Theater Games
By Kathleen Dimmick
Lady with a Lapdog
Adapted from the Chekhov story
by Kama Ginkas
American Repertory Theatre
64 Brattle St.
Cambridge, MA
Box office: (617) 547-8300
What is the theatrical potential for nondramatic
narrative prose? Can it be made compelling in the theater? From avant-garde
experiments in the early 20th century through story theater techniques
in the sixties to recent, popular adaptations of novels by Dickens and
Twain (and Ovid) in regional theaters and on Broadway, the adaptation
of nondramatic texts for the theater continues to tempt theater artists.
Kama Ginkas, a Russian director who has adapted other prose works for
the stage, notably Chekhov's The Black Monk and Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment, is clearly engaged by the process of
theatricalizing prose narrative, and his latest adaptation of a Chekhov
short story plays on the distinction between theater and drama.
Arguably Chekhov's best known story, Lady
with a Lapdog (1899) tells the deceptively simple tale of Gurov,
a forty-year-old Moscow businessman, who begins an affair with Anna
Sergeyevena, an unhappy young wife he meets while both are vacationing
at the Crimean seaside resort of Yalta. When Gurov returns to Moscow,
he discovers, to his surprise, that he cannot forget Anna Sergeyevna
as he has forgotten so many previous liaisons. He makes a secret trip
to her provincial town, and encounters her in a theater. She begins
to visit him secretly in Moscow, and the story ends with a typical,
and beautiful, Chekhovian non-resolution: Gurov and Anna recognize that
their love for one another will force them to create a second, secret
life full of struggle, one in constant tension with their ostensibly
"real" lives of business, marriage, and family. Written in four parts
like his plays, the story moves in nearly imperceptible jumps and starts,
creating a reality that breaks many rules of traditional narrative realism.
Gorky wrote to Chekhov after reading the story: "You are killing realism...That
form is finished, that's a fact! Nobody can go further down that road
than you have done. Nobody can write so simply about ordinary things
as you can."
Ginkas is working with his long-time collaborator,
set and costume designer Sergey Barkhin, and with lighting designer
by Michael Chybowski, and his production is often literally brilliant,
the lighting and stage design contributing in large measure to the theatrical
experience of the piece. The ART stage has been re-configured as a narrow
platform of blond wood, stretching from wall to wall with no wing or
back stage space; an upstage pit allows actors to appear and disappear
in one of the many physical motifs of the staging. (Actors also enter
and exit through the house.) Two very tall ladders (resembling tech
ladders) dominate stage right. A blue box with a blue boat suspended
inside hangs up center, forming a kind of floating, three-dimensional
backdrop. As the location for the first half is the seaside resort,
the set consists mostly of blue and white striped bathing huts, resembling
little comical gendarme kiosks, which the actors manipulate as large
movable props. The stage is partly covered with sand, and Chybowski's
lighting creates the heat and glare of a summer beach resort. The initial
costumes replicate the look of the bathing huts: one-piece striped bathing
costumes, somewhat absurd on the men, fetching on the Lady. A sophisticated
sound design (by David Remedios) combines original music (by Leonid
Desyatnikov) with realistic and nonrealistic sound effects. Its presence
is strong: loud interruptions alternate with quick fades, underscoring,
punctuating, and literally illustrating theatrical moments.
Ginkas employs several theatrical strategies
to make a theater piece out of Chekhov's quintessential prose description
of human struggle and unhappiness. The first and perhaps clearest signal
that this is not going to be a "realistic" adaptation is the addition
of the two Gentlemen Sunbathers, who are nothing more or less than clowns,
each with a virtual bag of theatrical tricks: red noses, commedia dell'arte
lazzi, and assorted physical hi-jinks. They serve to interrupt and disrupt,
both the performance itself and Gurov, plaguing him with distractions
in his pursuit of Anna. They torment him (and often delight us) with
their interruptions (they function like the score, in that sense) --
throwing sand, spitting water, blocking Gurov's movements. In one particularly
hilarious gesture, all three march forward, holding their blue-striped
bathhouses horizontally, like cartoon phalluses, as they compete to
be the first to reach Anna.
Another strategy is Ginkas's manipulation of
the text. (Chekhov's story was newly translated for this production
by Ryan McKittrick and Julia Smeliansky.) There is much verbal overlapping,
and in the initial erotic energy of their attraction, Anna and Gurov
compete to speak the narration, with Anna trying to get equal time in
recounting their respective back stories. This competition to tell the
story calls attention, in a playful way, to the fact that the original
story is definitely from Gurov's point of view; it's his story,
and Anna must fight to remain a player. The narrative competitiveness
soon drops off, and in the second half we lose Anna almost entirely;
she no longer competes for a narrative voice.
