Of course, as this is Chekhov, there’s a gun and eventually it goes off, though, in this case, ineffectually.
So, in summary, my character, Astrov, is bewitched by the beautiful, useless Elena, who out of sheer perversity has married an old and impotent husband, and now wanders about the run-down estate tantalizing all who see her.
From the first day of our rehearsals, our director expressed his astonishment at the naturalness and sensitivity of Madeleine’s interpretation of Elena. He thought she was acting. I wasn’t so sure.
Now, one last scene before we proceed to the drama.
It is my habit to arrive early at the theater for rehearsals. I get up, shower, dress quickly, and hit the streets, still in the daze of sleep. At the hall I drink two cups of coffee and eat whatever sugary roll or doughnut is on the table, putting my nerves on the alert for the work to come. I enjoy watching my fellow actors make their entrances, one by one, greeting one another and milling about the ample space. There are always a few who are habitually late, flustered and apologetic, with wild excuses that vary from day to day until their creative faculties are exhausted and they resort to blaming the subway.
It wasn’t the subway—the theater was an easy walk from my apartment—but my alarm clock that failed me on the third day of our rehearsals for Vanya. I woke half an hour late, curtailed the shower, dressed frantically, and rushed into the street with my hair still wet, hoping my fellow actors would not have eaten all the cheese Danish by the time I arrived. It was a blustery, chilly, gray morning, threatening the dreaded wintry mix, and I bustled along with my cold damp head bowed against the wind. As I ducked under the theater awning, the glass door flew open and a man, his face drawn in under the hood of a heavy parka, burst out, nearly colliding with me. We drew apart and our eyes met. As he ducked past me, an expression of revulsion and outrage which struck me as completely disproportionate to the provocation narrowed his eyes, inflated his nostrils, and doubled his chin. In that moment I recognized him—it was Guy.
This was a confrontation I would have preferred to avoid, but I was still too close to the numbing embrace of sleep to feel anything beyond a mild vexation and surprise. I didn’t greet him; how could I? Our coats brushed as he pushed past me, leaping awkwardly upon a wedge of packed and blackened snow at the curb. His boot soles were slick and could find no purchase. Briefly his feet performed a pas de deux on the ice, but he had lost his balance and in the next moment his legs buckled, his arms flew up, he emitted a low cry of alarm, and down he went, flat on his back in the street. His head was protected by the hood, but it was dangerously close to the passing traffic and as I watched in fascinated horror, a car whooshing past threw up a spray of half-frozen muck that caught him square across the face. I released the door handle, and, careful of the ice, hastened to assist him. By the time I got to him he had risen on one elbow, occupied in wiping the slush from his eyes. I bent over, offering my hand. “Are you OK?” I said.
“Get away from me!” he shouted. “Don’t come near me!” I stepped back, meeting the apprehensive gaze of a passing pedestrian who veered toward the building to avoid the two crazies at the curb. Dripping gutter water, Guy got to his feet and staggered into the traffic.
“Be careful,” I warned. A car swerving to avoid hitting him sent a wave of slush over my shoes. “Christ,” I exclaimed.
“Stay away from me,” Guy shouted. I watched as he dodged another car and gained the opposite sidewalk, where he stopped, turning to scowl back at me. His face was streaked with dirt, his eyes fierce, and his cheeks flushed with rage. This interested me. Guy had always seemed so studied to me, conniving and artificial, but this was raw emotion.
“Fine,” I replied, “that’s fine with me,” and I stalked back to the theater. I opened the door upon the warm, inviting lobby, puzzling over the whole complicated history of my connection to Guy Margate, the man who saved my life. The cliché “no good deed ever goes unpunished” came to mind. What was that from? I looked back through the glass door and saw, to my surprise, that Guy was still on the opposite sidewalk. He was smoking a cigarette, his back pressed to the building, glaring across the traffic at the door. I doubted that he could see me, but without thinking, as I mounted the marble steps, I raised my hand and waved goodbye.
The rehearsal period for our Vanya was intense; we had four weeks to put up a long and complex show. We started in the morning at nine, broke for lunch, which was sandwiches sent in from the deli down the street, and then went on until eight. In the first week we got the blocking down and worked on various separate scenes, but after that we had the whole cast in all the time. It’s an eight-character play and the scenes require from two to six at all times, the family passing in and out of the set, just as they would in an ordinary home. At one point Serebryakov remarks that the house contains “twenty-six enormous rooms, people wander off in all directions and you never can find anyone,” so there’s a sense of brooding and empty space outside the circle of warmth where the characters confront one another with their suffering.
