danger, endurance-can apply to anyone.
"If you found one of [Chekhov's] plays with the cover ripped off, no title page, you'd have no idea if it was written by a man or a woman or a rich person or a poor person," Hawke says. "[His] is such the agenda of a true doctor-he kind of sees everybody."