Marina Madorskaia
Overcoming the Resistance of Chekhov's Drama:
Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street.
In terms of its place of action, Uncle Vanya may be characterized by extreme interiority. The evocations of places outside the Voinitsky estate only reinforce its isolation. The tension between the place of action and recounted places conveys best the theme of circular existence, life without an outlet, so potently embodied in the character of Uncle Vanya and reflected, to varying degree, in every other character of the play. Boris Zingerman, who studied Chekhov's space most productively, created an apt epithet for the space of Chekhov's drama - "closed-swung open" (zamknuto-raspakhnutoe).1 Characteristically and sadly, the references to ideal places or places of escape lose their realistic referents in Uncle Vanya. What remains is but a vague dream of a climate where people are happy.
Needless to say, Chekhov was far from creating a solipsist model of the universe: the Russia that stretches outside the estate is very much relevant to the lives of its denizens. At the same time, as Ilya Erenburg put it in 1960, "Chekhov abstained from showing many things," including "the energetic, smart and ruthless capitalists; the revolutionaries, fanatically loyal to the idea; the scientists, who defied the 'general idea' but who worked successfully in their field… Riabushinskys and Sytins, massive strikes, unrest among students, pogroms, the growth of proletarian movement, Pavlov and Mechnikov…"2 Erenburg's list of Chekhov's omissions consists of the personalities and events that made Russian history at the turn of the century. In contrast, in his belles lettres, Chekhov was interested in writing of those sides of human existence, not necessarily conditioned by society at large. Not for nothing did he invent the term "difficult people" - people are sometimes simply "difficult" for no apparent reason. This signals the necessity of a careful approach to the relationship of Chekhov's characters to the place of action and the space outside that place.
The history of Uncle Vanya on the screen points to the filmmakers' deliberate approach to the place of action. They tend to extrovert the play spatially, to make it larger than life, so to speak, larger than "the scenes from the country life". The most common move is to furnish the play with a specific historical context. In 1970 Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky inserted a montage of old photographs in his version of Uncle Vanya. The late 19th century images of the intelligentsia inspired the film's look. At the same time, the sequence included shots of Sakhalin prisoners, Nicholas II, mine workers, prostitutes and an outright Tolstoian peasant with a rake, deep in thought. The intention was obviously to create a large panoramic portrait of Russia as well as include Chekhov, who supported a number of social causes. However, the sequence failed to intertwine organically with the subject of the play. The photographs of ecological decay and typhoid children haunted the characters throughout the film. As they are written, the characters cannot support the ideological weight of history. In the play, Elena turns away from Astrov's maps to probe his feelings toward Sonya. In the film, she turns away from the photograph of a dying child. In other words, historical clutter breaks through the play's existentialism, very much connected to the characters' most immediate daily concerns. The emphasis on the history of the period shifted the accents of Chekhov's play away from these concerns in the direction of more general social problems.
Two other films based on Uncle Vanya, Anthony Hopkins' August (1996) and Michael Blakemore's Country Life (1994), displaced Uncle Vanya in the best traditions of the British-American screen adaptation. Michael Blakemore transferred the play to the post-WWI New South Wales, Australia. The film brought to the surface the play's subtle conflict between city and country, expanding it to the tension between the British Empire and its remote corner. Pursuing identical goals, Anthony Hopkins set the play in South Wales. In both films, the professor and his wife come from London. While applauding the superb performances, the critics remained dissatisfied with the feeling of a dated interpretation. The focus on the messy and complicated life of the characters shifted to a clearly conditioned conflict.
Louis Malle overcame the resistance of Chekhov's drama while indulging cinema's craving for extroversion. His Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is a quasi-documentary about a group of New York actors rehearsing Uncle Vanya at the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street in the mid-1990s. Theater director Andre Gregory and the actors play themselves engaged in the performance of Uncle Vanya that resulted from their real ongoing project: prior to Malle's film, Gregory and his actors had worked on Chekhov's play for over four years.
