Two Russias
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Two Chekhov is a painfully honest writer; he will have the truth, however disappointing. The dialogue of the early play Ivanov (1887, published in 1889) is...
...obvious than Rouben Ter-Arutunian's...
...if they do not live the full roles it is because the roles have an unexplained, labyrinthine depth infrequently found in modern plays...
...It must be, and is, muted, neurotic without a display of neuroses, a picture of a man whose floods of self-deprecation never rinse away his dignity...
...The dialogue of the early play Ivanov (1887, published in 1889) is virtually an open conjugation of the verb "to bore...
...Its characters dwell in lassitude, monotony...
...The Russia of Isaac Babel's Sunset is a couple of thousand miles, a quarter-century, and an entire social class distant from Chekhov's...
...Culver carries the best scene of the play...
...She has consumption...
...The part is no showcase...
...She is a Jewess whose rich parents disowned her after the marriage...
...they will not rise to a climax when presented with one...
...With quickchange scenic elements designed for the six different settings by Kim Swados, lighting and sound by Garry Harris, and Tec Crans' technical direction, Bruzzichelli has assembled the most industrious (and, I would guess, expensive) physical production of the off-Broadway season...
...In the pauses - Benya waiting to attack his father...
...The plot appeared tighter, the old Russian atmosphere more oppressive, the relationships more suffocating, the mood more urgent than in the present expansive production...
...A strong performer can fill a silence, but Martin Rudy (Mendel) and Michael Wager (Benya), both able actors, lack the electrifying personalities their parts cry out for...
...The "sunset" of the title represents the end of Mendel's rule...
...After the first disastrous showing of The Seagull Chekhov declared, "Never again will I write plays or have them produced...
...One can easily feel surfeited with the lugubrious goings-on, unless an attempt is made, say, at some modern stylization, within the realistic framework...
...His scenes are brief, sure, filled with darting poetry and exquisite character humor...
...and answers, "Because red is gayer than white...
...William Ball staged the play seven years ago off-Broadway and seemed to benefit from having the limited playing area of the Renata Theater imposed on him...
...After Benya punishes his father, someone says that he has "killed the falcon.' The rabbi asks, "Why does God wash in heaven with red water...
...The part has no bite...
...At the heart of the play is an eternal rectangle...
...The playing abounds with small hints and hesitations, unintended insults and abandoned decisions...
...A 19th century version depletes its vivacity and exhausts its sparing ration of humor...
...The wife, in turn, is loved - or perhaps only pitied - by a priggish young doctor...
...It is densely populated, richly colored, economically wrought, and innocently malign, an updated canvas of Black Sea peasantry by Breughel...
...In the final scene of Ivanov the hero does not reply to a tormentor...
...Later he tells Benya's brother, "A Jew who fancies lobsters will go further with the female sex than a man should...
...Some of his pauses do not hold...
...They suffer from rigor mortis of the will...
...Two years later Stanislavski transformed the play at the Moscow Art Theater...
...Lebedev takes enough bills out of his pocket to cover the interest and pleads with Ivanov to hand it back to Zyuzyushka, so that she will stop nagging them both...
...there are, in general, too many silences and they last too long...
...But when he decides to sell his business and run away with his mistress to plant orchards in Bessarabia, Benya steps in, clubs him with a pistol butt, tames him, and introduces tranquillity into the Krick household, so that the daughter of the family can be married off to a merchant after a real Jewish wedding, rabbi and all...
...The actors, old and young, move indolently...
...Nor will Ivanov's character...
...Chekhov's drama has become respectable, if not academic...
...But it does give us his performance as Ivanov, and this deserves undiluted praise...
...Lebedev's wife, Zyuzyushka, has loaned Ivanov money...
...Even with these blemishes, though - and there is some very good acting in the subsidiary parts, notably that of Sol Serlin as a matchmaker, Roberts Blossom as the rabbi, and Sylvia Mann as Nechama - Sunset is an eye-opener as a bravura study of comic and terrifying demons who talk like angels...
...He looks to me like the most truly natural Chekhovian actor in the English-speaking theater...
...In his later plays Chekhov avoids the kind of "big curtains" that close the four acts of Ivanov...
...The production goes sorrowfully forward, its verbal clichés propping themselves lethargically one against the other and decorated (in Gielgud's own adaptation) by those British drawing-room adverbs -perfectly, simply, dreadfully - that de-gut the adjectives they modify...
