The method, p.7
The Method, page 7
Chekhov, perhaps understandably, declined. Nemirovich, ever the good producer, put their friendship on the line. “You will wound me,” Nemirovich wrote, if he couldn’t have the play. Perhaps instead he could visit Chekhov and make his case? Chekhov, missing his friend, traded the play for a visit. “Please do come! Come, there’s a good fellow … just for the pleasure of seeing and talking to you I am ready to give you all my plays.”
With only a month to go before rehearsals were set to start in Pushkino, Nemirovich had pried the rights out of his reluctant friend’s hands. Now he faced a new challenge: Stanislavski, who found the play confusing. “It seemed that it was not scenic,” the director wrote in My Life in Art, “that it was monotonous and boresome.” When Nemirovich talked about the play, it made sense. But the second he left the room, a fog descended again on Stanislavski. Nemirovich took the drastic step of spending two full days at Lyubimovka taking his collaborator through the script line by line. Thus prepared, Stanislavski left to work on his score, and Nemirovich took over the day-to-day operations at Pushkino.
Sitting in a tower on his brother’s estate of Kharkov, Stanislavski stared into the endless barley sea of the Russian steppe, imagining ways to stage the lakeside story of crushed dreams and frustrated desires that lay before him on his desk. His Tsar Fyodor score was incomplete when he began rehearsals, but The Seagull score had to explain, in painstaking detail, “how, where, and in what way one was to understand the role and the hints of the author … how to act and move, and how to change position,” so that Nemirovich and Sanin could stage the play in his absence, preparing it for him to take back over in mid-September.
As Stanislavski would later write in My Life in Art, he viewed The Seagull as a journey between Nina’s two recitations of Treplev’s play, one that echoed his own life. In the first, the young, naïve girl, like Stanislavski in his boyhood, is imitating the outward appearance of emotions. Her World Grief is a copy of a copy. Having lived a life without suffering, she is incapable of truly mourning the “men and lions, partridges and eagles, spiders, geese and antlered stags” that have, along with all other life on earth, perished. By the end of the play, having wrecked her life, broken Treplev’s heart, and suffered at the hands of Trigorin, who “quite idly … destroys her,” she can finally access real grief. She can finally act with true, authentic emotion because she has the necessary life experience. What she can’t do is fix Treplev’s broken soul; once she rejects him finally, there’s little left for him but death.
But all this personal meaning was visible to Stanislavski only in hindsight. At his brother’s estate, he relied on intuition, unsure what to make of the resulting score. He could not yet articulate the mysterious qualities necessary to make Chekhov’s plays work, but he could summon them into being with his revolutionary mise-en-scène. He might not have understood the play, but he was “bound to it innerly.”
The score he prepared is a thing of precise beauty, a watch with innumerable parts, each moving in perfect synchronization. It’s filled with elaborate diagrams of staging and, when these prove inadequate, line drawings of the desired stage picture from the audience’s perspective. Stanislavski determined the exact day in August in which Act I must take place by the play’s description of the light of the moon. The length of pauses is worked out to the second. He paid particular attention to sound, writing descriptions of offstage songs, insects, birds, and frogs, all the better to “help the audience to get a feel of the sad, monotonous life of the characters.” One of his boldest staging ideas came right at the beginning: Instead of angling the makeshift stage on which Treplev’s play takes place, he faced it directly out to the audience. The other characters sat on benches facing upstage. By ignoring the audience to such a degree that the actors sat with their backs facing the auditorium, Stanislavski pushed the idea of the “fourth wall,” the invisible barrier that exists between audience and spectator in a realistic work, about as far as it could go.
A painted study of the set for Act I of The Seagull by Viktor Simov.
When he completed the first three acts, he sent them to Nemirovich along with a letter worrying that the score might be “quite unusable.” Nemirovich responded that much of it was filled with “things I would never have thought of. Bold and interesting things which give life to the play”; yet some of Stanislavski’s ideas were too bold, too unsubtle for a play “written in a delicate pencil and demand[ing] in my view great care in staging.” In particular, Nemirovich revised anything he felt might move the audience to “unnecessary laughter.”
