#12
New York Times
December 2, 2001
For Russians, Theater Is a Process of Constant Rediscovery
By LAWRENCE SACHAROW
Lawrence Sacharow is the chairman of Fordham University's theater department, artistic director of River Arts Repertory and the director of Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning play ``Three Tall Women.'
MOSCOW -- ON a bright Sunday morning earlier this year, four prominent representatives of Russian theater, all in their 50's, met in a large high-ceilinged room filled with natural light a few blocks from Red Square.
The building, the Moscow Art Theater School, is part of the complex of the revered Moscow Art Theater, where Konstantin Stanislavsky directed and taught. The room itself is the office of the school's dean, Anatoly Smeliansky, a leading critic and editor of Stanislavsky's collected works as well as the author of a new book in Russian on recently discovered correspondence between Stanislavsky and Josef Stalin. Mr. Smeliansky's book "The Russian Theater After Stalin" was published in English by Cambridge University Press in 1999.
Besides contributing to the discussion himself, Mr. Smeliansky served tea and coffee during the wide-ranging and often animated conversation on the state of Russian theater today. The other men seated around his large table included:
Valery Fokin, a prominent director who earned international attention with his play "A Hotel Room in the Town of NN," his adaptation of Gogol's classic satirical novel "Dead Souls," staged by his Meyerhold Arts Center theater in Moscow.
Aleksandr Kalyagin, a leading stage and film actor and the founder and artistic director of Moscow Theater Etc., a small repertory theater in the capital.
Aleksandr Galin, a major Russian contemporary playwright and the author of the gritty, realistic "Stars in the Morning Sky," about the lives of four prostitutes when Moscow was the host of the 1980 Olympics.
Also present was Natalia Fedora, a teacher of movement and acting at the Moscow Art Theater School, who served as translator.
Already in Moscow to direct the River Arts Repertory production of the play "The Road Home: Stories of Children at War" at the Taganka Theater, I raised questions and taped the conversation.
One issue that seemed to infuse the discussion: a once vital acting system or technique, when passed from generation to generation through repetition, inevitably loses spontaneity and vitality. After a time this can only result in deadly theater. The theater must be in continual search to rediscover its intention and relevance. The great work of Stanislavsky was never finished. He continued to experiment until he died in 1938, as did the other two masters of 20th-century theater, the Russian producer and director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski.
Stanislavsky said: "There is no system. There is only nature. My lifelong concern has been how to get ever closer to the so-called system, that is, to get ever closer to the nature of creativity."
LAWRENCE SACHAROW Yesterday in Moscow, I spoke with a woman who said: "Before glasnost I went to the theater to have an experience, to breathe free. Now, it's not so important anymore." What is the difference in Russian theater under Communism and after glasnost?
VALERY FOKIN I think that woman's view is simplistic. Basically, nothing has changed because the artist is still struggling to create, to deal with mortality. Art is older than capitalism or Communism. In the future, there will be other forms of society, but we will still have art.
ALEKSANDR GALIN The conditions of my life as a playwright changed drastically after perestroika because after the political censorship another censorship appeared: the censorship of taste. In today's theater, only really artistic plays will survive out of the mediocrities. In this transition we are going through, life is so unpredictable that it will provide a lot of material for future playwrights to create interesting new plays from.
ALEKSANDR KALYAGIN I would like to contradict my friend a little bit. Theater is a modern part of life, and we actors miss this aspect of it because our playwrights now are stuck in the past. Actors train with classical texts. But it is also important for training to include modern parts, or the actor will not continue to develop. Right now, there is a trend toward making the theater process more middlebrow -- commercially appealing. But it won't last because Russian theater has a great tradition as a sanctuary. It's a church, and it will always be like that.
ANATOLY SMELIANSKY Look at what is going on in contemporary Moscow. When the great directors and artistic directors are gone, the producers take their places. Producers are now playing a much more important role than before. It's very important, this capitalization of Russian theater. The person who can get the money takes the job of artistic director.
