Marketing the Chekhovian experience

As I prepare to open in the Theater Studies Department’s production of "Uncle Vanya," I’ve realized that Chekhov is astonishingly difficult to market. I'm often bombarded with the question, “What’s it about?” Knowing that we students are harassed with opportunities from every direction, I understand that what many really mean to ask is: “Why should I see this show?” Though I have heretofore held no qualms luring unsuspecting victims into the darkened auditorium with a carefully devised pitch, these days I’ve found myself unable or unwilling to respond with more than an embarrassed stare and some open-mouth breathing.

Don’t get me wrong; these plays are unrivaled. The problem is that one needs to know what to expect of the plays in order to enjoy them. The generic summary of a Chekhov play simply wouldn’t sound appealing. Chekhov doesn’t have indulgent song-and-dance spectacles; he doesn’t have Jabari Parker. And yet his plays transcend time and space to delight audiences time and time again. There’s a disconnect between his plays as marketable entities, and his plays as charged, humanistic organisms. What follows is my attempt to reconcile this conflict. Even if you think you already understand “what it’s about,” I invite you, especially, to entertain for a moment my notion that you don’t. Not yet.

Let’s make this exercise most difficult and assume we’re converting the unfortunate souls who have, at some point in their life, developed a negative impression of Chekhov. For many of us (yes, even myself) this begins with our first reading of Chekhov in high school: foreign names, complicated familiar relations, the misreading of humor and a perceived lack of action all play into the deadly half of Chekhov’s reputation. On top of that, it’s an easy reputation to perpetuate when we consider amateur productions that miss their mark and Chekhovian jokes. I can’t argue that I am above the occasional harmless Chekhov-bashing, either: “In a dramatic reading of phonebook, at least we’d recognize the names.” Even if you yourself find that your deep-seated distrust of Chekhov began in high school, do not fear! We can all come to terms with this trauma and finally move on because these plays aren’t meant to be read. Leave it to the performance professionals. If only the characters in Chekhov’s plays could find therapy this good…

The experience of a live production is fundamentally different from a literary reading; we preserve dialogue in scripts merely out of necessity. Take my word for it: when a play is staged, suddenly we care minimally about someone’s name and much about her manner, her appearance and her choices. Relationships are more clearly reinforced by the characters’ interactions and physical connections to one another. Action is discovered between the lines.

Don’t let me fool you into thinking performance solves all the problems of a Chekhov play. Chekhov is difficult to perform, but I’ll argue that this difficulty is as much a virtue as it is a danger. In this, Chekhov is like Shakespeare. When their plays feel long, it’s because the playwright has left his players with more opportunities to work their magic. When their plays are flops, it’s because the players realized too few of those opportunities. Yet when their plays achieve their full potential, the experience is one of the most rewarding one will find in the theater. Though their complexity makes these plays impossible to describe in brief, the greatest difference is that Shakespeare offers us a world of battles and clowns, while Chekhov confines us to a provincial Russian estate.

Before I scare off the rest of you, I had better address Chekhov’s subject matter. Chekhov wasn’t doing the marketing department any favors when he bestowed upon "Uncle Vanya" the subtitle “Scenes from Country Life,” which sounds more like a pastoral documentary than a universally resonant play. Though the description applies in the technical sense, perhaps Chekhov was exercising a dry sense of humor with this ironic subtitle; the play does not represent a sampling of average country life as we would imagine it. Instead, it is masterfully constructed, examining with careful attention latent components of human character, desire and interaction, transcending any particular location or time period.

If we say Shakespeare could take a whole world and put it on his stage, then we might say of Chekhov that he was able to put a character on stage, and reveal within her an entire world. Watching Chekhov, then, requires us to tune our gaze to subtlety. This is problematic given how we’re used to entertainment. Blockbusters spoon-feed us action that we hardly need to follow, much less subject to subtle analysis, and sports entertainment provides us with clear signals to keep us informed of scoring changes, fouls and the like, in case we missed them during our trip to the fridge. Simply put, we’re not used to paying attention, so we confuse high-frequency vibration with stillness.

Certainly there are productions of Chekhov that fail to realize this vibrancy. I won’t claim here that our production does or doesn’t. I won’t even assuage your fears that this could be just another lugubrious Chekhovian naptime. As with all theater, I want to argue that a single transformative performance is worth wading through a good deal of rubbish; even within a performance, a few magical moments can make it all worthwhile. And we need to tune in.