CHEKHOV STRAIGHT
Funke, Lewis
Chekhov Straight By LEWIS FUNKE ONE OF THE more remarkable and, indeed, healthier aspects of the theater this season has been the phenomenal growth of the "off-Broadway theater"—tiny playhouses in...
...This not only helps explain what his intent is, but also why he embarked upon his Chekhov Festival...
...The interpretation is simple and straightforward, purged of excessive worship...
...What I learned from The Dybbuk," he says now, "was that anything the mind conceives can be executed on a stage provided it is done with taste and intelligence...
...Of the groups currently functioning, none has done more to stimulate the New York scene than the one just off Second Avenue on Fourth Street—the Fourth Street Theater...
...You cannot drop a word, rearrange an act of a scene...
...In the center there is a slightly-raised platform, with the audience sitting on two sides...
...The players make their exits and entrances down the side aisles, occasionally bumping into late-comers finding seats...
...Occupying a room that once was a synagogue and subsequently a night club, it is the single-handed creation of David Ross, who, in his early thirties, already has managed to startle reviewers for the New York press with his four presentations to date: Henry G. Alsberg's English-language translation of S. Ansky's The Dybbuk, and Chekhov's The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vanya...
...When he is told to stand, he stands...
...He finished college with no thought of making the theater his vocation...
...Otherwise the exits and entrances remain down the side aisles...
...In The Dybbuk and The Three Sisters he gave the matter hardly a thought...
...he has, in his Fourth Street Theater, an intimate little playhouse where the empathy of an audience can be easily captured, provided the work is of high enough caliber...
...With able support from his younger playLEWIS FUNKE is drama editor of the New York Times...
...IV Ross is a dedicated man, and he doesn't intend yielding his dream...
...He is utterly unconscious of the sacrosanct place Chekhov is supposed to hold in the archives...
...This tradition offers a nice paralyzing experience every theatergoer ought to have if only once—and that is about what it has been in the past—but it just is not Chekhov...
...East," he says, "was a dream...
...It's exciting...
...he asks, and knows that there is no answer...
...A bushy-haired, plumpish man, Ross was born thirty-one years ago in St...
...at the end of a year, he was back in high school in St...
...In his studies he realized that the important thing was to convey the feelings of the play, that Chekhov must be played as the script is written...
...Meanwhile, Ross is on Fourth Street pursuing his ideal...
...Secondly, there is Ross' approach to the plays themselves...
...If he fails on Fourth Street, with that training he will be equipped to go home or elsewhere in this country and start again...
...III If Ross' success is intriguing, all the more remarkable are the facts surrounding it...
...History fascinated him, and he was good enough as a swimmer to gain his varsity letter...
...In 1951, resolved to give the drama full reign, he came East and got a job as an apprentice at the famous Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Massachusetts...
...They blend and give us a sense of the modern without sacrificing the inherent beauty of the prose from which they are derived...
...So narrow was the areaway that he could not even have a conventional theater-in-the-round...
...The simplicity of Ross' approach obviously must have its inherent validity...
...He is not interested in how Stanis-lavski directed Chekhov in those hallowed days of the Moscow Art Theater or how others have directed Chekhov in the past...
...The bad nights of the week are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays...
...However, for The Cherry Orchard, he decided he needed "speedier" action and ingeniously conceived of a tiny area at the rear of the platform to which the actors could adjourn while they were "in the house...
...At the University of Minnesota an interest in dramatics that had been kindled at Yeshiva began to come to the fore...
...New York was the goal, the haven, the capital of the theater...
...Ross is revealing the playwright's original glory, awakening a new appreciation, and providing "scope to measure, to appraise, to compare again what strange and different currents of imagination the theater of any new period (for Chekhov's was just that) can reveal...
...Some of the little theaters don't charge a dime: they simply ask for donations and you give what you please...
...Consider: First, the translations Ross has used...
...Ross has refused to read more into Chekhov than there is on the printed page...
...Ross was in his mid-twenties when he realized that the electroplating business was only tolerable as a means of making his living and that the theater had a far greater grip on him than he had realized...
...He remembers that he must have read the play at least thirty times—"I knew every word by heart...
...As far as Ross is concerned this is no special problem...
...Ross settled on the Fourth Street site, in spite of the fact that it would provide him with the most unorthodox of playing areas...
...Consequently, most of the actors were "non-professionals" when they started with him...
...What he has, as has been most aptly described by Al Hirschfeld, the New York Times' famous caricaturist, is a "theater-in-the-long...
...The off-Broadway theater is subject to the same inexorable laws of economics that engulf Broadway...
...No one was interested, and he decided to tackle the problem himself...
...At the moment Chekhov is a going artistic concern on Fourth Street...
...Ross launched his Fourth Street Theater October 26, 1954...
...Ross himself contends that "the Chekhov tradition today means, unfortunately, drama loaded with bittersweet Russian gloom, and it further offers a smattering of high symbolic art, guaranteed to be there, but just beyond reach of the average audience's spiritual means...
...At this writing Uncle Vanya with Signe Hasso and Franchot Tone is on view, and followers of the theater know that a visit to the lower end of Manhattan is most rewarding...
...but he admits that as an undergraduate he had no affection for Chekhov —"I couldn't understand those terrible translations," he says...
...They have a fluency, ease, and clarity that are a pleasure to the ear...
...The Dybbuk had a satisfactory engagement...
...He has insisted on directing and playing Chekhov "as is...
...II How has this neophyte achieved two eminently satisfying productions of a playwright who has tripped other and presumably better-trained technicians of the theater...
...The production captured the script's brooding atmosphere, its snatches of wispy light and beauty, its sense of doom and frustration...