Chekhov attended rehearsals in Moscow on September 9 and 11. He expressed grave reservations about the use of such elaborate means as frogs croaking offstage to realize the world of his play. The stage was art, not real life, he argued, and he was wary of bringing the superfluous to it. According to Olga Knipper, Meyerhold’s classmate who played Masha in The Seagull, the actors found Chekhov adorable and incomprehensible in equal measure. He had a complete “inability to teach” or “demonstrate.” When they asked him for notes, “his answers were rather unexpected, somehow tangential … we didn’t know whether to take his remarks seriously or as a joke.” Chekhov warmed to the production after the second rehearsal, and he particularly warmed to Knipper after seeing her in Tsar Fyodor as the tsar’s wife, Irina. In a letter to a friend, Chekhov called her work “magnificent … it was so splendid that it brought a lump to your throat.”
•
Stanislavski returned to rehearsals as the company prepared to take over the Hermitage, the second-choice theater that would house their first season. On the way there, he “could not control a nervous shiver of excitement … I am going to my theater, I have a theater, a stage, dressing rooms, actors …” But when he entered the Hermitage, he discovered that what he actually had was a moth-eaten garbage dump, falling into decay and stinking of beer. Over the summer, the Hermitage’s yard had played host to some kind of circus that moved inside the theater during inclement weather. What decor wasn’t in disrepair was tawdry, aimed at ersatz luxury instead of real comfort. Decaying posters adorned the walls. The less said about the food in the lobby’s buffet, the better.
So the company fixed up the place. They painted the walls, reupholstered the chairs, and installed a state-of-the-art lighting system. They carpeted whatever they could to improve the acoustics. Every time they fixed one thing, something else would break. Once, while hanging a shelf in his dressing room, Stanislavski knocked out a brick. The resulting hole, never fixed, let in air from the street outside. As the weather turned cold, Stanislavski found himself having to chip his frozen costume from the wall in order to wear it.
In the midst of the whirlwind, Nemirovich reminded him that their company still needed a name. They had tossed many around—the Allcomers? the Literary?—and even jokingly thought of calling it “the First and Last Theatre,” or, in darker moments, “In Memoriam.” Nemirovich suggested they combine their two goals—a people’s theater dedicated to art—and call it the Moscow Open Art Theatre. Stanislavski, only half paying attention, agreed.
In the weeks leading up to the play’s opening, the negative press became increasingly gleeful. One critic even published a satirical pamphlet that included a poem mocking Stanislavski, making reference to The Gentleman, a popular comedy about a foolish merchant:
The laws of art are to me nothing
I’ve devised my own to take their place,
Tradition’s tireless foe am I,
The actor’s scourge, the stage’s ruin—
I have no curbs, nothing to restrain me
I am in a full sense a “gentleman.”
It likely didn’t help matters that the Moscow Open Art Theatre had made their rivalry with the Maly explicit by setting their opening night on October 14, which also marked the Maly’s seventy-fourth anniversary. As the night approached, Stanislavski begged Nemirovich to agree to a delay. The censors approved Tsar Fyodor in August, but they had demanded changes that required shifts in the play’s casting. If only he had a few more days—a week?—he knew he could get it right.
Nemirovich said no. He’d seen the dress rehearsals. It was time.
On opening night, Stanislavski felt sick with fear. If the show failed, it would prove the naysayers right. His war on Maly-style hokum would be over before it began. He felt helpless, so he did what helpless directors always do: He gave an inspirational speech. As the audience drifted in, he gathered the actors onstage behind the curtain and, in an effort to fill them with the confidence he lacked, lied to them about the play’s inevitable success. The orchestra struck up the overture, interrupting his exhortations. Frantic, unable to be heard, Stanislavski began to jump up and down, dancing his enthusiasm at the actors, shouting scraps of encouragement. One of the cast members finally saved him from himself. “Konstantin Sergeievich,” he said, “leave the stage! At once! Don’t annoy the actors!” Stanislavski stormed off to his dressing room and locked the door, sulking until his first entrance.
