Kama Ginkas on Anton Chekhov.
Six Excerpts from Provoking Theater: Kama Ginkas Directs, by Kama Ginkas and John Freedman (Smith and Kraus, 2003). (Reprinted with the permission of the publisher).
1) Chapter 1: Russian Theater is not a Time-Killer.
From my student days I have loved The Cherry Orchard. To this day I consider it the greatest and most difficult play ever written. No Shakespeare can compare to The Cherry Orchard as regards the difficulty of staging it. In many of the shows I do, I am actually staging The Cherry Orchard: Nina Pavlova's The Club Car, Alexander Galin's The Toastmaster or Daniil Gink's Dostoevsky dramatization, K.I. from "Crime", if you will. They are all The Cherry Orchard. It is a play of genius. I am amazed at the lightheadedness and brazenness of many who dare to stage Chekhov. There is nothing surprising in someone doing Shakespeare. You can do him. I myself did Hamlet when I was 30. Shakespeare has this key that unlocks things no matter what. Chekhov does not. Chekhov is vengeful. Let’s say some actress plays Ranevskaya well. But you still cannot watch the show. Somebody plays Arkadina wonderfully. But you still cannot watch. Somebody plays Treplev well. But you cannot watch. Everybody has to play well.I have never liked contemporary plays, either Russian or foreign. I like Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. I like her a lot. But I was also afraid of staging her, as I am of The Cherry Orchard. I have been asked why I do not stage Strindberg. But why should I stage Strindberg if I can stage Dostoevsky? If Dostoevsky is a god, Strindberg is a deacon in some provincial theater. He takes a tiny little piece of Dostoevsky and does it very well. But I can get that from Dostoevsky. Dunya and Svidrigailov add up to all of Strindberg. Everything I want to say is already there in Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare.
2) Chapter Two: A Russian Director from Lithuania with a Jewish Accent.
I want to ask you about an image I have of you as a two-year old. It is based on stories you tell about the time when you were being sheltered from the Nazis. German officers often came to the house in which you were staying and you, a Jewish toddler, were often the one who opened the door for them. Every time you spoke, you were in danger of giving yourself away. Someone was standing over you trying to drill into your head that you must not continue to speak one way and that you must begin to speak another way. It was a matter of life and death. In that image, I see any number of the characters in your shows who also speak to me simply and forcefully of simple topics. It is perhaps as if I am somewhat stupid, or perhaps I am a child, and I am not quite able to understand without being prompted that this is a matter of life and death.
[…] The way I imagine it is this. Sofia Binkiene, the woman who was hiding me from the Nazis at the time, was an intelligent and beautiful woman. It so happened that she was also a woman of great heroism. She was speaking to a child who was merely two-and-a-half years old. Here is what happened.
I would run to the door and say in Yiddish, "Vos?" which in German would be "Was?" That is, "What?" And she would say encouragingly, "You know what, Kama? Vos sounds just like voz" — which is the Russian word that is rendered in Lithuanian as vezimas, that is, "wagon." "So why don't you just say vezimas?"
There is no coercion or pressure in that. It is just a gentle suggestion — "You see? This is death. Why not steer clear of it?" […]
Let us apply this to my production of Chekhov's The Black Monk, for instance. In this show, the intonation characterizing the speech of Tanya might be that of a cheerful mother: "Oops, careful there Kovrin. You don't want to fall, now. That is the edge of an abyss there, you know. It is quite a drop. Who knows what's out there? Maybe you'd better come away from the edge and play with the fluffy feathers over here. Dabble about in love and conversation. Why not come away from there? You'll be safer. And what's the difference in distance? A meter. No more. That is all. Vos. Voz. It is almost the same thing. You don't want to go over to the edge. Just stay over here, okay? Okay?"
I am certain that is how Sofia Binkiene spoke with me. And I would want it to resonate that way in my productions.
Basically, when I create my shows, I perceive them as gentle, tender and ironic. I do not know how spectators perceive them, but that is how I perceive them. You see, in the example I have just given you from The Black Monk, the notion of playfulness is very prominent. It is the deception of a child. "What's the difference? Vos? Voz. 'S'. 'Z'. Just that one little change, that is all. And then everything will be fine."
As the author of the production, I recognize and know the abyss facing Kovrin. I am convinced that it presents a mortal danger. But that is another thing. […]
3) Chapter 5: Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Others.
It would seem that Chekhov was an impressionist. But why do you think he did not like the way his plays were performed? Because they played his characters as if they did nothing but drink tea and wear their suit. That is where the "pleasant, agreeable" Chekhov comes from. But he himself did not like that. He did not see himself in that light. We know he was not like that. If he had been, his works would not have survived.4) Chapter 6: We Play Literature.