Spatially, the structure of the film may be written out as the following tertiary: New York/New Amsterdam Theater/the Russia of Chekhov's play. The New Amsterdam Theater functions as metonymy for New York, originally New Amsterdam. As a result, the spatial tertiary may be reduced to a binary: New York/the Russia of Chekhov's play. New York here is, of course, the New York of Malle's film. For brevity I will sometimes refer to "the Russia of Chekhov's play" simply as Russia. And so New York and Russia come together at the New Amsterdam Theater.
Since its foundation in 1903, the New Amsterdam Theater has been a meeting point of high and low cultures. The film's dialogue foregrounds this: we are told the theater housed Shakespeare productions, as well as the Ziegfeld Follies. In this sense, the theater also mirrors its immediate surrounding - 42nd Street. Up to the late 1990s, New York's famous theater street also functioned as a red light district, among its few other questionable functions. The street poster for Uncle Vanya locates Chekhov's play next to an advertisement for hot dogs, followed by the shot of a "Triple Treat Theater" adjacent to the New Amsterdam. At first glance - an unlikely location. Yet, as we will see further, the entire film works at assimilating the play and its performance in this difficult context. The interior of the New Amsterdam Theater and the conversations that take place just before the performance set up a seamless transition into the world of the play. For the next two hours various spaces of the theater will represent the Voinitsky estate. Built in 1903, this art nouveau theater also provides a temporal link between modern New York and Chekhov's time. New York and Russia meet at a space that functions like a mirror for both.
The theater also serves as a meeting place of two different codes - cinema and theater. In the film, these codes correlate with the spaces of New York and Russia. New York is conceived as hyper-real. The actors and the director approach the theater as undifferentiated people of the New York crowd. More importantly, they play themselves rehearsing the play. While New York is iconic, the estate is markedly symbolic. This is the Russia of Chekhov's playtext, performed without sets or costumes, with only verbal indicators, such as names of characters and places.
For the purposes of further analysis, it is useful to look at the structure of the film as a text within the text. Here and further I am drawing on the terminology of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school .3 The film creates meaning by way of seamless transitions between the elements of its structure-New York and Russia - and between the elements of its style - cinema and theatrical performance. The structure, as I have already mentioned, may be written out in spatial terms - the Russia of Chekhov's play in New York. New York constitutes the external text, Russia is the internal text or the intext. The intext is Gregory's production of Chekhov's play within the external text - Malle's film. New York also constitutes the compositional frame of the film. There is, however, no strict border between the two. The film signifies by way of constant intertwining. This causes both to be at once framing and framed parts of the text, a situation described by Lotman in his article "Text within the Text" .4 Further in this paper I will analyze the principles and functions of this relationship between the external text and the intext, between New York and Russia. The principal goal of such an analysis is to explain the productiveness of Malle's "extroversion" of Chekhov.
To begin with, Malle establishes subtle similarities between the external text and the intext. Chekhov's style determines the style of the frame. The opening of the film is vaguely reminiscent of all Chekhov's plays, in which all of the characters come together early in the first act. The development of action on multiple planes is also reminiscent of Chekhov's drama. The dialogue at the beginning of the film creates an impression that we are following several conversations at once. Malle, however, makes sure we hear every single detail, by arranging bits and pieces of dialogue sequentially, with some overlap in-between. The background music and street-noise support the impression of the kind of eclecticism for which Chekhov was so often reproached by his critics. As a result, we quickly receive much information about the actors, the audience, the theater, and the production. The inclusion of exotic details, such as a mention of Chekhov's translations into Bengali, echoes the well-known exotic details in Chekhov's plays, such as a reference to Africa in Uncle Vanya. The list may go on and on.
