Yawning is out

And Yuri Yeremin is in at the ART Ivanov

by Scott T. Cummings

Call it melancholia nervosa, a midlife crisis, or just an extremely bad case of the blues. Whatever it is, Nikolai Ivanov, the hero of Anton Chekhov's first full-length play, cannot shake off the depression that has overcome him, and as a result his life is going to pieces. He is deep in debt, his wife is dying, and the beautiful young girl next door finds his middle-aged angst so romantic that she's fallen in love with him. What would you do?

The American Repertory Theatre opens its regular season at the Loeb Drama Center this weekend with Ivanov, in a translation by Paul Schmidt (see sidebar). The play is adapted and directed by Yuri Yeremin, one of Russia's leading directors and the artistic director of the Moscow Pushkin Theatre. His local directing debut marks one more step in the Russification -- or, more accurately if more awkwardly, the Stanislavskization -- of the ART.

Artistic director Robert Brustein's play Nobody Dies on Friday, which premiered at the ART in the spring of 1998, took issue with Lee Strasberg's American interpretation of the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who was co-founder of the fabled Moscow Art Theatre and inventor of a system of acting first associated with the works of Chekhov and other realist playwrights. At that time, talks were well under way toward forming an alliance between the ART's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training and the professional school of the Moscow Art Theatre. Since then, Yeremin is just one of many Russian master teachers to work with Institute students, both in Cambridge and in Moscow. Now he takes the Loeb stage with the only major Chekhov play that neither he nor the ART has yet done.

Paul Schmidt 1934-1999 One person who, we're sad to say, won't be in the audience on opening night of the ART's production of Ivanov is translator Paul Schmidt, who died on February 19 of this year from complications due to AIDS. He was 65 years old. The 1999-2000 American Repertory Theatre season is dedicated to his memory. As a translator, poet, scholar, and sometime actor, Schmidt enjoyed a distinguished theatrical career that bridged the classic and the avant-garde repertoires. If translation is a form of authorship, then he was the most frequently produced writer at the ART in recent years, having rendered the texts for productions of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities (from German), Racine's Phaedra (French), and Euripides's The Bacchae (Greek), as well as the current Ivanov (Russian). "He was a genuine man of the theater," recalls artistic director Robert Brustein. "And his collaborations with directors were instrumental in helping us to re-vision these classical works." Liz Diamond directed three Schmidt translations, the ART Phaedra and two productions at the Yale Repertory Theatre. "He never translated from a language that he didn't know the way a poet knows language," she points out. "He understood what it meant for words to live inside an actor's body, what it meant for language to be embodied in space by a living breathing performer." Schmidt also collaborated with several of the foremost experimental directors of the past generation. He translated Zangezi, by the little-known Russian poet Velemir Khlebnikov, for a 1986 production directed by Peter Sellars. He prepared the text of Jean Genet's The Screens for JoAnne Akalaitis's 1989 production at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He provided the translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters that was the point of departure for the Wooster Group's 1990 theater piece Brace Up! And in 1995, he wrote the libretto for Alice, Robert Wilson's treatment of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, with music by Tom Waits. Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Schmidt graduated from Colgate in 1955 and came to Harvard to pursue graduate work in Slavic literature. During his years in Cambridge, he balanced scholarly pursuits with a passion for theater that led to his involvement with a legendary circle of friends who performed at the Agassiz Theatre in the 1960s. This group included Kathryn Walker, Lindsay Crouse, Tommy Lee Jones, John Lithgow, the director and writer Tim Mayer, and Stockard Channing (to whom Schmidt was married for seven years). Schmidt went on to teach Slavic languages and literature at the University of Texas at Austin from 1967 to 1976. In the late 1970s, he returned to the Northeast to concentrate on theater work and translation projects, including a three-volume edition of the complete works of Khlebnikov. His translations of Chekhov's plays were published in 1997 to great acclaim. Carey Perloff, artistic director of the Actors Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where two of Schmidt's Chekhovs have been produced, prizes their stageworthiness. "He was himself a wonderful actor and had a clear sense of what is actable. It bothered him that Chekhov was treated for so long like a 19th-century English playwright, and he wasn't willing to `Victorian-up' the translation. For him, Chekhov was modern." At commemorative services in New York in April and in Cambridge in June, friends and family gathered to celebrate Schmidt's particular grace, his passion for literature, languages, and life, and his genteel and noble spirit. Those qualities live on in his landmark translations.

