Happy Birthday, Chekhov!

Anton's Uncles and the Cherry Orchard, 150 years on

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Jun 10 2010

After the opening night of Theatre Movement Bazaar'sAnton's Uncles, they threw a birthday party for Anton Chekhov, who would have been 150. In the Russian playwright's Uncle Vanya, from which this production at 24th Street Theater is distilled, a country doctor with a passion for women, not unlike Chekhov himself, bemoans the death of a patient who expired in surgery, under his care.

PHOTO BY JIM MOODY

Dancing with Chekhov, in Anton's Uncles

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"I sat down and closed my eyes — like this," Astrov the doctor explains to an old nanny — "and thought: Will our descendants one or two hundred years from now, for whom we're clearing the way, remember to give us a kind word? No, Nanny, they'll forget us."

Hardly. Well more than a century after Uncle Vanya premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 (after out-of-town tryouts in 1898), champagne was flowing in Los Angeles to honor the man and his enduring legacy. Enduring, but relevant? Or is the Chekhovian "atmosphere" — a blend of vaudeville muted by existential malaise, all wrapped in a light sheet of unrequited loves, aphorisms and quasi-comic ruminations on the pointlessness of life — a kind of genteel distraction from the brutality of our culture and the vulgarity with which we express ourselves in it?

When asked to explain Doctor Astrov during rehearsals for its Moscow Art Theatre premiere, Chekhov replied cryptically, "He wears a silk tie."

Great. Thanks.

One could infer from that crack a kind of essence: a doctor forced to ride horseback across muddy roads to patients stricken with ailments, from emphysema and malaria. Amidst all that filth and disease, the man still wears a silk tie. You can almost see it spotted with grime from the road. This would reflect his beautiful, absurd faith in decorum and gentility.

And what has that to do with us, and our culture in which we debate in public by screaming and hurling invective, if not worse? Where even our romantic songs proffer odes to bee-yatches and whores.

In Chekhov's world, sometimes they make sarcastic jokes, but when they get really upset, they retire to an anteroom and shoot themselves, or somebody else. And everybody gasps in horror, or they nod knowingly. Their actions are like ours, but their style of interracting is certainly not like our style, which is far less respectful.

Chekhov's characters are eager to explain themselves, but we're far too evolved to explain. Explaining implies a confidence in the power of reason. We can't even agree on the facts. On when and how we were created. On whether our climate is really changing for the worse. We're not big on explaining, or on decorum or listening politely. We prefer to disparage and cut people off midsentence, like they do on talk radio.

There's so much in Chekhov's plays that now resembles fantasy. The politeness, for example. Does he, like Shakespeare, still have the influence to show us who we are? Not much decorum in King Lear or Macbeth, which somehow get right to the rancid heart of the matter. Chekhov would have a hard time on Broadway, even with, say, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts and Kathy Griffin as his Three Sisters. He's a minority taste.

Yet from that minority, from that land of antique decorum, you get a monologue from Astrov, whose hobby is to plant trees and help preserve Russia's great forests. Remember, this is a voice from 1898, a voice from the wilderness, even then, a self-proclaimed crank and eccentric:

"Oh, I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. Why? Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down to pick up their fuel from the ground. Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the wild life is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the Earth becomes poorer and uglier every day . ... When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride and I — [sees the WORKMAN, who is bringing him a glass of vodka on a tray] however — [he drinks] I must be off. Probably it's all nonsense, anyway. Goodbye."

The man with the silk tie is staring into the abyss of what his descendants — that would be us — will do to our planet. Decorum or none, there's no arguing with such unexpurgated prophecy. Uncle Vanya is the first play on record to grapple with ecology.

Director-choreographer Tina Kronis bypasses the problems of decorum and style in Richard Alger's distillation of Uncle Vanya, which takes a quartet of men from the play and displays and splays them with snippets of Vanya's more memorable scenes, plus Alger's own supplements, and Kronis' synchronized movement patterns.