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When a terribly opinionated person is making a good-faith effort
to be polite, avoidance often comes into play. So when
the question of American audiences arose last Sunday morning
with Moscow director Kama Ginkas, he did what convention
dictates and talked vaguely, pleasantly around it.
But Ginkas, 62, a gray-bearded man with a sturdy, compact
frame and an abundance of passion, could not hold out
for long.
"American
audience insists that theater is entertainment, where
European audience and especially Russians consider theater
to exist for
self-exploration," said Ginkas, who in an interview
at the Yale School of Drama spoke sometimes in English
and sometimes in Russian, relying on Yana Ross, a Moscow
native and first-year dramaturgy student at the school,
to translate.
"But
," he added, "it’s still amusing."
Addressing
a small gaggle that included British theater photographer
Ken Reynolds, camera in hand; Yale Repertory Theatre Associate
Artistic Director Mark Bly, who had lent his office for
the interview; and a reporter, Ginkas leaned forward in
his chair and pointed out the title of his new book with
John Freedman, "Provoking Theater," which was
lying on Bly’s desk. Settling back, he instantly, comically
assumed the pose of a not-too-bright spectator at the
theater: sitting, gaping, chomping on a snack. As he gripped
the arms of his chair, it suddenly began shaking as if
it were jolted by an electric current.
It
is that kind of figurative shock to the system, he suggested,
that can leave American theatergoers — who he believes
are often protected from difficult life questions — protesting,
"I paid money for entertainment," even as he
knows his work has achieved the desired effect.
"And
I always do this in Russia, in Europe, in the U.S., because
that is my goal: to provoke the audience, to give them
the feeling that life is
not comfortable, that life is a very complicated thing.
And living is not going downstream. Living is going against
the current."
The
Lithuanian-born Ginkas made his professional directing
debut in 1967, but it is only in recent months that his
work has been seen in the United States. He made his American
debut last August at Bard College with
"K.I. from ‘Crime,’" based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
"Crime and Punishment." In September, he directed
the American version of his "Lady with a Lapdog,"
adapted from Anton Chekhov, at American Repertory Theatre
in Cambridge, Mass.
Now
he is at Yale Repertory Theatre with his world-premiere
production of "Rothschild’s Fiddle," which he
adapted from Chekhov’s short story of the
same name. Performed in Russian with English supertitles
projected above the stage, it runs through Jan. 31 at
Yale’s University Theatre.
"Rothschild’s
Fiddle" is about a small-town coffin maker named
Yakov (played by Valerii Barinov), who has spent his 70
years bitter, surly, toting up his losses and treating
his wife, Marfa (Arina Nesterova), like a
piece of furniture. His one pleasure is playing the fiddle,
and even that is touched by his cruelty: He is vicious
to Rothschild (Igor Yasulovich), the
flutist who sits to his left in the orchestra that sometimes
hires him. From Yakov’s hatred of Rothschild grows his
hatred of all Jews.
But
when Marfa suddenly becomes ill and dies, Yakov realizes
the many possibilities that his life once held and he
squandered. Grief-stricken, he sickens and soon dies,
too.
"It’s
a story about a person who had no idea what love meant,
never, but who died two days after his wife died,"
Ginkas explained in Russian.
Then
he broke into English for emphasis.
"Maybe
," he said pointedly, "it was love."
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Yakov’s
last act is to leave Rothschild his fiddle. To give away
that final plot twist is to give away nothing about Ginkas’
production. Just as Yakov’s wood saw sometimes functions
as a saw and sometimes represents a fiddle, just as the
carved wooden boat onstage is both a boat and a bed,
Ginkas’ play is both a faithful evocation of Chekhov’s
story and a much more
nuanced, far more tender telling of it. Amid the grief
of Yakov’s emotional
awakening are a sweetness and even a joy that did not
come from Chekhov’s
pen and, in fact, do not appear in the text of the play.
It is all in Ginkas
’ staging.
"I’ll
tell you," Ginkas said last weekend, the morning
after a
run-through of the play. "I am 25 years older than
Chekhov when he wrote
this story. When I wanted to first stage this short story
it was 30 years
ago ... and there wouldn’t have been any of what you saw
last night if I’d
staged it 30 years ago. It would’ve been a horrifying
and cruel show, just
like Chekhov wrote. He wrote a horrible story, horrifying.
And he knew that
he was writing this type of story, and he allowed himself
a sentimentality
that he almost never does."
Ginkas
, who is Jewish, sees that sentimentality in the story’s
ending,
in which a lowly Jew receives a gift of great value.
"A
violin in Russian culture, especially in relation to Gypsy
culture,
is a very sentimental, emotional instrument," he
said, and Chekhov
ordinarily would never have allowed a character to give
a violin to such a
person.
"But
when he realized he was writing this wrenching story,"
Ginkas
said, "he allowed himself to write the end that he
never allowed himself
anywhere else.
