Ravels in (mid) Review

Yes, Ravels in Review is a weekly Friday round up, but with the art fairs going on, it seems unfair to cut off the week like that. Things are just beginning to get interesting...

but alas, one must trudge on.

This week was thoughtful, with a review of the excellent Cherry Orchard by Chekhov now at BAM, and not one but two ponderings on aesthetic experience from the strangeness of clapping to suffering for art. If you're in need of some beautiful images to ponder, try the Cy Twombley images I posted that span both style and time. Oh, and my good taste was indubitably confirmed.

And then, just in time for your weekend needs, a quick reference guide to the New York art fairs going on this weekend, and where you'll find me running to now.

Like a little Chekhov with your coffee?

Then keep reading...


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In a Chekhov-heavy season comes another excellent production, The Cherry Orchard playing at BAM's Harvey Theater. Chekhov's final play tells the story of a noble family who has spent their fortune with a purely Russian frivolity and because of it is forced to sell their ancestral home and its huge, beautiful, and useless cherry orchard. True to character, these scions can't manage either to stop spending or to sell the orchard, so it is inevitably auctioned off to pay their debt. Tom Stoppard's adaptation and Sam Mendes' direction would be a winning combination for any play, but a light hand is all that is required to guide this masterwork.

The actors certainly deliver light-handed, realistic versions of their characters. Chekhov's femme fatales are mockeries of the name; femme flawed would be better. These roles certainly aren't easy, requiring self-aggrandizing loud voices and silliness that ring patently false over the play's wasteland of ideals. Sinead Cusack, as Ranevskaya, is true to her part, but hardly carries the lead role as Kristen Scott Thomas did in The Seagull. Rebecca Hall, recently seen in the movie Vicky Christina Barcelona, handles her character excellently. The male cast is strong in general, with Ethan Hawke in another solid performance as an intellectual, and the venerable Richard Easton as the butler Firs.

The production is solid and the remaining question is the same one The Cherry Orchard faced at its first production. Chekhov wrote a comedy, but its first director produced it as a tragedy. Stoppard's rewriting leans toward comedy, but the question remains open. The ridiculous characters, the general insouciance, and the underlying conviction the Chekhov wants you to disapprove of the spendthrift aristocrats all beg you to take their downfall as lightly as they do.

For example, the family's departure from their home is oddly anti-climatic. This is redeemed by the final scene, which depicts the family's faithful old servant Firs, who has awoken to find he has been left behind, dying with only a twinge of sound to mark his passage. His death is a masterful finale for a play that hovers between tragedy and comedy, and, handled in this manner, it diffuses attention from the family just when your sympathies are most with them.

Chekhov's disapproval likewise breaks through in an earlier moment, when an anonymous passerby interrupts the family (and the lightness of the play) to beg for directions and money. His grim presence is the breaking through of a Russian reality, the peasant reality, into their lives. The emotional declarations of the family, for all their more impassioned delivery, don't have the same heft as his simple, serious words. By comedy, Chekhov indeed meant that The Cherry Orchard was a satire, and one whose unhappy characters illustrate unhappy views. His characters are so lifelike and unhappy we sympathize with them.

Despite his intent, Chekhov's artistry outstrips his personal convictions, and in this case, the production itself. What struck me foremost was the play over the production. Chekhov crafted a thoroughly modern, neat, and emotionally satisfying drama that is both timely and timeless. This production at BAM, though by no means unimpressive, was like watching the Oscars and seeing a beautiful girl whose beautiful dress wore her.

Following in the footsteps of The Seagull, and now running concurrently with Uncle Vanya, BAM's production of The Cherry Orchard enlivens any Chekhovite's evening through March 8.

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine March 2, 2009.

Of Russians: Returning to Babel's Verve

My Russian kick (first Chekhov, then Vladimir Sorokin) has led me back to Isaac Babel, and the rogue is finally starting to get interesting. As I mentioned in a previous post, I ambitiously took out Babel's collected short stories from the library, then found one story might have been enough for me. On a second perusal, I find his lively verve thrilling and terseness masterful.

Babel's folksy tales are rollicking in a way Sorokin's The Queue was not. (To The Queue's credit, it ended with a hilarious dialogue of sex sounds.) Babel writes the Jewish experience in Odessa in the 1920s and 30s, so he isn't dealing with Communism as Sorokin is. Yet he critiques society in a way that suggests he must poke fun at life because he must somehow bear the status quo. These Russians attempt humor through criticism, or criticism through humor, but I'm not sure to what effect, as I haven't laughed out loud as of yet.

I flipped through Babel's collection again, hopping from Odessa stories to Red Calvary stories to autobiographical stories. There's always a joke on someone by the end, and with a modicum of detail he suggest a world of characterizations. His people don't always have great depth, but they fit in their role in society that grows increasingly complex as we read his cycles of stories. His portrait is one of Russia rather than an individual. Humble lives are transformed into red-blooded exercises in existence. What I'm trying to say is, Babel is a great storyteller.