But Nemirovich was right. Tsar Fyodor was ready. The audience was even readier; some of these spectators had waited thirty years to see this banned masterpiece staged. Aleksandr Vishnyevski, one of the actors and a classmate of Chekhov’s, would later say it was clear by the play’s third scene that they had “really said something new.” Tsar Fyodor was a massive hit. In its first season, the show bowed fifty-seven times and was seen by thousands. Ivan Moskvin, who played the tsar, became famous overnight, a one-man proof of concept for Stanislavski and Nemirovich’s ideas about naturalistic acting. One critic said he gave “without exaggeration an entire epoch in the history of the Russian actor’s art.” Stanislavski’s staging and Simov’s sets—particularly the branch-framed set for Shuisky’s garden—won wide acclaim. A reviewer for Moskovskiye vedomosti (Moscow News) wrote that Stanislavski possessed “some kind of inexhaustible inventiveness to which is added undoubted artistic taste.” Had Stanislavski and Nemirovich known it, they would have found it additionally gratifying that the head of the Moscow office of the Imperial Theatres hated the show. “They acted badly,” he confided to his diary, “the settings are pretentious, and the general impression is of an amateur production by an amateur Russian Meiningen troupe.”
The extremity with which Stanislavski approached verisimilitude in sets and costumes did come in for some ridicule. Some of the garments were from the wrong century. And, as Nemirovich would later joke, Stanislavski’s taste ran toward exaggeration. The boyars had to wear not only long-sleeved shirts, but the longest-sleeved shirts. Still, the Moscow Open Art Theatre had triumphed during the first leg of its marathon.
Soon the company would stumble again and again.
The troubles began with Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell, which received an indifferent reception from audiences and critics. Next came The Merchant of Venice. Darski’s performance as Shylock—the one Stanislavski had forced on the young tragedian—was, the critics said, a disaster, his “Jewish accent” doubly controversial. To conservatives it was, as Nemirovich would later write, “a desecration of the deep conception of that tragedy.” Meanwhile, liberals found the accent and characterization anti-Semitic at a time when pogroms regularly raged through the country. Stanislavski had always been slated to take over the role, but the press portrayed his impending assumption of the part as a vote of no confidence in Darski. It didn’t matter. Stanislavski never took the stage as Shylock; he and Nemirovich pulled the show from their repertory instead.
Next they ran into trouble with the censors. In tsarist Russia, censorship was imposed by multiple overlapping regimes. One set of civil authorities covered what could be read, another what could be performed. The church also had a say, banning works it found sacrilegious. Hauptmann’s The Assumption of Hannele had long been approved for publication but not performance because of a scene in which Christ, literally represented onstage, appears in a dream. Nemirovich came up with a clever solution, commissioning a new translation that cut the dream sequences. The civil authorities signed off, but the new Metropolitan of Moscow decided at the last minute to ban it. Nemirovich appealed to the Metropolitan personally, only to learn that he had based his decision on the original translation. The Metropolitan refused to accept that he had made a mistake. He was in fact deeply insulted when Nemirovich brought up this supposed “other translation.” There was nothing they could do. Even Moscow’s Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who had been instrumental in freeing Tsar Fyodor from the shackles of the censors, refused to pick a fight with a newly appointed bishop. A week away from its premiere, with its budget already spent, Nemirovich and Stanislavski canceled Hannele.
Other plays of the season failed to find their audience. It was as if the beer smell at the Hermitage had been gradually replaced by the stench of failure. When founding an “art theater,” prestige is as much a currency as actual cash, and they had spent all they had of both. Box office receipts dwindled, and their next premiere loomed. The Seagull would fly or it would crash, taking the Moscow Open Art Theatre with it.
