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.

Another Epiphany!

Increasingly I suspect that these blog posts about Three Sisters and my character work on Tuzenbach are only interesting to me... but who knows! Maybe not! Someone must read them, even if it's just my Mom. (hi Mom!)

Well, anyway tonight was our first Three Sisters rehearsal in like two weeks. I can't think of the last time I had that much of a gap between rehearsals of a play, unless it was like a read through. In the meantime, I've been off in the land of improv and auditions and seeing shows and stuff, you know? In fact, in the time since we last rehearsed, I rehearsed and shot a presentation of another show, joined the cast of another, had three auditions, and went to four theatrical performances.

So tonight, I was dropped back into the world of Chekhov and those three crazy sisters, amIright? I'm still figuring out how aware Tuzenbach is of how creepy his obsession with Irina is because it's pretty... yeah, I want to say delusional. We talked in rehearsal in the contrast between Tuzenbach and Solyony, both of whom are in love with Irina. In his mind, Solyony has cast himself as the romantic lead in his own story and he lashes out at people who don't share or contradict that viewpoint, whereas Tuzenbach on an almost metaphysical level (since Chekhov has written him this way) has been unwittingly cast as the TRAGIC lead in a romantic love story, one seemingly modeled on... wait for it, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Oh, wait wait wait! That's why he's German... he's an echo of Goethe's Werther! Arguably the original and quintessential tragic romantic hero, whom when he is unable to possess the affections of his beloved, kills himself. Just like Tuzenbach. Sad, I know.

I think the literary universe of Chekhov is very interesting. The plays are full of these allusions. I think my case for Tuzenbach as Werther is supported by Chebyutkin who references a group of intellectuals discussing him. Likewise, Ron (aka Vershinin aka Astrov) and I were discussing in Uncle Vanya Telegin's line "A plot worthy of Tolstoy" and it's ability to always get a laugh. Then in the Seagull there's this whole thing of Konstantin being compared to Hamlet, etc. Clearly the guy was very well read, as were the characters in his plays. Tuzenbach's counterpart Solyony is always comparing himself to Lermontov, who Scott (who's playing Solyony) told me wrote this one sort of adventure novel about this guy who fights duels and sleeps around, which is essentially what Lermontov was doing at the time and Solyony wishes he were doing.

Well, I could keep going, but I won't. In other news, the next few days will be busy. Tomorrow night I have a call back for Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead at Apollinaire, Tuesday is the first rehearsal for that show I joined up with, then my acting class with Carolyn Pickman then my first jam session with some musicians I found online. Then for the rest of the week... who even knows! I'll try and blog about it after it happens.

Small Epiphanies

Reading my Mamet Three Sisters on my apartment buildings lovely, shady patio, I put something together. As you might have read previously, I've been trying to put the play into my own perspective as an actor and someone who's just really into Chekhov. So for example, I've been trying to answer the question of Tuzenbach's germanicness (his name in the play is understood to be uber german) from both the perspective of an actor, and a wannabe dramaturg. One theory I'd been toying with dramaturgically, maybe Chekhov is intentionally creating an echo to Karl Marx through Tuzenbach's proto socialist diatribes and his german last name. I brought this up in rehearsal, and my director admitted she hadn't thought of it that way, and over the course of the conversation I ultimately dismissed it for myself. Then I was looking at the text, and Tuzenbach's line where he says that although he has a German last name, and his optimism could be ascribed as a German trait, his father was Russian Orthodox and not fluent and German and Tuzenbach was the same way. Then I thought, "oh yeah cause duh, he's descended from the Russian nobility, and as was the case with Tsar Nicholas II, his family married into the German royal line" because that's what they did back then in the European aristocracy. So that answers half of that question! I've now moved on to Tuzenbach's relationship to his Germanicness, and in particular that theme of optimism in his character and how it relates to the play's philosophical ideas. The other night at rehearsal, we looked at a moment where Vershinin, who provides a counter point to Tuzenbach's ideas and character, expresses his belief that over time the sister's influence will be felt and their enlightened presence and way of life will reverberate across future generations, until it is the dominant way of thought and life becomes beautiful. In the process, he kind of one up's Tuzenbach who tries to frame a rejoinder and doesn't really succeed. In the next act, Tuzenbach's philosophy has turned cynicism and we pondered the question, could this be because of Vershinin's influence causing him to attempt a new point of view to regain his status as resident philosopher? Maybe, but now I think it's just life wearing him down. Over the play he continues to realize that life isn't as sunny as he believes it to be in Act 1 as he says to Irina as he confesses his love to her. I wonder if part of his philosphizing, or as Solyony calls it his sophistry, is partly an attempt to woo her with his ideas. He persists in this throughout the play, pursuing her and a life which is more meaningful then his meandering life as an officer in the Russian army. In the fourth act, he's close to realizing it, Irina has finally agreed to marry him, having few other viable options and they are about to go off together to live a romantic life working. But in the end, he realizes she doesn't love him and never will, and instead chooses to go off and die rather then let his optimism wither way. Or has it already left him, now that he's realized his dreams will never truly come true, and death is a better option?

Did I mention how heavy duty this play is? It's pretty serious stuff. But it's really funny too! I mean, that's what I've always loved about Chekhov, how there is so much humor ingrained in his sometimes sad or downright tragic situations and that is especially true in David Mamet's adaptation.

And now I'm off to do Swimming in the Shallows, it's warm and spring like outside, and to echo Tuzenbach's earlier sentiments, life is good.