On Stage
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage DEADLY REVIVALS by JOHN SIMON should we laugh or weep at what is being done to Chekhov at Lincoln Center? Andrei Serban, the Rumanian avant-garde director who has found a home at La...
...For Serban, one word of Greek is "more powerful than any 15 in a modern language," Greek being "also a language to talk to the gods in...
...Serban is influenced directly by Peter Brook, whose assistant he briefly was, and indirectly by Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin and, no doubt, Robert Wilson...
...or, at the very least, in the dark about what they are supposed to be and do...
...Or is it...
...Of course, you can go just as wrong the other way, with a conventional staging of a classic, as is demonstrated by Ellis Rabb's mounting of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra...
...Charlotte is turned into a total madwoman...
...Anya is not living at the expense of former slaves...
...his subsequent works, mostly for the Open Theater of Joseph Chaikin, added nothing to his stature...
...l could go on citing absurdities for pages...
...At one point Dunyasha does a near-strip tease and runs around with her underpants about her ankles until she trips and falls flat—again and again...
...That is neither English nor Russian, merely gibberish...
...Farce is rampant throughout...
...The Cherry Orchard, accordingly, is treated at Lincoln Center as a subject for free improvisation by director and performers...
...Van Itallie turns this into, "They squeak to a point that is unfeasible...
...The text, technically, is still there...
...through it, all sorts of symbolic characters can be seen wandering singly or in frieze-like groupings...
...Serban, now 33, became the darling of the avant garde several years ago with something he called The Trilogy—versions of Euripides' Medea, Electro and The Trojan Women, three plays as unrelated as any by the same author can be...
...The supporting cast ranges from insipid to intolerable, although Paul Hecht's Rufio gets more arresting as he goes alonf and James Valentine is a passable Britannus...
...Unsurprisingly, Serban's theory of theater, as expressed in a profile by Richard Eder published in the New York Times Magazine of February 13, is a mixture of myth-monger-ing, essence-chasing, body-building, and trumpeting emotions through unearthly sounds coaxed from human throats and instruments that have little to do with speech or music...
...When the family returns from abroad, they are preceded by Firs, in a funny little top hat, hopping about and singing a foolish ditty...
...Lopakhin carries on like a maniac most of the time, and like a dangerous maniac when aroused...
...Beyond this there is a scrim that, from time to time, reveals a naturalistic cherry orchard...
...Actually, they reduce meaning to nonsense...
...Only C. K. Alexander, as Pishchik, suggests a turn-of-the-century Russian...
...The production is consistently coarse, virtually cretinous and a total betrayal of Chekhov's basic simplicity...
...Ranevskaya has a quasi-sexual relationship with Petya, who is often made to suggest a large bat or spider...
...George Vos-kovec's aristocratic Gaev is really a sniveling oaf...
...But all the characters are turned into grotesques, constantly jumping up on objects or falling down backward or forward—or even rolling off a bench sideways...
...What Freud has become for middle-class America at large, Jung has become for the avant-garde theater...
...And so it goes all the way to the end, when Firs assumes a fetal position on the floor—from which we are more likely to deduce that he is about to do his yoga exercises than that he is dying—and a little girl waltzes in with a few cherry sprigs to strike an attitude right behind him...
...Or, to put it differently, on Broadway you can still be a Method actor, and use the theater as bastardized Freudian self-analysis...
...Before leaving the doomed cherry orchard forever, Ranevskaya gallops around the stage three or four times like a child who pretends to be on horseback...
...Needless to say, the acting style that went with this was what we have come to recognize as the ca-vortings and wallowings of today's avant-garde theater, with the audience buffeted hither and yon by stampeding actors...
...Near the beginning of the play, Epihodov, the clumsy clerk, complains that his new boots squeak unbearably...
...What is common to all of them is the journey," and he goes on to talk of archetypes...
...She is becoming predictable, a word that will do also for Rabb's lackluster staging...
...Desperate people, though, who seek in theater not an intellectual and esthetic experience but solutions to nagging personal problems—not least frustration with their own creative sterility—will talk about archetypes, essences and myths the way more forthright unfortunates carry on about uppers, downers and acid...
...Yet this accumulation of irrelevant gimmicks received rave reviews from most New York drama critics, and Serban's next project for the Beaumont is to be, according to Eder in the Times, "Sophocles' Agamemnon...
