Russian ballet

The ART's exquisitely choreographed Ivanov

by Carolyn Clay

IVANOV, By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Adapted and directed by Yuri Yeremin. Set design by Scott Bradley. Costumes by Catherine Zuber. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound design by Christopher Walker. With Arliss Howard, Debra Winger, Alvin Epstein, Will LeBow, Jeremy Geidt, Karen MacDonald, Kristin Proctor, Benjamin Evett, Paula Plum, Evan Zes, Bill Church, Matthew Francis, Larisa Linetskaya, Robert Saxner, and canine newcomer Chester Geidt. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center, in repertory through January 22.

Surrealism meets the samovar in Yuri Yeremin's potently scored and choreographed rendering of Ivanov for the American Repertory Theatre. This is not what I expected from the noted Russian director, a student of students of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Moscow Art Theatre head who first breathed detailed, melancholy life into the plays of Anton Chekhov. Yeremin, when he speaks of Stanislavsky and the Russian system, puts emphasis on the actors' being "alive on stage." But, the director added in an interview with the Phoenix, "the type, genre, or style of the production doesn't matter. It can be metaphysical, realistic, futuristic, whatever." And he wasn't just blowing exhaust from his troika.

Yeremin's stark, Impressionistic, ultimately haunting Ivanov filters Stanislavsky through the ART aesthetic at its best. Birches abound, birds twitter, bugs are slapped at, and rickety bicycles traverse the stage. And, oh yes, tea is served in little glass cups. Yet I thought of Monet, Robert Wilson, Woyzeck, and, as autumn leaves fluttered to a sharply raked stage, Andrei Serban's achingly beautiful Three Sisters. Ivanov is an imperfect work, written in 1887, when Chekhov was 27 (nine years before The Seagull took flight), then intensively reworked during the ensuing two years. Intended as a last word on the malaise-ridden Russian intellectual Turgenev dubbed "the superfluous man," the play was modern in theme yet resorted to hoky plot conventions of the period. But here, with its clinically depressed antihero and jarring mix of period melodrama and incipient existentialism, it seems as modern as Beckett. Moreover, whatever lip service Yeremin pays to the importance of the actors (who in this instance include film personae Debra Winger and Arliss Howard), his Ivanov is as precisely and intensely directed as a dance by Balanchine.

Of course, it's not exactly Ivanov as the author left it. The late translator Paul Schmidt pared down Chekhov's repetitious early work and supplied it with a prologue extrapolated from the second act whose purpose is to supply exposition and a sense of the desperate ennui of late-19th-century Russian rural life. Yeremin has further adapted the work, transforming dialogue into audience-directed soliloquy and contrasting the production's eerie contemporaneity with small, folksy rituals of the country (a clanging dinner bell, a hammock, a just-caught smelt thrashing on a line).

His design, however, is psychological and formal, with an exquisite trajectory that moves from summer to winter, from disaffection and languor to icy, almost lunatic despair. And it is artfully carried out by designers Scott Bradley (set) and John Ambrosone (lighting), whose swinging, uprooted birches and streaks and pools of wintery light contribute to the production's abrupt shifts of mood and mental landscape. Most effective is sound designer Christopher Walker's synthesizer score, a subtle, dizzying mix of increasingly discordant yet somehow stately oom-pah-pah and dirge.

Moving through this gorgeous sea of stagecraft, sometimes like wounded idiots and sometimes like sinister ghosts, are those human bits of flotsam and jetsam, the actors. The performances, however, do not so much stand out from as inhabit the design. Yeremin, using a translator, worked with his American cast for six weeks, training them in the Russian manner, yet advising them to relate to the material, and to each action, as Americans. The result is performances that at first seem a tad hesitant (as if the actors were still working on them) but are, for the most part, stylized (often the ensemble moves in tandem, like desexualized Fosse dancers) yet human.

Arliss Howard, so affecting in both ART's In the Jungle of Cities and its How I Learned To Drive, gives a surprisingly monochromatic yet oddly affecting performance in the title role. Under the Stanislavskian tutelage of Yeremin, he proves an unprepossessing Ivanov, no dashing poster boy for midlife crisis (the role was recently assayed in New York by Kevin Kline) but a pained, unkempt, and shrinking depressive. He has become a stranger, Ivanov says, not only to his energy, faith, and dreams but to his very limbs; indeed, as Howard's wiry Ivanov strips off shirt and shoes to bespeak his despair, his hands flex and flutter like agitated entities on their own.

Ivanov, according to neighboring landowner Lebedev (Jeremy Geidt), was once "the only honest, decent young man in the district." Now, at 35, he has fallen prey to the Russian disease of self-perceived uselessness; enervated to a fault, he has emotionally abandoned his wife (Winger), a converted Jewess dying of tuberculosis. The plot turns on his flirtation with Lebedev's 20-year-old daughter, Sasha (Kristin Proctor), a Hilde Wangel type who finds the older man's angst romantic and sets out to "renew" him. She wants the two of them to run off to America; he replies that he lacks the motivation to find his way home. But when she plants a kiss on the walking Prozac ad, he quietly puts down his bicycle kickstand and you know there's gonna be trouble.

One of the play's ironies is that, whereas Ivanov has deeply internalized his superfluity, he is surrounded by superfluous folk, neither heroes nor villains but, for the most part, bored and flawed bourgeois who are too superficial to figure out that, as feudalism does a swan dive, they've also grown useless. Yeremin lines them up and lets them swat absent-mindedly at bugs and pointedly at boredom. "Yawning is strictly prohibited," read a sign in the director's rehearsal room; yet the country soirees of the production are marked by pained silences and stifled yawns, with the entrance of anyone new marked by relieved hosannas that are as touching as they are ridiculous.

In this atmosphere, the liveliest characterizations, Will LeBow's crude yet enterprising estate manager Borkin and Alvin Epstein's antic old Count Shabelsky (Ivanov's uncle), are the standouts. But Geidt captures the bonhomie and hopelessness of the alcoholic Lebedev, and Karen MacDonald humanizes his loanshark wife. ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training student Proctor is suitably girlish yet predatory as Sasha, perkily casting the defeated Ivanov under a spell. And Paula Plum, in a pinched display of the distraction at which she's so good, creates a widow Babakina who's pathetically eager to connect yet perplexed by just about everything.

Benjamin Evett supplies an arresting if unconventional take on Ivanov's nemesis, the young doctor Lvov; much of the speechifying about the scolding physician's rigidity and self-proclaimed honesty has been trimmed, and Evett plays him almost as a loose cannon. (In one scene, in which he's meant to shoot daggers at Shabelsky, he comes close to physically assaulting the Count, and he later takes after Ivanov with a belt.) As Ivanov's sick wife, caught between selflessness and anger, the husky-voiced Winger is rather contemporary, yet believable (once Yeremin lets her down from the muffin of a haystack on which she sits like a cherry for her first scene). But however fascinating the Russian process may have been for these American actors, Stanislavsky is not the star of this Ivanov. Yeremin is.