Au Revoir Tuzenbach

And with this past weekend's performances, I close the door on my time on stage as Tuzenbach, one of the great roles period and particularly for actor's of my type. Where the jocks get to play Biff Loman, the geeks play Tuzenbach. Not that I seriously view the great roles of theater through a lens of base a archetypes, but it's kinda true. I am kind of a geek, and Tuzenbach is one of the roles in the western dramatic canon that I'm ideally suited for and indeed one of the most beautiful. And I say goodbye to the role with no real regrets. I do wish we'd had a longer run than four performances, but such is the way of community theater and especially a play like Three Sisters, a three hour long turn of the century semi-melodrama (which is to say a play on the melodrama but that's another dramaturgical Chekovian can of worms, yes I know $5 words $10 meanings). I don't think I really nailed down the role to the fullness of my capability until the second weekend... but when I nailed it down, I nailed that sucker down. The most fun and the most challenging part of the role is definitely the big dramatic death scene, where Tuzenbach comes face to face with his great existential quandary, Irina's inability to love him and subsequently his inability so save her/bring her meaning/find happiness with her. The fact of the scene being he's loved her to bits the entire play, and throughout as he's watched her suffering and remorse escalate fantasized about taking her away to some mystical shangri-la of work and eternal happiness... but in the end he can't give that to her, and she can't give him what he needs which is her true affection, so he fights a duel and dies.

During the process, my friend and cast mate Ron referenced a conversation he had with a Russian coworker who said that for the Russians, (this is my summary/interpretation) Chekhov is sort of like dramatic comedia de'll arte, and for a Russian audience characters like the drunken doctor or the nobody who thinks he is or could have been an intellectual savior of Russia (ex; Konstantin, Vanya, Andrei, etc) are recognizable archetypes. I think in the case of Tuzenbach, he's a reflection of a popular literary idea that I've blogged about it, that of the romantic/intellectual hero-poet, the classic example being Werther and that's why he's German because it's an idea of Germanic origin, etc I've talked about this. I've further though that Solyony, Tuzenbach's counterpart in the army and his rival for Irina's affection who goes on to kill him, is sort of like his Russian doppleganger. In Solyony's case, he's decidedly anti intellectual and violent, perhaps even a sociopath and identifies himself with the Russian author Lermontov who wrote novels about romantic heroes sleeping with lots of women and fighting duels (credit to Scott, who played him, for that background). So in that sense, they kind of mirror one another, two sides of the same coin which explains why Tuzenbach is so inexplicably drawn to him and why Solyony constantly torments him except when their alone, when they get along pretty well, blah blah contents of the play.

Anyway, this is a long build up to how it is that Tuzenbach embodies some of Solyony's madness at the end of the play, leading him to (in our version, anyway) lash out at Irina before going off to die in a duel in a final act of desperation, and as a way out of a life that he simply can't continue living while maintaining his romantic hero factor (because one of the ways romantic heroes die is in duels).

One of the things the director and I struggled with in our collaborations was this whole where Tuzenbach goes off about trees and shit, and their permanence against our mortality and it's like what? You're about to go off and die and this is what you give the love of your life before you do? Initially, we tried it where this passage is a moment of introspection for Tuzenbach where he collects himself after going off on her, and I think that's part of it. But after reblocking it where Irina was available during this speech for Tuzenbach to connect with her and during the second to last performance where I was the mostly deeply connected I would be to my scene partner and the given circumstances... I felt like I figured it out. It's his way of forgiving her, and his plea for forgiveness for what he's about to do, that in the end the trees are the way they are and will continue to be so and that we don't control the way we feel or how the universe affects us. It's not her fault that she couldn't love him, and it's not his that he has to do what he's about to do, and then even when he's gone some part of him will continue in the world and in her and it's also tied it into (I think) romantic ideas and values about the natural world and our connection to it as human beings. And that's what he's leaving her with before he dies. And in the second to last performance, I really felt like I did that, and that's the moment I blogged about where I saw a real tear go down her face and I thought to my self "yes, this acting" and I found the full truth of the moment, of two lovers saying goodbye for the last time.

If I have those moments, I tend I find to have them once per production (in the case of the two productions where I've had them, small sample size). My scene partner and I found it in the second or third to last performance of Swimming in the Shallows. I think I blogged about this at the time, but it was a particularly unresponsive audience in that tiny theater so when I came to my big romantic scene with The Shark, instead of playing to them for laughs like I usually might I just focused on The Shark and tuned them out completely, and felt the romance and chemistry of those moments, and then in the moment of our big dramatic kiss it felt... real in a way that it hadn't prior. And didn't in the remaining performances. The same being true of Three Sisters, not that Saturday's show was worse than Friday's just different. And that's the lesson I'm still learning as a stage actor, even when you find what is in a way the perfection of a moment like that, it is the perfection of that moment and every subsequent moment is inherently different, ya dig? So it's a fools errand to try to replicate that perfection, because it's impossible, you have to find the truth of THIS moment and you have to refind it every time you go on stage. And that's the truth and the challenge and the beauty of acting on stage, you have to try every time and you get to try again.

My hope is that I'll get to try again someday with Tuzenbach, but if I don't, then this was a production I can be satisfied with and moving forward harbor no regrets, because I lived a dream role and embodied it to the fullness of my ability at that time and made it something beautiful. The end.

Goodbye Three Sisters, no not goodbye but farewell for we shall not meet again. Or if we do, who will we be then? (Quote from the play, sort of). Someone else entirely, and the moments will be all the same... but different in every way.