Peter Smythe had clear ideas about what he wanted and the ability to express these ideas coherently, which is about as rare in the theater as the ivory-billed woodpecker is in the forest. He was interested in his actors and gave us leeway, even adjusted his own view in the light of an interpretation that he hadn’t considered. Soon, with his guidance, we began to cohere into something very like a small orchestra, each instrument in tune with every other and clear about the score. I never worked more confidently and I think the other actors felt as I did. At night I was generally too exhausted to do much but have dinner with a few of the cast. Madeleine was never with us, having been disappeared by her husband for who knows what sort of dinner, a jolly evening of browbeating and guilt-tripping and kvetching. In the second week she told me Guy had found an apartment in the East Village and that Sunday they had driven to Philly with a truck, packed their meager possessions, and moved in. “Is he going to get a job?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
We had five days to rehearse on the theater stage itself. The first two were devoted to the ordeal known as tech rehearsal, in which the actors are required to sit or stand for hours on end while the lighting director and the sound director make minute adjustments to their equipment, and the stagehands figure out how they’re going to get the furniture moved between scenes, and the set designer instructs the actors about the dangers of the set, which parts move and which are permanent, which doors open in, which out. The union allows two eleven-hour days and we filled every minute of that time, breaking for dinner and then back in the theater until midnight. During the waiting around we familiarized ourselves with the stage, the backstage, and the dressing rooms.
At last we did a full dress rehearsal and I finally got to kiss Madeleine as passionately as I wanted with no interference from our director. She struggled, as Elena must, but I held her tightly until Vanya appeared with his roses and ruined everything.
Peter’s notes were brief: an adjustment to the blocking here (“How did everyone get balled up in the corner?”), a suggestion about timing there (“Sonya, start leaving before she says ‘Go on’”). In conclusion, he said, “Astrov and Elena, about that kiss.”
Madeleine stepped forward, eager for the critique, but I hung back and said coldly, “What about it?”
“Well,” Peter said, “actually.” He left a nice pause for effect. “Actually, it’s perfect.”
Uncle Vanya opened at the Public in March to notices so overheated you could warm your hands by them. Rory Behenny in the title role was “brilliant, as always,” and brought to the outraged Vanya “a wry intensity.” Edward Day’s performance was “astonishing,” also “complex, nuanced, ironic,” possessing—I liked this one—“a range Chekhov would have applauded.” In Astrov, Day “showed us reason and desire in mortal combat.” Madeleine Delavergne was “born to play Elena,” her beauty “delicate, ravishing, haunted,” her Elena “longing to live but unwil
ling to sully herself in ordinary life, mesmerizing.” “When Astrov and Elena steal their brief kiss, the audience holds its collective breath.”
Our director, Peter Smythe, was praised for his “apprehension of the tragic strain in the comic situation of these trivial characters who can’t bear the tedium of their existence.”
Et cetera. Tickets were hot; cast and crew settled in for a nice long run.
I’ve never much liked the whole setup of Christianity, with its emphasis on being saved, thereby acknowledging a debt that can only be paid by a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion. Must God’s love have strings attached? People who crave salvation should think about how they’re going to feel if it turns out that this God who saved them is, upon closer acquaintance, completely alien. He, possibly she (or, more likely, it), is not now and never has been one of us. Jesus clearly was not one of us, with his crypto-stories about the prodigal who is more beloved by the father than the dutiful son and the sliding pay scale for field hands, with his magic powers that run the gamut from improving the wedding beverage to blasting trees to raising the dead. These days we have born-agains everywhere, even in the White House, carping about how clear and meaningful everything is now that they’ve seen the light and accepted Christ as their Savior. There they were, just sinning along aimlessly, drinking and fornicating down that slippery slope lined with good intentions and ending you know where, when suddenly Jesus reached out or down or across and saved them. And now they feel grateful all the time, every day. If things go wrong, that’s God’s way of testing their faith, and if they are successful and make lots of money, that proves they have been chosen by God.
It’s supposed to be all about free will, but there’s not much freedom in it. And if God is really so eager to save the desperate from themselves, where was he when my mother was knocking back the Seconal with her lunatic girlfriend from hell.
These musings are by way of preparation for the climactic scene of our drama, which takes place, appropriately (though perhaps you’ll disagree), in a dressing room at the Public Theater between acts 2 and 3 of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
Mikhail Astrov isn’t onstage for the last part of act 2 and he doesn’t appear again until several minutes into act 3, so it was my habit to retreat to my dressing room and stay there through the intermission until I appeared in act 3 toting my geographical surveys. Rory Behenny and our Russian, Anton Schoitek, shared the room with me but they had a serious long-running card game going in the greenroom, so I generally had the space to myself.
In the third week of our run I was backstage, exchanging witticisms with the Russian, when Madeleine arrived looking harried and made a beeline for her dressing room. “You’re late, my angel,” I said, following her. At the door she turned to me. “We’ve been fighting all day,” she said. “Even in the subway. He wouldn’t let up.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He’s here somewhere.” She laid her hand on my forearm, her eyes searching mine. “If I leave him, can I stay with you?”
Did I hesitate? Not more than a breath, I swear. “Yes,” I said. She squeezed my arm and her eyes softened. Then she disappeared into the room.
