A scene from the show, via
In The Lady with the Lapdog, Chekhov’s famous short story, a young wife named Anna meets a handsome (but married) banker, Dmitry. The two flirt by the beach and then, in Yalta’s sultry summer heat, commit adultery. After the fact, Dmitry cuts a slice of watermelon and eats it “without haste.” Anna doesn’t say a word. When I first read the story, fumbling through Chekhov’s original, this made me cry. I looked up the Russian arbus, which means watermelon, and a rush of pity almost knocked me off my chair. We went over the scene in class the next day, and my professor called it “comedy.” I furrowed my brow.
This question—farce or tragedy?—is central to Chekhov’s work, from his plays to his novellas. It also accounts for many poor productions of The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, productions that picked sides, without uniting the comic and tragic. The Russian Arts Theatre & Studio’s new play, My Uncle Chekhov, is one such well-intentioned theatrical misstep.
Playing in Manhattan’s West End Theater, it’s a compilation of 11 Chekhov short stories, 10 of which are just one-acts, short scenes with a handful of characters. The Russian doctor wrote more than two hundred stories—perhaps more than eight hundred—and with this astonishing figure in mind, you might think a director would cherry-pick interesting tales with a common theme or motif. Instead, the Muscovite Aleksey Burago makes a strange selection, including impenetrable stories like “A Little Joke” and “Minds in Ferment.”
The nine actors are another motley crew: a few hail from Russia, others from Italy, another from France. The result is a hodgepodge of accents, dialects, and theatrical styles. Delightful, in moments. (Unexpected props, like a sputtering rain machine and a red-eyed mechanical dove, complement this absurdity.) Still, some actors can’t control the show’s volume, and My Uncle Chekhov has too many ear-splitting shrieks and inaudible whispers.
Most scenes bear little resemblance to Chekhov’s canonical plays, for obvious reasons. A story is a living thing, with organs working together: dialogue, narration, description, etc. But Burago takes a knife to these creatures, carving the dialogue out of the whole. Surgery is a delicate task, and not every tale survives the ordeal. “Minds in Ferment” lies lifeless, for instance, a corpse on the stage. The actors don’t move, and the plot has no logic.
The eleventh, central story is chopped up into segments, interludes between the ten one-acts. “The Darling” is one of Chekhov’s best works, and it bristles with tension, the pull between humor and pathos. Olenka (Di Zhu) is the titular “Darling,” a lovely young woman who parrots her husband’s beliefs. When he dies, she marries again and adopts a new rhetoric. On the one hand, Olenka’s shifting convictions are comedic gold. On the other, Chekhov writes:
When she had Kukin, or Pustovalov, or the veterinary surgeon [her husbands and lovers], Olenka could explain everything, and give her opinion about anything you like, but now there was the same emptiness in her brain and in her heart as there was in her yard outside. And it was as harsh and as bitter as wormwood in the mouth.
Burago doesn’t tackle despair; instead, he grafts uncomfortable sex scenes onto the story. And while the slapstick humor is sometimes successful, it doesn’t do the tale justice.
In his note to the audience, Burago writes: “Chekhov is an uncle I wish I had.” (Hence the show’s title.) He goes on to call him “a man who looked at the world with a sense of humor.” In other words: Were I to ask Burago about the infamous watermelon, he would chuckle, not weep. And once again, I would furrow my brow. This discrepancy—between the cheery take on a text and the gloomy one—is unsettling, yes, but it’s also productive. We pause for a second; we reevaluate our beliefs; we see that some were just dogma. In brief, we’re all operating under faulty assumptions, with incomplete information. We’re all a little like Olenka.