two disappointing plays

ibsen and chekhov (not their fault)

It’s spring break AND Lent, so what best to do, other than to see Ibsen and Chekhov on the stage?

The first was A Doll’s House at the Hudson, very good but like the lady in The Life Aquatic says, I just don’t think they got it. Coming off the electricity of the audience response to A Bright New Boise, I did expect something more from the crowd for this all-timer of a play. As a play, it’s perfect, unfolding organically, drama perfectly timed up until the final speech. I first came across it in (catholic) high school, where it was assigned by Deacon Viau, a lovely man with a real new orleans accent, the kind that sounds like old school new york. His intentions were remarkable; the class was a sort of surreptitious catholic novel class (we read a brideshead and lot of graham greene), and I think the Ibsen was both meant as a kind of innoculation, but also something to take seriously, for real, and not just as what not to do. How else otherwise do you open up for full unmoderated debate whether Nora should have left or not with a bunch of teenagers?

I don’t remember what I argued in high school, but my impression now is that there’s no answer—nothing is the right thing for Nora to do. Stay and know your spouse considers you to be like poisonous spores and like a baby for the rest of your life; or leave your children forever (granted, to be raised by the nanny who was essentially your mother). When Nora says she doesn’t know how to raise her children anyway, she’s making an essentially Socratic point: we let women, taught to consider themselves as childlike, irrational human beings (not the same as real innocence), have the earliest care and teaching of all other human beings—and you’re telling me that man does not hand on misery to man?

The audience didn’t seem to get it, which was interesting to me. They loved it when Jessica Chastain (nora) talked in baby-talk to her spouse who responded in kind. The Simone de Beauvoir point—that the play helps you chafe under—that love cannot thrive under these conditions, where neither person sees the other fully adult, fully human, free, mortal but alive for now—well, sitting there in a much larger theater than I’m used to, trying to gauge the mood, it felt diffused, a little scattered, there wasn’t that beautiful common focus where the audience was all on the edge of their seat together. Granted, Nora’s last speech, where she points out her realization that she is after all human, but a human who has no idea what she really thinks about any single thing (terrifying), feels potentially like a break in the dramatic tension, unless it can be something you, the actors, and the audience figure out, if you can together preserve the mood.

As you can imagine, J. did it very, very well. I cried. I could have wished for a more universal catharsis amidst my fellow humans. I’ve been writing this week about how Beauvoir’s basic point in The Second Sex, the ways it is difficult but necessary for women to understand themselves as people, not so much as individual actors with rights but as mortals with a fully existential consciousness, is still undigested culturally by us, to the extent that it’s not even really on the table. Ha ha, this lady pretends to be a squirrel. At the end of the play, Ibsen makes this point almost too clearly to be believable—the irony being that we find it hard to believe a woman like Nora would ever notice or articulate half of what she does, in the end, say. My 2023 New York audience was puzzled—why was this a slightly appealing denouement? Was anything the matter? At least in Copenhagen in 1879, they knew enough to be shocked.

*

The second performance was an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull at Signature, set in Woodstock NY in the present day, which had been advertised to me as a “fresh and fun” version of what one presumes was otherwise moldy and depressing as hell. Lord how I wished for a rather more Russian hell. Y’all, it was bad. It was terrible! I HATED it. I had been hoping that the “fun” promised was the fault of the promotion-copy writers, but in fact, this was also a conceit of the adaptor, Thomas Bradshaw, like myself an academic. The adaptation started out by pandering, switched to cheap-shock-camp, then pandered some more only to work up to its dramatic peak: condescension. I did not like it.

Last year around this time, I went to go see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s quasi-adaptation, quasi-homage to Uncle Vanya, the film Drive My Car, writing about it here. I’ve always struggled a bit with Chekhov, having seen Wallace Shawn’s Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street at perhaps too young an age for the bleak despair he manages to portray all too well. Drive My Car takes you into Chekhov from the inside out, where the skull-drilling honesty each character portrays provides an astonishing catharsis, once you catch the rhythm of it.

Walking down 42nd Street last night, I was thinking about Wallace Shawn doing the same in the opening credits of his Chekhov, and enjoying the overlay of a glimpse of the same street in 1994, glimpsed only by me via VHS at the time. A younger me would have been suspicious of modern-day adaptations a priori, but older and wiser me knew all too well that that is dumb. This adaptation is a vehicle for Parker Posey, who was lovely, working hard and making it look easy. But P. could not save it, no not even all that much.

The best moments were the scenes between Parker (Irina) and Hari Nef (Masha), the latter I think was by far the closest to getting to the mood of skull-drilling honesty referenced above. The adaptation, over-loaded with fun modern-day references, kept stepping in the way of itself; it hard tried to portray its wealthy characters dealing with woke and anti-woke impulses by asking the actors to do uncomfortable things, like asking a young black actress to deliver a monologue on the cultural intricacies of the n-word, and Hari, a trans woman, to be critiqued by Parker Posey on whether she was confident enough in her attractiveness. (P. did this so outrageously well that H. lost it and laughed so hard she broke character a bit, the best moment in the evening.) These choices could have delivered more than camp, given the skill of the actors and well, Chekhov, but they did not.

If I hadn’t seen Drive My Car, I probably would have thought, well that’s Chekhov. Everyone is terrible in Chekhov, there’s no escape, that’s it. But now I know better, so I’m mad. The audience mood was scattered here too, but not from a lack of understanding. On the subway train back uptown, two women read the production notes aloud to each other, attempting to figure out what happened. My own plan involves reading The Seagull later this week, and trying to find its saving moments as best I can.

One good play without an audience; one good audience without a script. Five weeks until Easter.