My first attempt at staging documentary materials was in 1968. It was a play called My Mocking Happiness, based on the correspondence of Anton Chekhov with various people. Written by Leonid Malyugin, a writer who was quite popular at that time among intellectuals, it was a very bad play constructed on the basis of badly edited letters. Basically he wrote a piece of sentimental slop, a portrait of Chekhov as if he had been an exemplary Soviet citizen. He went to live in the country and then traveled to Sakhalin Island to find out how strong-spirited people live. He was the kind of person who did not accept the tsarist regime, but he fell in love with the famous actress Olga Knipper, became involved with a good theater, the Moscow Art Theater, met "the stormy petrel" Maxim Gorky and, then, finally saw the light. Still, he was a lonely man and he died when he got sick. It was a banal version of the loves and works of Anton Chekhov. I was not at all interested in that. I did not give a damn about Chekhov's first love or his second love. I rewrote the whole thing. All I left untouched were the characters' dialogues and the basic plot based on historical facts. I went back to a pre-revolutionary edition of Chekhov's letters in five volumes and re-read them all. That was when I realized that all the quotes in the play were inaccurate. They often broke off right when the most interesting thing was about to be said; something that would transform what Chekhov had been saying up to then into something else. I left the basic structure of the play intact, but filled it out with quotes from Chekhov's actual letters and threw out everything Malyugin had inserted on his own. It was then that I first realized the tragedy of Chekhov's nature. I discovered the paradoxes that existed inside of him and the breach between others' perceptions of him and his own perception of himself. This breach existed even with people who loved him. I discovered the paradoxes that affect any person in Russia who dedicates himself to art. Perhaps that stands true not only for Russians, but it is especially true of Russians. Essentially, Chekhov wholly renounced himself, declining to have a personal life. And I began to understand that that "old man" who died at the age of forty-four was no old man at all. I was used to judging him by his photographs which make him look like an old man. In fact, he was a passionate man. As all in the Chekhov family, he was an alcoholic by inheritance. That is, he was not an actual alcoholic because he did not allow himself to become one. But his brother Alexander was an alcoholic and his brother Mikhail died of alcoholism and tuberculosis. That was hereditary. Anton was in the same position, but he did not allow it to control him.He was a tall, handsome man with a great sense of humor. He was charming, a great ladies' man. He adored women. And, yet, he avoided them, too. Chekhov rarely talked about himself, but if you know how to read him, you will see that he loved plump women with tough characters. He was not interested in elegant women, no.
He had a famous affair with a well-known provincial actress whom he described, in part, in the character of Arkadina. This woman often created public scenes. She was capable, at a society gathering, of falling down before Chekhov on her knees and declaring, "Oh, great writer of the Russian land! How I love you!" He hated the theater and theater life with all its vulgar scenes. And yet, this affair lasted several years. Because, even as he hated this crude, vulgar behavior, he was drawn to it.
Our impression of Chekhov is that he was a very proper person. But he was actually capable of being very explosive. Admirers would travel to visit Chekhov at his home in Melikhovo. Teachers, usually associated with liberal populist groups, would come and ask him how to educate children or how to improve the life of poor Russians. He hated all those populists and social progressives! He saw their superficiality, how badly educated they were. Yes, they were devoted to their cause, but he saw how vain they were about their virtue. Chekhov was unwell, he wanted to write. But these people would sit there for hours, talking and asking him questions. One time, he began smashing plates and yelling at his sister, who was in charge of the house. Couldn't she possibly find a way to protect him from these intrusions? When I did My Mocking Happiness, I took my actors to the Chekhov museum at Melikhovo. One thing that amazed me among the exhibits was a big beret. The tour guides told me that Chekhov had terrible migraine headaches. He would literally yell from the pain. The beret was a method for easing the discomfort. They would put out a basin and fill it with hot or cold water, I do not remember which now. He would put his feet in the basin and, instead of pressing a towel to his forehead, would put on that extremely tight beret which would squeeze his head. And he would sit like that for hours. Imagine Anton Chekhov sitting there with his feet in that basin of water and his head in that beret. That is a completely different person from what we know. This is not the man we see in the crisp white shirt with his hair combed perfectly.