...The merchant remarks, "There are good friends who are ready to swallow you down, fully dressed, and without salt...
...Then there are incidents like the service in a synagogue during which the members of the congregation are exchanging market news...
...After 15 years of this union he has wearied of her and let himself be loved by a girl half his age...
...I say this to you as an observation from life...
...He does this, some critics believe, because he now finds Victorian melodrama distasteful and excessive...
...Aldo Bruzzichelli's direction (81st Street Theater) has caught the play's irregular beat, its threats and bursts of violence (the blazing obverse of Chekhov's world of gentle regrets...
...In the last act, after she is dead, he might get free of his financial and emotional tangles by marrying the young girl, but Chekhov's honesty will not permit such a resolution...
...And he has 27 actors to keep in hand...
...Ivanov could now use a comparable re-charging...
...The overall story thus progresses by a disorganized hop, skip, and jump method...
...They meet, clasp limp hands, toy with a few uncompleted thoughts, bandy a little holier-than-thou advice, part, and reappear...
...Gielgud's work, then, as director and adapter is ultra-conservative...
...this is what London theatergoers call an "Old Folks at Home" revival, a classic poshly underwritten by the resources of H. M. Tennent Productions, and sewn together with a few senior stars...
...Like the whole production, Miss Leigh spends more in languid effort than she can recoup in artistry...
...But he hampers the play in several respects...
...It is not so much a matter of distaste or dramatic form as of content...
...the doctor warns that she is dying...
...Ivanov and his wife are a childless couple living on his rundown estate in Central Russia...
...He cannot afford to pay her the accumulating interest, much less return the capital...
...Ivanov is stricken about this, but only because he cannot feel sorry for her...
...Like Büchner, Babel never squanders a word...
...But Ivanov indicates by negative example that climaxes do not belong in Chekhov's plays...
...In this case, the alterations might begin with scenery less ordinary and...
...He establishes weirdness, rather than comedy, as the dominant note of his staging, when weirdness is a quality that has to be suggested, not stated...
...He is sensitively supported by Roland Culver as the girl's father, Lebedev...
...Rudy and Wager know what is required...
...Torn by shame at his maltreatment of his late wife, he commits suicide...
...Mirra Ginsburg and Raymond Rosenthal have translated it into a sumptuous, sensuous vernacular English...
...As Ivanov's wife, Vivien Leigh has little to do but pour out creamy vowel sounds...
...He uses a running curtain, a translucent scrim lighted from behind, to let the scenes stay in motion after they have ended and float into one another...
...The best they can do to allay their malaise is to yearn: "If only I could Out of their petty moralizing come strings of proverbs and wornout wisdom which are tolerable to listen to only because the author is continually demonstrating how unqualified these people are to pronounce on one another's lives...
...Like many of Babel's stories it occupies the Jewish quarter of Odessa and features the Krick family, in particular Mendel Krick, the ogreish patriarch, and Benya, his gangster son who aches for middleclass orthodoxy...
...He allows the young woman he loves to defend him, then goes quickly offstage and shoots himself...
...When Mendel is turning in bed while his wife, Nechama, complains that "other people live like human beings,' instead of telling her to shut up or go to sleep he groans, "Let it be night, Nechama...
...an episode will take fire in the strangest places and most unexpected ways...
...In his revival of the play (Shubert Theater) Sir John Gielgud is true to what he sees as Chekhov's truths...
...A leading question then arises: Why rescue the play at this time without fresh insights from the director...
...One sentence opens with "I suppose it wouldn't altogether surprise you to learn that " before its gist arrives...
...He has an incredible dramatist's instinct for where to place an emphasis and what to omit...
...he'll use indecent language at the table and if he has children they'll be 100 per cent degenerates and billiard players...
...As in his brilliantly-read narrative for the movie To Die in Madrid, Gielgud here is all control, down to the finest detail of expression...
...Mendel standing drunk in a tavern and looking for something or somebody to damage - the theater should pulse with rage and danger...
...The people he elects to write about are incapable...
...He is 62, big as a house, strong as a horse, and, as his wife says, "as hot as an oven, as powerful as an oven," the terror of the neighborhood...
...even its decline offers her no footholds for character-making...
...It is a waste of an important actress...
...The five big plays, more than the work of any other dramatist of consequence, resemble one another...
...One congregant is telling another, "You come to the synagogue for a little peace and" when the cantor snatches out a revolver and fires at a passing rat...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 11