"In
his stories, always there is no happy ending. Hopeless.
And never
a lesson. A lesson is never learned."
"Rothschild’s
Fiddle" is the exception.
"Like
a parable," Ginkas said.
Even
so, it is a bleak tale, and Ginkas’ vision for the play
changed
as he aged.
"I
can’t tell that harsh story. I caught myself," said
Ginkas, who
first wrote the play in his head three decades ago.
"And
I can see what I wanted to do, what I intended to do.
And to be
honest, I’m not sure if I’m right. Because Chekhov doesn’t
have tenderness.
Chekhov is the most somber and harsh and honest writer
in the universe. He’s
a pathologist."
But
Chekhov also died at 44.
"If
he lived longer," Ginkas said, "maybe he would’ve
been more
tender."
In a dialogue in his book, "Provoking Theater,"
Ginkas discusses at
length Federico Fellini’s 1954 film, "La Strada,"
in which a brutish man,
late in life, at last experiences human emotion. "I
must say that everything
I am comes out of that film," Ginkas says in the
book.
The
movie’s theme runs through his work, including "Rothschild’s
Fiddle."
"Because a
human being is born for something," Ginkas elaborated
last
weekend. "He has a mission. If he’s not looking for
that mission, if when he
finds it he’s not fulfilling that mission, he’s not human.
He’s wasting his
life meaninglessly."
Ginkas
, who joked that he answers a simple question with an
hourlong
lecture, said that Yakov, like most people, merely existed;
he did not live.
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"The
question of what is a human being and what makes him
a human
being is the primary question," he said. "We
know that physiologically, when
a child is born, it’s supported by convulsions of both
the mother and child.
... For a human being to be born, he has to go through
pain of convulsions,
physical pain. In this story we see how a man who’s
quite old, who has lived
his life, while dying is born. It’s Chekhov’s genius
paradox: Through dying
he’s born. And we see those painful convulsions throughout
the show when he
is born."
Ginkas’
own life began only weeks before the Nazi invasion of
Lithuania. As a little boy during World War II, he lived
for a time in a
Jewish ghetto and later was hidden from the SS; as an
older child, he lived
under Stalin.
He
was schooled in the Russian theater, but his work was
often
censored by the Soviet authorities during the first
decades of his career.
Since 1986, his creative home has been MYTZ Theatre/Moscow
New Generation
Theatre, where his wife, Henrietta Yanovskaya, is the
artistic director.
It
is that theater’s production of "Rothschild’s Fiddle"
that Yale Rep
signed on to present even before a script existed —
and before Ginkas’ work
had ever been seen in the U.S.
Shortly
after he was appointed the Rep’s new artistic director
in fall
2001, James Bundy, acting on a tip from David Chambers,
an adjunct professor
of directing at the drama school, deployed Mark Bly
to Moscow to check out
Ginkas’ work. Bundy, who had never seen the work himself,
finally did last
February in Moscow, but by then the production at Yale
Rep was already a
done deal. He had been convinced over lunch in a restaurant
in Cambridge,
Mass., when Ginkas spent 20 minutes telling him the
story of "Rothschild’s
Fiddle."
"I
was laughing when he first started, and I was really,
really sad
when he finished," Bundy said the other day.
"If
I didn’t know by reputation," he said, "by
the time he finished
telling the story, I knew that I was in the presence
of a master director."
Before
arriving in New Haven with his wife two weeks ago, Ginkas
rehearsed "Rothschild’s Fiddle" in Moscow
for six months — not an unusually
long rehearsal period for a piece that will stay in
the company’s repertory
for years after it opens in Russia. (The first time
Ginkas was asked to
direct in the U.S. was 12 years ago. "But I was
offered to direct Chekhov’s
work in four weeks," he recalled. "I said,
‘If you can do that, you can do
it yourself.’")
"Rothschild’s
Fiddle" is the last piece in Ginkas’ "Life
is Beautiful"
trilogy of Chekhov adaptations, which also includes
"Lady with a Lapdog" and
"The Black Monk." With Dostoevsky and Shakespeare,
Chekhov is one of Ginkas’
storytelling touchstones.
"He’s
so paradoxically and brilliantly and geniusly telling
the story
of my life that I can’t not love him," Ginkas said.
"It’s like a father or a
friend who really knows me better than I know myself."
The story
of Ginkas’ life is onstage at the Rep in another way,
too:
The set, designed by his longtime collaborator, Sergei
Barkhin, echoes the primitive Lithuanian wood sculptures
that Ginkas has loved since childhood.
Those roughly carved figures, made by people who are
not trained artists,
emerge only partially from the wood, like a "half-born
human being," he
said.
On
the set, bare wood — a metaphor for "the unfinished,
unsaid
things" — is everywhere: in coffins upended, coffins
lying flat, a boat, the
rooftops of the town.
"And
it gives this incredible, vast space for my own fantasy,"
Ginkas
said, "for my own imagination."
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