As always, I am going off on tangents. But this was one of the first of my shows that you could call "documentary" in nature. Somewhere around 1969 I wrote the dramatization for Chekhov's Ward No. 6. I called it The Theater of the Watchman Nikita and wrote it culling appropriate phrases from various stories which I thought suited the characters. I also incorporated segments of prose narrative that were not originally intended to be performed. Naturally, I could not stage The Theater of the Watchman Nikita at that time because Ward No. 6 was too controversial a work for the Soviet authorities. […] What about The Black Monk? I did not write anything there. That is staged exactly as it is written. It is another matter that I had wanted to do it for some twenty, twenty-five years. I had long ago marked up the story in my father's green Chekhov collection. I worked out the structure long ago. It is all there in dad's old book. A show I have never been able to stage completely is one I call Life is Beautiful, based on Chekhov. I have staged or tried to stage parts of it, but I have never done it completely as I would like. I include a certain irony or question mark in that title, but it is based on Chekhov. It includes the story "The Lady with the Lapdog," which ends rather tragically, and it includes "Rothschild's Violin," which is, quite simply, a tragic tale. They are what comprise my idea for Life is Beautiful, based on Chekhov. I first had the idea of doing this show in the 1970s in Leningrad at the Lenin Komsomol Theater. However, the culture committee forbade me to do it. It was not the show they were suspicious of, but me personally. I was persona non grata.
When they asked me what I wanted to stage, I said, "Chekhov." Then they asked for the play. I said, "I'm not going to stage a play. I'm going to do something else." They did not like that because that was not something they could keep under their control. So they made me write a play based on the prose I wanted to use. I wrote lines like, "'The moon rose,' said one person. 'The river flowed,' said another." When they read that, they concluded I was making fun of them. These were not dialogues. So they turned me down. It was only twenty years later that I was able to stage the first part, "The Lady with the Lapdog," in Istanbul. Then I did another version in Helsinki although, as I say, I was not able to realize my plans for the second part.
You engage in a certain kind of "in-breeding" in your productions. I mean that when talking about staging Chekhov you might say you were thinking of Dostoevsky, while when discussing your work on Dostoevsky, Shakespeare or some other author you are liable to say you were thinking of Chekhov.
Well, using Chekhov, I worked out a unique method that I am very proud of in
my production of Alexander Galin's The Toastmaster, a play about the guests
at a large wedding. Imagine this: Fifty-two people are on stage at all times,
eating, dancing, talking, walking around, each living his or her own life. But
the spectator's attention was constantly drawn back and forth to the necessary location on stage, the most important of the many events occurring simultaneously.
The counterpoints existed all around at all times. I do not mean that they set
up a realistic, lifelike background, but that they were actual counterpoints
establishing contrasts or parallels to the main event at that specific moment.
An action would take place at one end of the stage and it would be followed,
seemingly without connection, by another action at another end of the stage.
While that was happening, someone over in another corner was singing while in
another location a couple was kissing or someone was killing someone else. They
seemed like random developments but, in fact, they were all interconnected.
The result was a very dense show even though it was a comedy, a tragicomedy, a
philosophical comedy. It was extremely dense with what I would call earthworms
digging everywhere.
The Toastmaster was the only show in which I have ever successfully applied
this method. You can organize things scene by scene in film, using close-ups
and long shots. In principle, you cannot do that in the theater although I did
something similar in The Toastmaster. My "models" were The Three Sisters and
The Cherry Orchard where Chekhov gives us the parallel existence of various
characters. Of course there are far fewer characters in Chekhov's plays and
all of them were put into a web of simultaneous interaction by the author. I
accomplished this on the level of the direction. […]
5) Chapter 6: We Play Literature.
Even when I staged The Lady with the Lapdog I was staging Crime and Punishment. Chekhov’s idea of crime is that a man had existed senselessly, without meaning. He lived forty years and was punished by Life which brought him love. Love as punishment. Love as a trial. As a test. As punishment. That is very Russian. And very much Chekhov. Gurov is crushed by love. He does not measure up to it. As we often fail to measure up to life’s demands. Life demands that we live to the maximum degree possible. It expects us to measure up to the titan of Life! And to all of life's complexities. Measure up! But we are not able to. We do it just a little and then we close our eyes. Life is off over there somewhere and here we are existing over here. You have a wife, kids, job, card games, conversations and interaction with people of some sort — is that not life? Yes, it is, but not really. For the first time ever, Gurov ran up against life in the form of love. Gurov, as we know, had many beautiful women. Now he meets one who is not all that pretty or intelligent. She is quiet, provincial and a little silly. That is the humor and the paradox of Chekhov. Chekhov is a genius in that he never has goddesses of fate doing the punishing. It is not like Aeschylus. Nobody gets their eyes put out. Nobody sleeps with their mother or kills their father. There is none of that. Gurov is simply crushed when he himself does not measure up. I think that is brilliant. That is one of the types of crime and punishment.