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Ginkas moves in on Chekhov’s Lady
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Lady with a Lapdog
From a short story by Anton Chekhov. Adapted and directed by Kama Ginkas. Set by Sergey Barkhin. Music by Leonid Desyatnikov. Costumes adapted by Sergey Barkhin from original designs by Tatiana Barkhina. Lighting by Michael Chybowski. Sound by David Remedios. English translation by Ryan McKittrick and Julia Smeliansky. With Stephen Pelinski, Elisabeth Waterston, Trey Burvant, and Robert Olinger. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through October 11.
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That the lady doesn’t have a lapdog will be the least of traditionalists’ objections to Russian director Kama Ginkas’s overhaul of Chekhov’s famous short story about a summer tryst that becomes a despairing passion. The 1899 " Lady with a Lapdog " is a meditative tale of a seaside seduction in Yalta that turns painfully serious, trapping its adulterous lovers — " a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages " — in an agony of regret for their otherwise meaningless lives. In Ginkas’s hands, it becomes a carnival of symbolism, feeling, and whimsy, its two protagonists shadowed by a couple of clowns in bowlers and old-fashioned bathing suits whose antics pull Chekhov into an uneasy collaboration with Buster Keaton and Beckett. At times this visually inventive slow-moving circus of narration and imagery put me in mind of Robert Wilson. Of course, Wilson’s cadenced canvases ruffle fewer feathers when stretched across the impenetrable pronouncements of Heiner Müller than when adding daubs of jazz tap to Ibsen. And many will argue that not even a bona fide Russian with ties to the Moscow Art Theatre should be allowed to mess with Chekhov. But if you can get by the fact that Ginkas has scrawled his signature on a sacred cow, Lady with a Lapdog — which the director, who specializes in prose adaptation, has previously staged thrice — is a deliberately jarring yet oddly poetic piece that uncovers the emotional dislocation in Chekhov’s deceptively simple, unresolved story of a roué brought to suffer and a bored wife brought to grief. In Russian architect Sergey Barkhin’s design, Dmitri Gurov, the middle-aged Muscovite philanderer, and Anna Sergeyevna, the young wife of a provincial functionary, move from a fairy-tale seaside, complete with striped phallic cabanas and a lone boat suspended in a blue box, to winter worlds marked by an entangling white dropcloth standing for snow and a grim, fortress-like fence that groans up out of what was the beach. In similar fashion, the couple ricochet among giddy game playing and near-hysterical frolic, moments of ghostly tenderness, and rage at a divided, dying life. Ginkas does not make conventional drama out of prose; his method is to have the actors narrate the story, complete with " he said " and " she said " and much rhythmic repetition, as they make their stylized way through it. This sometimes pulls the prose apart in ways that protract — some would say belabor — Chekhov’s astute, unfussy narrative. On the other hand, Ginkas, sticking his fingers into the interstices between the words, brings out the emotional frenzy and the abrupt changes of mood that lurk beneath Chekhov’s masterfully benign evocation of a summer idyll that burgeons into an obsession. And some of the production’s forays into symbolism (among them a sex scene featuring a taut-dropcloth slide) are physically arresting. Indeed, whereas the deconstruction of the text grows tiresome, the staging is notable for its pronounced aural and visual design, composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s Piazzolla-like tangos swelling like tsunamis, Michael Chybowski’s ruptures of lighting drawing a line between night and day, private and public. Ginkas is a Stateside fashion this season: his K.I. from ‘Crime,’ the first of his productions to be seen in America, was performed (in Russian) at Bard College last summer, and he will direct his adaptation of Chekhov’s story " Rothschild’s Fiddle " at Yale in January. The ART production marks his first work with American actors: ART newcomers Stephen Pelinski, a Donald Sutherlandish Gurov, and Elisabeth Waterston, whose initially childlike persona brings a Lolita-esque tinge to the proceedings. Neither actor is much of a clown, though Waterston exudes a kind of gangly sensuousness that gives way to tragic hauteur. Pelinski, a long-time Guthrie Theatre stalwart, is good at delivering the still, philosophic bits of the story, among them Gurov’s realization toward the end that love, coming too late, has hogtied him to mortality. As for the two vaudevilleans dubbed " Gentleman Sunbathers " and insouciantly represented by Trey Burvant and Robert Olinger, they are central to Ginkas’s idea of juxtaposing tragedy and comedy, but the Waiting for Godot overlay doesn’t always work. The sunbathers stand in nicely for the lurking boardwalk populace at Yalta; the production’s wordless opening, in which all four actors repeatedly bob up from the surf like little Chaplinesque waves, is charming. And the extras are used to good effect at the lovers’ parting, manhandling the summer-clad Gurov and Anna into sober black coats. Later, when the story leaves the beach, their contributions seem out of season.
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