Khvostik
May 15, 2019
Toronto is by no means a world theatre capital, but in the summer the city hosts two festivals of “independent” theatres – “Fringe” and “SummerWorks” (there is also an international festival “Luminato”).
Toronto is by no means the world's theatre capital, but in the summer the city hosts two festivals of "independent" theatres - " Fringe " and " SummerWorks " ( there is also an international festival " Luminato " ). Plus, in the suburbs there are two large summer festivals - Stratford and Shaw - which bring together the best theatre forces of Canada. But that is on the "Canadian street". On the "Russian" street, until recently, it was quiet, only touring actors from Russia made raids and "sheared the provinces", showing - par excellence - outright hackwork.
In 2019, the silence was broken, because in April, two Russian theatre festivals took place in Toronto one after the other, with companies from Canada and America participating. The level fluctuated from hopeless amateurism to real professionalism. So what was presented varied in quality - from disgrace ( when, as a spectator, I felt indignation multiplied by disgust ) to delight ( to the point of tears of admiration - thank you, Chicago ! ).
I will not analyze individual performances, but I will allow myself to share a few spectator thoughts about theater and amateur performances, inspired by the festival impressions.
Theatre, as an art, comes down to the spectator achieving the maximum degree of empathy with the hero. If the spectator does not feel himself in the same situation as the hero, then the performance is a failure. No matter how many flowers relatives and friends bring to the stage. This is a strict criterion. According to it, the absolute majority of theatrical performances fail. But this is exactly what we should strive for, the ideal that should be before the eyes of all those creating the performance.
In order for the viewer to be able to merge with the hero, the actor, as a mediator, must disappear. The acting training systems of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Mikhail Chekhov teach actors in different ways to “become” heroes, to “get into the skin” of characters. These are not the only ways – although they are the most popular ( in addition to the versions mentioned, there is also Brecht’s approach and the “practical aesthetics” promoted by David Mamet ) – most likely, humanity is capable of finding many roads to the said goal. And, more importantly, understanding the tasks of acting training leads us to the need to rethink the attitude of artists – especially amateurs – to themselves and the audience to them. In an almost literal sense, acting should become a religious practice, requiring oblivion of oneself as an individual.
Apparently, for the vast majority of those reading Russian, Christianity is the most familiar religion. Not because of the popularity of the Bible, but because Christian motives were present in a significant percentage of Russian writers and poets considered classics. In any case, Buddhist, Islamic, Confucian, Jewish, Hindu, Shinto and pagan motives are encountered much less frequently.
Nevertheless, practically all religious systems – not only Christianity – are united by a clear division of roles: God is great, man is small. And the most important thing that is required of a believer is to remember his own smallness and not to imagine himself as greater, not to aim at proportionality with God. Self-abasement is the valor of a believer, his highest merit is to renounce himself in order to merge with God as an insignificant particle.
Christian saints and martyrs, and monks and ascetics, demonstrate precisely this, as do ascetics and hermits in Hinduism, and monks in Buddhism, etc. Religion may cite named examples of desirable behavior, but none of those cited as examples made sacrifices for themselves or for the glory of their own name, but “for the glory of God.”
In essence, the actor is required to give up his ego, his personality. If the actor stops being Vasya Pupkin and becomes Hamlet for a few hours, the audience can actually empathize. At the same time, living with the emotions and thoughts of Hamlet, the audience becomes better, higher, purer ( at least that's how it seems, some viewers want to believe it ), but it is impossible to merge with the emotions of the one for whose work they paid, having bought a ticket, and at the same time become better. In any case, the absolute majority does not succeed.
It is worth emphasizing that the actor should not just transform into a character, he should convince the audience that he is a hero, i.e. have slightly more “convex”, brighter features and characteristics than a real person. A type differs from a prototype in that it always carries a drop of hyperbole. Otherwise, you will not recognize it. Or it will take more time to recognize it than the actor has on stage. But you also cannot “go too far” - show the audience a caricature. The talent of an actor is to accurately - intuitively or with the help of a director, it does not matter - find that minimum “concentration” of hyperbole that will be enough for the majority of the audience.