...Granted that Rabb inherited the production from another director who did it for the Kennedy Center—which, as I have often noted, is not even a museum, only a taxidermist's shop...
...He finds the three plays he has done most recently?The Trojan Women, As You Like Ft and The Cherry Orchard—share "something called essence...
...Van Itallie's reputation as a playwright rests chiefly on America Hurrah, three quite amusing satirical playlets...
...Dunyasha becomes an arrogant poseuse who may be near-imbecile...
...Paragraph two of his piece for the "Arts and Leisure" section of the Times (likewise February 13) begins: "Much of Chekhov's immediacy, wit and humanity have [sic] been obscured in the English translations available...
...Elizabeth Ashley continues her feline act—here a purr, there a scratch, and lots of meowing sensuality in between, but what worked in Wilder and Williams is not enough for Cleopatra...
...Thomas Skel-ton's lighting is less inventive than usual...
...The three plays cited by Serban are no more—and no less—plays about journeys than any other three you or I could name at random, every play being a trip from its first line toward its last...
...Ben Masters' valet emerges as an effete upper-class fop of today...
...So far, there have existed only an Agamemnon by Aeschylus and another by Seneca, but that shouldn't stop Serban any more than it did the Times...
...There is no ensemble playing of any kind...
...Think of it, Anya, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, and all your ancestors were serf-owners, proprietors of living souls" now becomes, "You are living at the expense of people who were your slaves...
...Greek, let us face it, is no more or less a language to speak to the gods in than English...
...Slow-motion occurs at random throughout the play...
...Such alterations, for Barnes, place "the play into more immediate focus...
...Between Serban's demented wilfulness and this kind of creeping commercial paralysis there must be a middle road—bringing the classics to life, not rewriting or embalming them...
...off-Broadway acting, on the other hand, provides you with pop-Jungian therapy updated by other schools from Primal Scream to EST...
...Rather, the statement means that long-established despotism can change quite suddenly, and the world can become democratized?so there is hope...
...But who was the author of this Trilogy...
...Even the remarkable Irene Worth is forced to turn Ranevskaya into a hysterical peasant and exhibitionist, while Raul Julia makes Lopakhin into a hyperthyroid young Puerto Rican...
...The third-act party takes place in a carousel-like pavilion, with the dancers performing a fancy ballet that at times turns into slow-motion, and at others freezes into stop-motion...
...most of the others come across as 1977 American...
...Jane Greenwood's costumes, at least for the women, are better than that...
...Yet the liberties taken by the translation—which, among other things, restores a scene between Firs and Charlotte that Chekhov rightly dropped—are as nothing to those of Serban's production...
...It is a new "translation" by Jean Claude van Itallie, who knows no Russian but, presumably, knows how to translate...
...the performers come from various backgrounds and do not begin to blend, despite the much-vaunted Serban training and discipline...
...He claims to have consulted "a literal translation," 10 English versions and a French one...
...Ranevskaya may step out of the supposed house into this orchard through a supposed wall, and then as casually step back in again...
...Or take another typical change that Clive Barnes quoted approvingly...
...Now let's see how it is obscured by the master himself...
...Even his literacy may be questioned...
...Ming Cho Lee's rudimentary scenery is more or less adequate...
...Rex Harrison can still toss off an epigram so that it catches you, a second or two later, quite unawares...
...In the case of Euripides, he and his composer, Elizabeth Swados, then in her early 20s, invented a language made up of some Greek words, chosen for sound rather than meaning and pronounced any old (or, rather, new) way, with words from African and American Indian tongues added along with a plethora of inarticulate sounds, supported by condign music...
...Most of them are rotten, anyway...
...The stars give typical Broadway or West End performances...
...But those came long ago...
...Thus, instead of being in a house, we are now in the vast spaces of the Vivian Beaumont stage, covered with whitish fabric and having a few pieces of furniture scattered across it...
...the real problem is that we have lost both our gods and our language, and are left screaming and groping in the dark...
...Andrei Serban, the Rumanian avant-garde director who has found a home at La Mama, the experimental theater in which he actually lives as well as works, has now been imported uptown by Joseph Papp, ever ready to snap up a trend...
...but he lacks both energy and involvement with his role, and plays everything, even the dramatic moments, for weary comedy...
Vol. 60 • March 1977 • No. 6