In the ART's rehearsal room in the basement of Zero Church Street, under a handmade sign on the wall that reads, "Yawning is strictly prohibited," I meet with Yeremin to talk about his work in Russia and the USA and, of course, about Chekhov. Interpreter Dmitry Zolotov provides simultaneous translation -- and I mean simultaneous! -- as he has throughout the rehearsal process for Yeremin and his American cast and crew, for whom the director has nothing but praise.

"We have been working together for four weeks," Yeremin explains. "This is week five, and personally I am in a state of creative happiness. We have forgotten long ago that we are speaking through the interpreter. We have a good mutual understanding on a very serious level. I am very happy to be working with such wonderful actors." These include Arliss Howard (as Ivanov) and Debra Winger (as his ailing wife Anna), the couple who appeared together in the ART production of Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive a year ago, as well as ART veterans Alvin Epstein, Jeremy Geidt, Benjamin Evett, Will LeBow, and Karen MacDonald.

Before taking over the Moscow Pushkin Theatre, in 1987, Yeremin was artistic director first of a youth theater in the provincial city of Rostov (in Ukraine) for seven years and then of the Central Soviet Army Theatre in Moscow for eight years. He first gained widespread international attention with his innovative stage adaptation of Chekhov's short story "Ward No. 6," which toured Europe and North America. Yeremin's initial professional training was as an actor, and in the 1960s his teachers included actors who had known and worked with Stanislavsky in their youth. His work at the ART, as both teacher and director, continues that tradition, which he insists is a living, changing one. He cautions against the codification or fossilization of Stanislavsky's teaching. "A lot of time has passed, the psychology of people has changed. Stanislavsky is not a museum."

So what is the essence of Stanislavsky? "Two words: to be alive on stage. The audience shouldn't suspect that the actor learned by heart his lines and is following the director's blocking. As soon as they [two actors] talk to each other on stage, the audience should say, `Yes, I believe that.' The type, genre, or style of the production does not matter. It can be metaphorical, realistic, futuristic, whatever. The essence is that the actors should be alive on stage. This is what Stanislavsky is."

Ivanov is Chekhov on the verge of playwriting genius. First written in 1887 (when Chekhov was 27) and then revised and expanded for production in 1889, the play has many elements that will distinguish his quartet of masterpieces a decade later. Chief among these are his psychologically complex characters: divided against themselves in subtle ways, existentially anxious, neither heroes nor villains in any traditional sense, proud and pathetic all at once, idealistic, profoundly human. "Ivanov is not hungry," Yeremin contends. "There are no big tragedies in his life, but something is gnawing at his soul, and his desire for life is going out of him."

For Yeremin, Ivanov is more than a manifestation of the late-19th-century Russian figure sometimes referred to as the "superfluous man." He is an archetype, as universal as Hamlet. "Characters like this accumulate certain moral, sociological, and political problems of their times. Ivanov is an embodiment or, I should say, a concentration of all the pains and sufferings of modern man, or contemporary man, if you want. I think the play is about you, me, and anybody who has ever asked himself or herself what it is that is going on inside and I don't understand it, anyone who has had a bad mood that he or she could not account for, not because a cup of coffee spilled down but for no particular reason. It is about everybody who thinks about the essence of being, of life." n

Ivanov opens in previews beginning this Friday, November 26, and runs in repertory at the Loeb Drama Center through January 22. Tickets are $24 to $57. Call 547-8300.