The last observation leads us to another conclusion – it is impossible to learn to act on stage ( as well as to become more “capable”, i.e. a serious, thoughtful spectator ), participating in the production of weak plays ( well, or – for the spectator – watching vulgarity from the audience ), where there are no bright characters, recognizable personages. If the playwright is not at the level of Shakespeare or Chekhov, i.e. worse than them not 10, but 1000 times, then both the troupe and the spectators should be extremely careful with such a project – most likely, even in the best case scenario – with maximum empathy, – the spectators will not be able to “lift their souls”, “ennoble themselves”, i.e. the actors’ efforts will not be justified.
How do you know which playwright is 1000 times worse than Shakespeare, and which is only 100? It is enough to check in libraries - either real or online ( but not those where authors can independently place their texts ): it is unlikely that the plays section will contain books by more than a hundred authors. In the well-known Moshkov Library in the section "Modern Drama" - 53 foreign authors and 41 Russian. Let's assume that not all agree to their works being in the public domain, which will deprive them of possible royalties for publications. But I would not increase the number - several dozen is more than enough. Why? In particular, since the list of 53 foreign playwrights in the same library practically did not miss any of the most famous authors of our time ( let's leave aside the annual Pulitzer Prize awards and all their analogues in different countries, let's limit ourselves to recognized talents ), i.e. and 50 should be enough for the Russian list ( a significant number of Russian playwrights represented in the Moshkov Library do not have a page in the Russian Wikipedia, i.e. most likely this is “samizdat” of the authors, and not the selection of an independent editor or librarian ).
Of course, a Wikipedia article and the presence of books in libraries are no guarantee that the work is talented and/or that it will be staged well, but a completely disastrous version of a famous play is much less likely - because the troupe will be ashamed! Well, or their friends will point out significant shortcomings during a run-through/"preview"/dress rehearsal, like, but there such-and-such a director presented it differently, such-and-such an actor was more convincing in the role, etc., etc. - than when staging an unknown person by an unknown person.
Why do amateur theatres all over the world stage God knows what kind of plays? Because they do not want or are not able to understand the ideal and hope to hide their mediocrity by showing a play where the helplessness of the troupe - as they would like to believe - will be less noticeable. At least because there will be no need to compare the performance of a bad actor with the performance of a good one, because a good actor, most likely, will not want to participate in a bad, weak play ( and if he agrees, then the failure will be forgotten after participating in successful productions ).
Sometimes the author defines a not particularly funny play as a “tragicomedy”, although it is just a melodrama with some jokes thrown in. A true tragicomedy is the pinnacle of the comedy genre, forcing the viewer to experience almost the entire spectrum of emotions – from joy to sadness. Against the backdrop of grief, laughter is experienced more acutely, and after laughter, the thought of death, of human mortality – mainly the experiencer’s own mortality – is much more piercing. Tragicomedy demands the maximum from the playwright, the actors, and the director. But it can repay a hundredfold when the emotions, many times amplified in the audience, return to the stage with the power of a tsunami during the ovation!
I would venture to suggest that few modern playwrights understand that drama requires a much more brilliant talent than prose ( or even poetry ). A very average prose writer can hold attention with the immediacy/"relevance" of the theme, the dynamism of the plot development with completely stereotypical characters. The cardboard two-dimensionality of the characters will not be as striking as when transferred to the stage, where the schematic nature of the images literally screams at the audience.
Another misconception is that comedy is easy to write. Comedy requires much more depth than tragedy. By throwing a few dirty jokes into the dialogue, you can elicit the expected reaction from the audience. But the goal of comedy in the theater – and not in stand-up comedy clubs! – is to communicate complex issues in a subtle way, to imperceptibly reveal conflicts that were not noticed before. And all this should be covered with a veil of light satire or hidden behind a screen of crude humor.
The problem for amateur theatres is the excessive friendliness of the audience, which consists in a significant percentage of friends and relatives. Standards are blurred many times by friendly affection and family feelings. So the audience either gets touched ( friends and relatives ), or spits ( everyone else ). And in this situation, those who spits are right, but amateurs do not get it, like any unpleasant truth.
Amateur theatre faces several problems created by its participants. The lack of people with skills and talents leads to the doors being thrown open to people with off-the-scale unfulfilled ambitions. Everyone wants to be in the front row, to get if not the main, then an “essential” role, i.e. to flicker on stage for a long time. No one wants to remain “behind the scenes”. So actors have to combine technical roles – sound engineer, stagehands, assistant director, etc. The worst thing is that in reality, stagehands are allowed to become actors. And the performance collapses.