Again, Stanislavski begged Nemirovich to postpone the opening. This time, however, the request was not his own. Chekhov’s sister Marya, having watched rehearsals on his behalf while his consumption kept him away from the Moscow winter, did not think The Seagull was ready. The play’s original high-profile failure had disastrously affected her brother’s health; now, she feared, a second flop would kill him. But Nemirovich again refused.
According to My Life in Art, on opening night, the Moscow Open Art Theatre had six hundred rubles to its name. It was about to premiere a play disavowed by its own author, a play that confounded one of its directors and stars. Its cast doped themselves with valerian drops to calm their nerves and trod the boards before the show as if the stage were “the floor of the gallows and we actors the executioners.” They were going to bomb, and kill one of Russia’s greatest living writers in the process.
At the end of The Seagull’s first act, Masha confesses to Dorn that she loves Konstantin Treplev. Dorn sits next to her on a garden seat, and she puts her head on his chest. “You’re all so oversensitive!” Dorn says to his daughter, who does not know she is his daughter. “So oversensitive. And so much love, around … Oh, the spells woven by this lake!” Here, in Stanislavski’s director’s score, he writes that Masha begins sobbing, kneels, and lays her head in Dorn’s lap. Dorn caresses her hair during a pause of fifteen seconds. Offstage, “the frenzied waltz grows louder, sounds of a tolling of a church bell, a peasant’s song, of frogs, of a corncrake, the knocking of the night-watchmen and all sorts of other nocturnal sound effects.”
Dorn then says, gently, “But what can I do, my dear child? What can I do?” And on this moment of distended futility, the curtain closes.
The company gathered behind the curtain, preparing to bow, as actors generally did after each act in Russia at the time. They were greeted not with applause but with silence. Olga Knipper swooned, unable to bear yet another disaster. The actors looked at one another—should they even bother to go onstage?
Then the applause began, exploding like a sudden summer storm. The Hermitage may have been half full, but the roar of the audience was deafening. After Act I, the company bowed six times. By the end of the second act, the actors were weeping. By the end of the third, the audience began chanting Author! Author! Author!
Nemirovich took the stage and quieted them. The author wasn’t there, he explained. He was in the south, for his health. Someone in the audience shouted back Send him a telegram!
So he did.
To Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Yalta
We have just finished performance of Sea Gull. A colossal success. From the first act the play so possessed everyone that there followed a series of triumphs. Endless curtain calls … We are mad with happiness. We all affectionately embrace you. Will write in detail.
There were more failures to come that year. Stanislavski’s staging of Hedda Gabler was a hit with audiences but critically reviled. The plan to present low-cost matinees for tradesmen ran aground thanks to the existence of a fourth censorship regime governing performances for workers. This, along with the need to raise ticket prices, led the theater to drop “Open” from its name, becoming, at long last, the Moscow Art Theatre.
But Tsar Fyodor and The Seagull established the Moscow Art Theatre’s reputation and secured its finances and legacy. The productions also changed the lives of all involved. Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko now had their theater, and their revolution. Anton Chekhov was now a leading playwright. The amateurs were now professionals. Many of them were stars, and the rest had a secure career ahead of them acting in the most exciting and important new theater in the nation. Olga Knipper, the actor who had so impressed Chekhov when he visited, became his close friend, and then his lover, and then his wife.
Not everything about The Seagull succeeded. Roksanova, who played Nina, failed to convince, as did Stanislavski’s Trigorin. It’s hard to imagine how Stanislavski could have delivered a good performance while co-directing seventeen productions, opening a new theater, renovating a building, and continuing to run his family’s factories, particularly since he still was not sure what crafting a performance even meant. He could do voluminous, at times absurd, amounts of research. He could create a scenic environment that lit the spark of inspiration. But if that inspiration did not come, all he had was style.
In order to transcend style, Stanislavski would have to pierce the exterior of a performance, creating a process that re-created inspiration’s effects deliberately. Inspiration was lightning, igniting fires but striking at random. Stanislavski would need, in effect, to invent fire itself. It would take him nearly a decade to figure out how to do it.