SACHAROW Yesterday we visited the Novo-Devichy cemetery to see the gravestones of Chekhov, Stanislav sky, Knipper [Olga Knipper, the actress Chekhov married three years before he died in 1904], Bulgakov [the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, author of "The Master and Margarita," who died in 1940] and others. Afterward, Toila [Mr. Smeliansky] gave us a tour of the Moscow Art Theater and spoke with our company, which includes a Tibetan musician named Nawang Khechog. He knew nothing about Russian theater, and in fact had been a Buddhist hermit who lived in a cave for five years. That night he said: "Theatrical art seems to be the gateway to the Russian soul." Is this still true?
FOKIN I think this Tibetan man is correct because Russian theater always had important spiritual meaning. The woman who said it's not important to go to the theater nowadays -- she probably doesn't want to do all the spiritual work that theater demands. Many people used to go to the theater to hear how bad the Soviet regime was and that was a mistake. We must maintain our theater as a sanctuary.
SMELIANSKY The paradoxical thing is that all shows are sold out in Moscow. This is good and bad at the same time because the criteria are mixed up and people will go and watch everything. Everything that happens onstage is called theater, commercial theaters that pretend to be repertory theaters, fake avant-garde theater studios. You can see a production of this contrived avant-garde by attending a performance of "The Gambler" by Dostoyevsky and then going next door to a casino and gambling yourself.
FOKIN The times and criteria are all mixed up. It's very important to preserve ourselves, our attitude of seriousness toward the theater. We must ask: "Why do we need theater?" "Why does theater exist?" People asking those questions will be in the minority, but they are trying to maintain the aliveness of real theater.
KALYAGIN This year, two theater centers are opening, the Meyerhold Center [led by Mr. Fokin] and the School of Dramatic Art [led by the Moscow director Anatoly Vasiliev], both supported by the government. They give us hope that the spiritual part of our lives will be preserved and survive. These centers will also be for professional actors who want to perfect their art, the spiritual part of them, in their work.
SACHAROW Will these new centers draw on the work of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Vakhtangov [Evgeny Vakhtangov, one of Stanislavsky's most talented students, who became a brilliant director and acting teacher and whose theater, the Vakhtangov Theater, exists in Moscow today]? Especially for training and developing work? And are you satisfied with the legacy and tradition of Russian training?
FOKIN It will be different. To teach Stanislavsky's system as it was taught even 10 years ago is impossible. When the great ones pass away, there are always people who seek to make careers at their expense. They canonize the word and extinguish the spirit.
When I was studying at the end of the 60's, the names of Vakhtangov and Meyerhold were exciting in terms of theater process, and Stanislavsky seemed to be boring and dull. In reality, he was a genius, very alive and a true theater experimenter until the day he died. Stanislavsky endowed Grotowski with everything that has to do with the human spirit and inner life. The Meyerhold Center will be an international center for theater research and experimentation in the tradition of these great masters. We will collaborate with many people, including Anatoly's Moscow Art Theater School.
SMELIANSKY We will create a studio and work together to combine Stanislavsky and Meyerhold in daily practical sessions. We will open an international master of fine arts program for directors who graduated from acting, design or other programs. The real education of directors is very weak, even in America, and I think this is of major importance for the contemporary theater.
SACHAROW How would the approach be different from the traditional training of directors? Director training seems to emphasize two extremes: complete subservience to the text, or creating your own event with the text. Unless there is real genius guiding the investigation of a play, this second approach is often a disaster.
SMELIANSKY There is a difference in theater mentality between the United States and Russia. In the States, theater is, first of all, literature — words -- and then interpretation. In Russia, it is much more a delicate balance between directing and playwriting -- because of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and other great Russian directors. Ask Kalyagin, one of the greatest Russian actors now, and he would say that without a director, contemporary theater does not exist.
In America it would be difficult to say who is the director. The director is someone who says: "Come from that door, go out that door, put some light there." The director in Russia is an artist at least equal to a playwright. Frankly speaking, we have a deficit of directors today. In the history of the Moscow Art Theater School during 60 years, we have only had a directors' program two times. I'm inviting Fokin, from the Meyerhold Center, to help cultivate Meyerhold's tradition at the Moscow Art Theater School, which is traditionally an acting school. Without directors, the education of contemporary actors is pointless. Actors and directors should train together every year. If you have even two or three great directors in five years it is an event of national importance for our theater.