The performance begins while the actors, the director and the small audience are still dispersed about the theater conversing: Wallace Shawn, who plays Uncle Vanya, lies down on the bench and closes his eyes. In the play, Vanya makes his first entrance having awoken from a nap. Gregory's laugh carries over into the performance as a sound bridge. The dialogue strengthens the connection between the frame and the performance. David Mamet's translation into American vernacular eases the transition. The opening lines of the play echo conversations that took place only minutes before. Larry Pine (Dr. Astrov) complains to Gregory, the director, that he's lost it. Gregory replies: "You've been losing it for the past twenty five years". The first lines of Chekhov's play introduce Astrov as a man who had been "losing it" for quite a while. Nanny Marina (Phoebe Brand) tells Astrov he has changed a lot in the eleven years she has known him: "Then you were young, and now you are old. I think your looks are faded… and you're drinking now…"5 The examples of identification of the actors and the characters are numerous. The film obviously invites us to draw parallels between the off-Broadway theater actors in modern New York and the characters populating Chekhov's play. The conversation between Phoebe Brand and Larry Pine is particularly poignant:
Brand: You look tired…
Pine: Yeah, I haven't had time to catch my breath. You see I'm doing these two other plays. They keep calling me for extra rehearsals. I was up at six o'clock this morning moaning lines for the re-writes on this play I am doing at the Hearts and Minds Cafe.
Brand: I've never heard of that theater.
Pine: No reason you should have.
The opening dialogue of Chekhov's play reads like the subtext (Stanislavsky's term) of the dialogue above:
Astrov: Overwork, simply. On my feet all day, every day. Every night I go to sleep in fear I'll be called out on a call…
Marina: Eat.
Astrov: …One hundred years from now: those who come after us. For whom our lives are showing the way. Will they think kindly of us? Will they remember us with a kind word…
Marina: The people won't remember. But God will.
Despite the identification, the actors who perform in modern dress never quite dissolve into their characters, just as the theater never quite becomes the estate. Gregory's interventions between the acts also prevent complete identification with the play. The goal is to keep the two spaces, and the sets of characters separate to reinforce the parallels between them. Malle lets the sounds and symbols of New York penetrate the performance. It is hard to dismiss traffic noise and police sirens. And Uncle Vanya drinks from a paper cup with the "I Love NY" logo. In an interview Malle explained these choices as stemming from the desire to keep the audience aware of the film's structure: "We kept all that (sirens, 'I Love NY' cup), so even when people forget where we are and are just following the play, I hope they'll never think we're somewhere else. It's like when somebody came up with a samovar and I said, 'Are you crazy? A samovar? If we have a samovar, we are finished!'"6 Malle is only telling part of the story. New York and Russia intertwine on so many minute levels of the film that they virtually fuse. For instance, the smaller props used during the performance are not all modern. While the characters sip their tea from paper cups, the vodka is properly poured into granenye stakany from a glass shtof. Professor Serebryakov's medicine is stored in modern plastic prescription containers and in antique bottles of blue glass. The semiotics of the costumes, which pretend to be street clothes, is also not so simple. The Serebryakovs, who arrive from the city, are dressed to match in recognizable New York garb: both are wearing black pants, white linen shirts and black V-neck sweaters. On the other hand, Uncle Vanya's faded blue turtleneck and Sonya's polka-dotted baby-doll dress look quite provincial.
This peculiar fusion of New York and Russia causes each to function as a meta-text in relation to the other. For instance, the reality of the frame begins to determine and describe the intext. This is manifested in the nature of the interpersonal relationships between the characters, which are not entirely motivated by Chekhov's text. Rather, the relationships between the personages are a projection of the interpersonal relationships between the actors, marked by the kind of tolerance and familiarity, unforeseen in Chekhov's text but fostered by Andre Gregory. While it is difficult to imagine Vanya and Elena kissing and hugging throughout as good friends, it is even more difficult to imagine Astrov repeatedly kissing Vanya on the bald spot.
In its own turn, the intext functions as a meta-text in relation to the external text. Thematically, Chekhov's play revolves around the tentative status of the Voinitsky estate, the problems of the house and the lifestyle on the verge of extinction. Set in motion in the space of the New Amsterdam Theater, where the stage is no longer usable, the performance activates the homelessness of the production itself, pointing to the nomadic status of the New York actor and director, not attached to one specific theater. In real life, Gregory and his actors had performed Uncle Vanya in a multitude of spaces ranging from friends' lofts to small off-off-Broadway theaters. The performance also refers to Gregory's philosophy of theater, according to which there is no finished product - rehearsal is the point.