The audience that night was a live one; we could feel their attention. Sweet ripples of soft laughter ran up and down the aisles at various points and we fed on them, pumping up the irony, which in this play is sometimes too subtle for lazy auditors. I delivered my last line to Sonya in act 2 and exited stage right. My dressing room was around a corner and down a few steps. I paused on the landing, noticing that the door, which I knew I’d closed, was open.
So no entrance: this time he was waiting for me. The room was long and narrow, the usual bare bulbs and faux-leather chairs lined up before a dressing shelf, a full-length mirror at the far end and two sinks tucked behind the door. He was slumped in one of the chairs, rummaging through an open backpack in his lap. He had on a light jacket, similar to the one I wore as Astrov, and he had a mustache trimmed in the same absurd nineteenth-century style I’d chosen for my part. “Look at this enormous mustache I’ve grown,” Astrov tells the old servant Marina. “A ridiculous mustache. I’ve become an eccentric.” I pushed the door open a few more inches with my foot. Guy looked up from the backpack, raising his hand unconsciously to stroke the bristles over his mouth. “Is it real?” I said, entering the scene.
He frowned. “Is what real?”
“The mustache.”
He dropped his hand. “Of course it is,” he said.
“How did you get in here?”
“It wasn’t difficult.”
I crossed to the mirror where Astrov’s reflection greeted me. “I’ll have to ask you to come back after the play,” I said. “I don’t like to break character in the middle of a performance.”
“Don’t then,” he said. “That Astrov character is as big a heel as you are. And I’ve got the same problem with him.”
I plant trees, I told myself, because I want future generations to be happy because of me. “And what problem is that?” I asked.
“He’s trying to steal my wife.”
“Why not come back later and we can talk this over like gentlemen.”
He shook his head wearily. “I asked you not to take this part. I knew it would be too much for her. I know you have no sense of obligation to me, you’ve made that perfectly clear, but you owe it to her to let her get on with her life.”
I breathed deep into my diaphragm, lifted my shoulders and rolled them back, shrugging off Mikhail Astrov. “You’re always so preoccupied with who owes who what,” I said. “It’s a real failing of yours.”
“How do you sleep at night,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Well,” I said. “I sleep well. You’re the one who doesn’t sleep.”
“I don’t sleep because I care about other people. If I see someone struggling, someone in trouble, I try to help. I don’t just let them drown.”
Oh, here we go, I thought. “Look,” I said, “I know I’ve been a big disappointment to you but I just can’t keep my mind focused every second of the day on how grateful I am to you.”
The sound of applause, like a thousand ping-pong balls simultaneously dropped into play, pattered in over the intercom. The intermission had begun. Guy lurched to his feet, clutching the backpack to his stomach, and with a crabbed sideways step brought his shoulder to the door and eased it closed. Panic turned a screw in my chest and tightened the cords in my throat. The murmuring of my fellow actors as they drifted to their dressing rooms, a cough, a laugh I recognized as Rory’s, a ribald exchange as he and Anton sat down to their card game, the creak of shoe soles against linoleum, the glug of water running in the pipes, all these familiar sounds of our daily routine were improbably dear to me. Why was I trapped with this crazed loser and his backpack? I could have pushed past him, pulled the door open, and ordered him out, but I didn’t. If I made him leave he would run straight to Madeleine’s dressing room and start in on her. She’d gotten through the first act well enough, tearing up prettily during her brief and marvelous response to Vanya’s teasing. Everyone looks at me with pity, poor thing, she has an old husband! This sympathy for me, how I understand it. Her voice quavered on the last line in a way I hadn’t heard before. Our big scene was coming up and I didn’t want her distracted, so I decided to have it out, whatever “it” was, with her husband. He had resumed his seat, hunching over the bag like some beggar going through the day’s collection of rags and bottles. “What is it you want from me, Guy?” I asked.
He glanced up sharply over the bag. “Don’t ask me that,” he snapped. “If you had any interest in what I want, we wouldn’t be here.”
I could think of no response to this assertion, which was, I recognized, indisputable. I twisted the waxed tip of my mustache, gazing upon my unwelcome guest. I knew too much about him, I thought, and though some of what I knew should have made me pity him, what I felt was a steadily mounting irritation, such as a buzzing fly produces of a Su
nday morning when one is trying to read the papers. Just as, while rolling up the book review for use as a weapon, one may succumb to a grudging admiration for the doomed insect, I admitted that there was in Guy’s persistence, as well as his supremely confident appropriation of the moral higher ground, something impressive. He seemed incapable of seeing himself as anything but wronged. So be it, I thought. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t care what you want.”
He returned his attention to the bag. “That’s better. At least you’re being honest.”
“Has it ever occurred to you to ask yourself what I want?”
“I know what you want.”
“Do you?” I said. “And what is that?”
I assumed he would say my wife, and I was prepared with my response, which was that his wife could make her own decisions. But instead he lifted his head and considered me thoughtfully, his eyes fixed vacantly on my forehead as if he were reading a scroll on a video screen. “You want to be rid of me.”
Valerie Martin Page 20