The staging also parallels the growing intimacy
of the couple. At first the affair is all playful chases and sand fights
in bathing costumes, but as it proceeds to mature, sexual love, Anna
and Gurov begin to cover themselves in proper costumes of the period.
A beautiful coup de theatre depicts their sexual union: Gurov
climbs one of the ladders, carrying a long strip of fabric which Anna,
lying stage center, holds between her legs. It's a stunning visualization
of sexual passion, which modulates into a haunting post-coital tableau,
as the pair sit high up on the ladders (now a park bench) and the dim,
dawn lighting transforms the comical bathing houses into eerie, haphazard
coffins. At the end of Part Two, as Gurov leaves the resort, a larger
piece of fabric, much like a stage drop-cloth, recalls the previous,
erotic prop as it covers the bathhouses to represent the grey winter
of Moscow.
Part Three traces Gurov's growing obsession with
Anna following his return to Moscow, and his subsequent journey to her
provincial town. A wooden fence rises up from the pit, representing
Anna's forbidding house. This section is narrated solely by Gurov, and
the time and attention devoted to his internal questioning, his psychological
ambivalence, and the increasingly labored attempt to find gestural equivalents
for this ambivalence, slow the piece down considerably. This is no doubt
intentional, as the short fourth part moves quite quickly. Nonetheless
it allows us too much time to wonder and worry about the crux of Ginkas's
experiment: how resonant, how interesting, can a consistently self-referential
narrative voice be in the theater? A sort of narrative fatigue sets
in, as if Ginkas had also found himself at a loss as to how to theatricalize
this stretch of inner consciousness. Then the fatigue is wiped out,
however, by Ginkas's second coup of the piece. Gurov, who is attending
a performance of The Geisha Girl at the local theater in the
hope of seeing Anna, sits center stage and addresses the ART audience,
speaking the narration. The story reads (translation by David Magarshack–I
could not obtain a copy of the ART translation): "As in all provincial
theaters, there was a mist over the chandeliers and the people in the
gallery kept up a noisy and excited conversation ... Gurov scanned the
audience eagerly as they filed in and occupied their seats." At ART,
there is a misty chandelier suspended over the audience, which we notice
as the house lights come up and Gurov speaks directly to the audience.
He notices who is coughing, who drops a program, who looks bored, who
might be about to talk back. Who just walked out?! The sequence offers
an extended opportunity for a kind of phenomenological frisson, a time
for the audience to think and wonder about fictive time versus performance
time, story time in real time.
The role of Gurov is wonderfully challenging,
as the actor must be in the role and outside simultaneously. Stephen
Pelinsky does well, communicating a strong physical and vocal presence,
but ultimately the production leaves one wanting something more from
him, perhaps unfairly. Some larger recognition of the very complex line
between narrative and drama that he's been treading, or something on
the order of what Brecht's great leading actors achieved as they negotiated
this fascinating ontological divide. And while physically engaging,
Elisabeth Waterston as Anna lacks the vocal richness necessary to communicate
the weight of her story. Her lack of vocal color renders her somewhat
insubstantial, a disappointment since the story itself, as well as the
staging, tend to marginalize her.
In Part Four, Gurov visits Anna in a Moscow hotel,
where they're narratively and spatially trapped. Situated against the
brick wall of the theater, at the opposite end of the platform from
the sunny ladders of Yalta, the actors are confined to a tight playing
area that reflects their fate: a recognition and acceptance of the reality
of their love and the demands this love will exact upon them. Gurov
has aged suddenly, in both narrative and theatrical time (glasses, stooped
posture). Anna remains anxious and weeping, a black-clad figure of unhappiness,
as they try to sort out how to continue to live this, their real life,
in the midst of their other, less genuine, failed lives.
There is much to admire in this two-hour, intermission-less
production. The design stimulates the visual imagination and gives the
story a rich three-dimensional life. The metatheatrical devices create
a sense of community in the audience, at least fleetingly -- no small
achievement. At the same time, however, tedium sets in twice too often.
The Gentlemen Bathers and their antics grow tiresome, as does Gurov's
self-referencing. These gestures become too detached from Chekhov's
story so that one wonders what story is being told. Is it that of us
sitting in the theater watching this performance, or that of Gurov and
Anna? For all the wonderful inventiveness of his production, Ginkas
seems unwilling in the end to grant Chekhov's prose sufficient power
to truly blend with his own theatrical narrative into a third, hybrid
story. At issue, ultimately, is not just a debate about the dramatic
versus the theatrical, but about how to tell a story in the theater.