The relationship between the elements of the film's structure carries over into its style, which combines two distinct poetics: theatrical and cinematic. The most important elements of Malle's film are camera movement and framing. The sequences framing the performance are shot with the hand-held camera. During the performance, Malle switches to the camera hung on a bungee-cord suspended from a crane. This technique allows Malle to retain the free movement of the camera, while making it more stable than the handheld, which attracts attention away from the action. As a result the camera is able to follow essentially theatrical blocking. Theater action lacks the precision of action staged for the camera. If the actor onstage is off his or her mark, it does not make much difference. In film, however, being off the mark means walking out of the frame, which destroys the long take. This is an instance when stage space is less constricting than screen space. Here, the camera suspended from the crane calls attention to the relative looseness of the performance in the oversized space of the Amsterdam Theater. Malle controls the viewer's identification with Chekhov's play by switching first from handheld to bungee cord and then, as the play gets more intimate, to dolly, leaving the camera a little loose to smooth over the difference between hand-held and fixed camera movement.
Malle's blocking for the camera also provides a curious amalgam of theatrical and cinematic modes of guiding the audience. Avoiding for the most part one-shot close-ups, Malle blocks groups of actors to allow for a more objective action development. He repeatedly positions actors next to one another on benches. He then positions the camera on the side of the action, which results in diagonal depth of field. At the same time, he uses a long lens to bring us as close to several actors' faces as possible. This results in polyphonic development of action, when we are able to observe the characters' simultaneous reactions to each other's words. Side angles, multiple character shots, fluid camera movement and spare editing allow for the kind of blocking, more typical of theater than of cinema. At the same time, we are able to come closer to the actors' faces to observe the finest details of their work.
It is imperative to note that cinema gradually takes over as the play gets more intimate and tense. If Malle allows Gregory to intervene between the first sets of acts, there is no interruption between acts three and four. Framing, lighting and sound begin to abstract the performance from the larger space of the theater. As the performance progresses, framing becomes tighter, close-ups more frequent. This gradual change allows the viewer to become absorbed in the growing sense of the characters' loneliness. There are more and more shots with a single source of lighting, leaving the background blurry or black. Throughout the film Malle plays with timbre and volume to manipulate our sense of space in relation to the performance. Toward the middle, the characters' speech, reinforced by tight framing, grows acoustically and spatially abstract. Narrow framing and clean, post-synchronized sound abstract the characters from the larger space of the theater and create an illusion of space collapsing on the characters. Cinematic sound culminates in the one and only monologue, Elena's, just before she interrogates Astrov about his feelings toward Sonya. Unlike other monologues, Malle chooses to present this one as an interior monologue by way of voice-over. The monologue sounds almost subconscious - Elena dreads acknowledging that she is really going to ask Asrtov about his feelings toward her. The camera slowly zooms in on Elena's face. At the same time, she sighs, moves, runs her hand through her hair, even moves her lips. These noises break through the voice-over, pointing to Malle's constant awareness of the simultaneous presence of cinema and theater. Even at this moment we don't forget where we are.
Toward the end of the film, Malle gradually returns to longer and looser shots and sound that reflect the space of the theater and bring us out of Chekhov's Russia back to New York. The end of the film does not coincide with the end of Chekhov's play. Nor does it bring us out on 42nd Street. The ending is doubly theatrical. Seconds after Sonya wraps up the play, out of the darkness emerge Gregory and the rest of the cast to join Vanya, Sonya, Marina, Maman and Telegin who close the performance. This is the so-called performance after the performance, common in modern theater. The characters are still invading the actors. And so the film that opened in the most documentary, extroverted mode, comes to its close in the theater, reminding us that this was all about the theater after all.
To sum up, Malle combined New York and Russia, cinema and theater, preserving Chekhov's accent on the discrete life of the Voinitskys while making a film about the New York actor, the New York director, and the New York theater.
© M. Madorskaia
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TSQ 34
Toronto Slavic Annual 2003
Arkadii Shteinvberg. The second way
Roman Timenchik. Anna Akhmatova in 60s
Le Studio Franco-Russe
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