FOKIN It's a normal situation that we will never have a lot of good directors. A real director, in the true meaning of the word, is the author of the production. It's a very complicated question because bad directors try to exercise their power over a play, and sometimes they don't understand the sense of the play -- the spirit of the playwright -- which should not be a vehicle for the director's own ambitions.
Meyerhold, who put into practice the idea of the director as the author of the production, was led by the main artistic task. He had a profound knowledge of not just the particular play but all the works of the dramatist, like Gogol, for example. When he directed "The Inspector General" in 1926, it was based on all Gogol's works and he discovered all of Gogol through this play. The real director illustrates the genius of a play and creates his own new world; even interpretation is not enough, he composes a new reality.
SMELIANSKY Look at Galin. He started directing his own plays in the last few years because he was so disappointed with contemporary directors. Many playwrights now say: "Why should I give my play over to someone else? I can do it better myself." Directing is the whole world: visual art, music, architecture. From the time of Meyerhold, directing has been considered the one profession that embodies all of the arts. I would say the era of the great directors is over and this is a period between great directors and the new generation.
GALIN Historically, I think Anatoly is correct. There's a terrible emptiness in the contemporary theater because the director is occupied by form, by the shape of a production. Here in Russia, we have great set designers, world class, and the design can be overdeveloped, independent of the play and director.
SMELIANSKY It is difficult to be the director of your own work. Sometimes you are not equal to the level of the play. Because you create a new reality out of your own play, what does it mean to be truthful to the author? When you direct your own work you should be untruthful to yourself as the playwright.
GALIN When I first began to direct my own plays, I had a huge inferiority complex. I began to hate my plays, as if they were lifeless. But after some time, I reread my own work and I thought: "Wow. I was so pure inside. I was writing so simple a thing. I needed so little for everything." I agree that the director should create his own world. Without the spiritual connection, however, we may see a production where, for example, the cherry orchard is sold in the first act.
SACHAROW How is theater supported in the new Russia?
SMELIANSKY We have very, very few really private theaters that are based completely on box office ticket sales. Ninety-nine percent of Russian theaters receive some government funds.
SACHAROW Can Russian theaters survive on that alone?
SMELIANSKY No. SACHAROW So there's no widespread commercial theater?
SMELIANSKY That's the paradox of the new Russia: commercial theater with state subsidies.
SACHAROW What makes a theater or a school alive?
SMELIANSKY Stanislavsky discovered the importance of a studio, a place to work between school and professional theater. Then those involved have one or two years to be together as a company. In Russian theater, the company is the form and shape of theater itself. This is why the Meyerhold Center and Vasiliev's new center are so important, because they don't have an obligation to produce. Their only obligation is to develop the new generation.
FOKIN Unfortunately, young directors and writers are forced to think about how to be in demand. Galin says that when he writes a play, he's thinking about the purpose for the theater, the basic idea of the work. He is right, but he's not the role model in this situation because he is a famous playwright and he stands outside the general rule.
The problem of presenting the early work of young playwrights and directors is an important one. A young director should have the right to make a mistake, otherwise he can't become a director. The management of a theater often thinks, "Will audiences come to see the play?" That's a problem. My center will offer the possibility for young artists to start their careers in an environment of complete theatrical investigation.
KALYAGIN I was a medical student, which influenced my acting career. The best actors -- and this is true in America also -- don't feel that they separate life from acting technique. I understand acting not from learning at school but learning from life. As an artistic director, when I choose a play for my theater, I take into account the circumstances of life, the company, the spiritual inner life of the director who is invited to direct the play. Theater is not a building but a group of people living in a specific artistic climate.
In teaching, we have a great craving for new methods, new forms of instruction. For example, writings of Meyerhold have recently been uncovered. This is new material for us. And it's very important to learn more about him as his legacy unfolds.
However, there is no ultimate recipe for how to cook a good actor or a good director. And nobody will ever have one. Max Reinhardt said it very well: real mastery in the theater comes from unending curiosity.
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