Anton Chekhov

Chekhov was barely known on the American stage before the Moscow Art Theatre arrived on its tours of 1923-24, with a repertory including Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Ivanov, in many cases with the actors who had originally created the roles. Although the Moscow Art Theatre itself regarded these productions as outmoded, they were eye-opening to American actors and playgoers. Despite the incomprehens­ible Russian dialogue, they were struck by the ensemble playing and the extra dimension Chekhov assumed when realised so thoroughly in every detail.

The earliest results of this epiphany could be seen in the work of Eva Le Gallienne for the Civic Repertory Theatre (1926-1933). The ambitions of Le Gallienne, an actress of wide culture and taste, usually outstripped her capabilities, for although she tried to emulate the Moscow Art Theatre's stage pictures and deliberate rhythms, her casts were mediocre (with the exception of Alia Nazimova as an incandescent Ranevskaya); her productions were admir­able more for good intentions than for exciting theatrics.

Chekhov was now viewed as good box-office if titivated with popular stars. The shrewd producer Jed Harris mounted an Uncle Vanya (1937) with Hollywood celebrity Lillian Gish as Yelena, and in 1938, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne lent their formidable talents to a production of Stark Young's spare new translation of The Seagull. It was of this staging that Noel Coward remarked, 'I hate a play with a dead bird sitting on the mantelpiece shrieking, "I'm the title, I'm the title, I'm the title" \¹³ The star-studding of Chekhov reached its apogee in Guthrie McClintic's Three Sisters (1942), with Katherine Cornell as Masha, Judith Anderson as Olga, Ruth Gordon as Natasha, and Edmund Gwenn as Chebutykin. The cast was of disparate back­grounds and training, and McClintic seemed to subscribe to the view that Chekhov's play was a sombre tragedy of three statuesque heroines downed by a middle-class Fury. The sluggish pace drove Stark Young to remark that 'Chekhov in performance in English nearly always suffers from what seems to be some sort of notion that thinking is slow . . .'¹⁴

After World War II, Americans tried to naturalise Chekhov by transferring his milieu to more familiar climes. Platonov became Fireworks on the James (Provincetown Playhouse, 1940) and The Cherry Orchard was transmog­rified into Joshua Logan's The Wisteria Trees (Martin Beck Theatre, 1950), set in a post-bellum Southern plantation, with the servants former slaves, Lopakhin an enriched sharecropper, and Ranevskaya an ageing belle. American directors, when not aping Stanislavsky's alleged methods, went to grotesque extremes to be original, as in the APA's The Seagull of 1962, played in modern dress, with frozen tableaux and speeded-up action.

Paradoxically, American playwrights were steeped in

Chekhov and wrote a kind of poetic realism they hoped would match his. He had a direct influence on Clifford Odets and Irwin Shaw before the war; during the 1950s, Robert Anderson, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Paddy Chayefsky and others testified to the power is his example. Miller confessed, 'I fairly worshipped Chekhov at an early time in my life . . . the depth of feeling in his work, its truthfulness and the rigor with which he hewed to the inner reality of his people are treasured qualities to me'.¹⁵ But the actors and directors who were capable of brilliantly interpreting the works of these disciples found their technique inadequate to cope with the master himself.

The American theatre's deficiencies showed up most garishly in the long-awaited Three Sisters directed by Lee Strasberg for the Actor's Studio of New York, the Mecca of Method. Working with a galaxy of Studio alumni and veterans of the Group Theater, Strasberg, the self- proclaimed heir to Stanislavsky, proved to be a pedestrian director who gave line-readings and relied on runthroughs. The consequent performances were uncoordinated, want­ing in pace, detail, and continuity, 'a formless, uninflected evening by the samovar'.¹⁶