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Stephen Pelinski reaps the Ginkas whirlwind
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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Stephen Pelinski is sitting with his hands folded across his stomach in a room upstairs at the Loeb Drama Center. He appears to be relishing a fleeting moment of calm, a break in the intensity of immersion in Chekhov that has been his life since mid July. He’s preparing for the role of Gurov, a jaded Casanova who, in middle age, discovers true love (in the person of Elisabeth Waterston’s Anna) and all its accompanying thrill and heartache in Lady with a Lapdog, Russian director Kama Ginkas’s adaptation of Chekhov’s short story. It has been staged in Russia, Finland, and Turkey, but this American Repertory Theatre production marks the first time Ginkas has worked with American actors. "At first it was, you work from 10 until 2, from 5 to 9. Then I would sleep until 2 a.m., and from 2 to 4 I’d be working on the text," says Pelinski with a breathlessness that suggests he still doesn’t believe he pulled it off. "I couldn’t not. The expectation is, you stage something, and when you come back next time you know it. For three weeks, I was getting up at 2 a.m. and booking words. It was eat, breathe, sleep Chekhov." It’s easy to assume such a regimen would be innate to an actor whose résumé includes 40 roles in 15 years as a company member at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. Pelinski has starred there in works ranging from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Marat/Sade and A Doll’s House. He has also gained a thorough working knowledge of Chekhov through lead roles in Three Sisters, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard. But none of it prepared him for the concentration of his work with Ginkas. Of course, he might have seen it coming, given that he discovered more about Chekhov in the single hour he spent with Ginkas at the audition last May than he had over the course of his experience with Russian drama. "To work with a Russian director on Chekhov — it doesn’t get much better. Unfortunately, [after the audition] I had to go back to Minneapolis. I had a week left of performances of Three Sisters, and it was awful because I had learned so much in that hour with him and it was too late to use anything I gathered. Working with Kama has been an epiphany of sorts for me. I’ve never worked with a director so attuned to the nuances of his actors. He’s just intuitive." Many of Ginkas’s productions, which have been staged throughout Russia and Europe, are his own adaptations of prose literature, not straight scripts. This often translates into unconventional narratives that pose an exceptional challenge for an actor, especially when the work is drawn from a writer like Chekhov, whose stories are spun around subtle human complexities. The rehearsal time frame for this ART production is almost twice as long as what’s typical at an American regional theater; yet it’s half of what Ginkas is used to when staging shows in Russia. Pelinski experienced the time factor first-hand: he spent 21 hours with Ginkas over a period of four days working on a single half-hour monologue. "Most plays one sees are well-made plays with a certain arc: exposition, inciting incidents, then a dénouement," he explains. "What makes Kama’s work unique is it goes bing-bing-bing from scene to scene" — here his arms go whirling about. "You have one scene where the audience is laughing, and in a beat they can taste the ashes in their mouth. I’ve never been in a production where the arc moves with such violent opposition. As an audience going through it, I can’t imagine an emotion that you don’t experience in the course of the play." Lady with a Lapdog is presented by the American Repertory Theatre September 13 through October 11 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $12 to $69; call (617) 547-8300.
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