...Chekhov Straight By LEWIS FUNKE ONE OF THE more remarkable and, indeed, healthier aspects of the theater this season has been the phenomenal growth of the "off-Broadway theater"—tiny playhouses in New York's Greenwich Village, empty lofts converted into auditoriums, and basements of churches and synagogues...
...Where else could I be getting such training...
...In England there are repertory companies all over where young people can train, and the sad fact is that we have more talent here than there is in England...
...And like those thousands, Ross discovered when he returned to New York from Cape Cod that the doors were of steel and heavily reinforced...
...Not, mind you, that Ross has proved that Chekhov can be produced in the commercial theater uptown with equal success...
...Ross came to his production of The Three Sisters reinforced with his new experience...
...The theater is too concentrated in New York...
...For this production he managed to enlist such professionals as Morris Carnovsky for Andrey, Roger de Koven for Vershinin, and the late Philip Loeb for Tchebutykin...
...And Ross revealed that he knew how to plan and stage an intelligently conceived production...
...Paul...
...It is to Ross' everlasting credit that he has had the good sense and taste to discern the superiority of a master prematurely consigned to gathering dust on library shelves...
...To hear the lines in Young's translation is to realize how poor have been those we have heard before...
...He studied and restudied the script, went to live with a Chassidic family in Williamsburg, joined in the sabbath celebrations at the synagogue, and absorbed the spirit of the sect...
...This it is...
...The only recognizable names in his cast for The Dybbuk were those of Ludwig Donath and Lou Gilbert...
...They are simple and devoid of literary archaisms...
...He could find no work in the theater...
...Often under the most difficult of circumstances, actors, varying in rank from outright novices to full-fledged stars like Signe Hasso and Franchot Tone, perform in new plays and in classics that the Broadway theater cannot touch because of the financial risks involved...
...In time he may be victor over economics...
...Not given to waiting, Ross soon concluded that if he wanted to work in the theater he would have to adopt a contemporary vogue—"do it yourself...
...If you do, you're bound to be in trouble...
...Financially Ross still finds it difficult to put a solid structure under his enterprise...
...The result has been a salutary supplement to the theatrical diet, at comparatively nominal prices...
...When he was twelve, he was entered in Yeshiva in Chicago...
...He has refused to follow the time-encrusted traditions of directing Chekhov...
...As he grew a bit older, however, the idea of becoming a rabbi no longer seemed so appealing...
...And he didn't want to build a stage and create on a limited proscenium-arched stage...
...Once again Ross had a success, and, emboldened, he announced that for his second season he would offer a Chekhov Festival, including The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Sea Gull...
...ers, he created a thoroughly poignant rendition of a play that probes the lassitude, the grim attrition, and the overpowering stultification of life as Chekhov perceived it in his native country at the beginning of this century...
...The result is that he has been able to strip away ritualistic cant and uncover the wit, grace, and power in these plays...
...With the aid of friends, who added funds to his own nest egg, he set out to find a place where he could work and work as he pleased...
...But the absence of names did not matter...
...Someone has to wake up to the tragic waste of talent in this great country and give it the opportunity it needs...
...They are the work of Stark Young...
...Not only has Ross been able to commandeer a fine cast of players, but he also has given us a clear, clean production of a play that too often in the past has been mired in mannerisms and self-conscious styling...
...Until he undertook the operation of his theater he never had directed a play professionally...
...Encouraged, Ross decided to assail the Chekhovian rampart, certainly no small assault for an off-Broadway theater when you realize that the Russian master has fallen into disfavor with certain groups and that Broadway is convinced Chekhov is boxoffice poison...
...He feels that he has been building a theater and with it an audience...
...The actors may not have been of the established stature of those introduced to us in the same play not so long ago by the Habimah Theater, but they had a keen perception and comprehension of the ritualistic mystery they were playing...
...In the "off-Broadway theater" it has been possible for New York to see Marc Blitzstein's version of the Kurt Weill musical, The Threepenny Opera, George Bernard Shaw's The Admirable Bashville, Bert Brecht's The Private Life of the Master Race and The Cradle Song...
...Ross' initial defiance brought forth The Three Sisters, Chekhov's brooding portrait of life in old Russia...
...I like the idea of festivals," he says...
...If not, he says he will charge up the venture as an investment in his own training...
...The house is packed on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays...
...He went home to work in his father's electroplating plant and spend some of his spare time acting in a local little theater...
...he thought he wanted to join the rabbinate...
...One group that has given itself the outlandish title of Shakespearewrights has been turning out productions of the Bard that even the tough major critics have found worthy of attention...
...Paul, where he was educated in the public schools...
...He remembered the great hopes he had had of working and learning and developing—"like thosuands of those other youngsters who come to New York every year full of aspiration, convinced that in them resides the talent to knock 'em dead...
...Next season he's thinking of a Strindberg Festival...
...Ambitious to develop whatever abilities he possessed, he attended the Neighborhood Playhouse for a while and then studied privately with Lee Strasberg, that celebrated director and teacher who has been a major artistic force in the growing success of the Actors' Studio...
...He appeared in a few plays...
...By careful drilling and dedication to the task, he came up with the results described...
...As for the hurdle of actors, Ross knew he wanted to rehearse for at least two months, yet he couldn't afford the union schedule...
...For 1955-56 Chekhov would dominate Fourth Street...
...When a character is directed by the script to sit, he sits...
...The rest of the players were unknown, including Ross himself, who besides directing, played Rabbi Samson...
...Someone must take it out of this narrow boundary and plant it firmly where there are those who never have seen live theater before...
...It gives us a chance to see a playwright whole...
...After selecting The Dybbuk for his launching, Ross set about the problem of getting a director...
Vol. 20 • May 1956 • No. 5