Babel, photographed upon his arrest

Babel's life is a story unto itself: he survived the 1905 pogrom that killed his grandfather. He became a journalist and fiction writer, only after fighting in wars and studying finance for lack of other options. He become silent under Stalin's tightening control. Accused of being an aesthete, Babel would pay for his artistic licence (see Wikipedia article here):

After the suspicious death of Gorky in 1936, Babel noted: "Now they will come for me." ...In May 1939 he was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated under torture at the Lubyanka....After a forced confession, Babel was tried before an NKVD troika and convicted of simultaneously spying for the French, Austrians, and Leon Trotsky, as well as "membership in a terrorist organization." On January 27, 1940, he was shot in Butyrka prison.

Reportedly, while Babel confessed under torture, "once he realised he was doomed, he recanted" but "it made no difference." His last recorded words were,

"I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others... I am asking for only one thing -- let me finish my work."

Attempted review of a most excellent Chekhov's The Seagull

A new production of Chekhov's play The Seagull has-

{So why is it called The Seagull?}
{Excuse me! Who are you?! And what are you doing in my theater review?}
{Just trying to help you get to the point. I hate those wordy, loud-mouthed reviewers.}
{I hadn't even started yet!}
{And already prevaricating and going on about yourself...}
{Hrrumph. Apparently there are seagulls on the lakes in Russia,-}
{Ooooh, who knew?}
{-where the play is set , and Nina is compared to a seagull by Constantin and Tragorin, and the play ends with a stuffed seagull being placed on stage. Now may I begin?}
{You may. Start with the characters; Chekhov's people always remind me of my neighbors.}

Irina Arkadina, a famous but aging actress, brings her lover, the successful writer Trigorin, to the country estate where her retired brother and her son live. Her son, Constantin, wants to be writer, and has a tempestuous relationship with his difficult, attention-seeking mother. Constantin loves the naive Nina, who wants to be a famous actress. The rest of the characters circle around the story of these four in this family comic-tragedy. Let's just say things begin to unwind in a downward spiral when Nina runs off to Moscow and becomes Trigorin's lover rather than an actress, and this light family comedy takes on tragic tones that have to be avoided in drawing room conversation.

{Little social-climbling slut!}
{Not really, more naive than anything. Now if you'll please keep quiet!}

The Seagull is the first of Chekhov's 4 major plays prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1904. When it was first staged in 1896, the audience booed so loudly that the actress playing Nina lost her voice from fear. It had the typical Chekhovian cast of fully-developed, ordinary characters who keep most of the action offstage, and interact trivially while talking around more serious matters. For instance, a certain writer blows his brains out offstage and we hear no formal discussion, just a whisper to get Irina away. Subtext of this type was an innovation, and helped bring theatrical convention away from melodrama and into the realms of realism.

The version being played at the Walter Kerr theater in New York city, through December 21st, was written by Christopher Hampton, who says "Chekhov used to be thought of as a lyrical, melancholy kind of writer, and he isn't. He's a very muscular, energetic, clear, lucid writer" in this interview with NPR. The strength of the dialogue really comes out in the exchanges, often heated, between Irina (Kristin Scott Thomas of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient fame) and Constantin (Mackenzie Crook, who is in the BBC version of The Office). Their relationship mirrors that of Hamlet and his mother, as Constantin hates his mother's lover and vies for her respect and attention. This production actually took 9 of the original cast from the British Royal Court's production, although Kristin Scott Thomas was a new and welcome addition.

{Yes, yes, that is all very well, but how was it? what did you think of the performance?}
{Oh, you mean this performance? the Ian Rickson production that I just saw?}
{Oh, go on then. That one, yes of course!}

I really enjoyed it.

{That's it??? You got to say more than that.}

This highly-enjoyable production held my attention from the moment it subtly started, with a character walking out before the lights went down and the audience hushing itself. The different love-longings and sadness and disappointments of the characters was interspersed with laughter throughout, and kept this tragedy in content light in context. It was perfectly staged, with great sound and lighting. The actors were on the top of their game. Kristin Scott Thomas might have been over that top, but then the character Irina is meant to be over the top to some degree and it worked within the play. I really felt drawn into a different world, and was genuinely troubled by the appearance of Nina in the last act.

I think it was an excellent production of an excellent play. A perfect play, really, as it felt like a perfectly harmonious whole and the end was satisfying even while tragic. The characters were true to life throughout, and distinctive as people you live next to and see every day. I thought it was moving in the way life often is, with significance understood rather than outspoken. The New York Times also praised the production, in case you're interested. It was beautiful to watch, especially as things went from light to dark in the end.

{Well, I'll go see it then.}
{Please do, and go away...bothersome old thing!}
{What was that last bit?}
{Nothing!}