However, even greater damage is done to the production when the director begins to combine - either by staging his own play, or not only directing, but also acting. In both cases, the opportunity to evaluate what is being created without bias ( or at least without too obvious bias ) evaporates completely.
No, in this case directors are not judged more severely than representatives of other professions. In the same way, programmers cannot scrupulously check the programs they have written, so they hire testers. Workers in production need quality control from their bosses or the "quality department". The police have an internal investigation department that reviews complaints about the police, because otherwise there is chaos, when some bandits in uniform cover for other bandits in uniform ( this happens not only on one seventh of the land, but everywhere where the situation leaves the authorities without control ).
Of course, there is nothing absolute and applicable to all cases. Some directors can act in plays and films that they themselves produce, or be playwrights/scriptwriters and directors at the same time. This is rare not so much because of the need to have different talents, but mainly because of the need to pay attention to fundamentally different things, to look at them from different angles at the same time. Too much intellectual and volitional resources are required for this. So something of quality comes out of such Herculean efforts rarely.
In the same way, a play by an unknown playwright – one who has no Wikipedia page or books in famous libraries – can be a masterpiece and amaze with the depth of thought and beauty of style. But geniuses are born rarely, many orders of magnitude less often than ambitious graphomaniacs. Therefore, with a very high degree of probability, an author unknown to you, dear reader, means a terrible play that even a good director would not save.
When stage workers who become performers in amateur theatres were mentioned above, the VPS did not lead to the conclusion that all auxiliary positions are unnecessary. Naturally, lighting, scenery, sound, costumes and many other details are important in a theatrical performance ( even to comfortable and non-creaky chairs in the auditorium, although this is beyond the capabilities of the troupe ). And almost each of the above-mentioned points turns into a financial burden for amateur groups. However, when the trinity of the playwright's concept, director's interpretation and actor's embodiment arises ( and only in this case the usually mentioned unity of place, time and action has value ), the audience stops paying attention to secondary details like scenery and costumes. So we should not limit ourselves to the Aristotelian approach - after all, two and a half millennia separate us - but try to develop it.
In a play, as in a game of chess, one can distinguish three parts, differing in their tasks. In the beginning – and the sooner the better! – the troupe must “catch” the viewer, hook him. Here, more depends on the playwright. The middle of the play is an opportunity for the director to find his intonation, to demonstrate unconventional thinking, and for the performers to reveal their talent and emotionally rock the viewers. Deep-thinking maxims, as well as truly deep, and therefore hidden, not lying on the surface, thoughts will reach the audience much better in this part. A bright ending cannot save a failed play, but it can make a good play excellent, memorable. The ending can be open, when the audience has not received all the answers - they have almost been led to something ( without this there will be no catharsis ), but if the audience thinks ( this is one of the important characteristics of a good performance, if they do not think, then all the flowers, tears and applause are worthless! ), then they will understand that there is a chance for a slightly different version of the subsequent events, or a different interpretation of the previous ones. The ending can be clear and definite. Since in this case there is no need to think, it is desirable to catch the audience with a beautiful plot twist somewhere in the second half of the performance - so that everyone expects X, but gets either YGREK or anti-X. Without this, it will be extremely difficult to maintain emotional attention, since it will be harder to swing from positive to negative emotions and back.
Now about the fantastically bright side of the festival. Chicago theater “ By The Way ” showed the play “ Aydont Understend ” based on the play by Viktor Shenderovich, directed by Sergey Kokovkin.
A chamber play, with only two characters – an old man from the former Soviet Union living on welfare in Brighton Beach and a middle-aged woman brought to America as a child. These are not just two generations, they are also two different types – an e- migrant and an immigrant. For the first, it was more important to leave somewhere, for the second – to arrive in a certain place. The emigrant continues to hold on to the long-gone Soviet Union, the immigrant tries to understand America, to put down roots in it. The heroine married an American, she has an Anglo-Saxon surname, she has almost forgotten the Russian language, but she LIVES in this country, here and today. The hero does not live, he REMEMBERS THE LIFE he had, he is “there and yesterday”. She can be happy today, he cannot. He compensates for the lack of joy with fading memories of how happy he once was.
Eternally dissatisfied, 100% sure of his own rightness, living in the last century, almost an anecdotal character is masterfully played by Vyacheslav Kaganovich. The type is instantly recognizable, from the first seconds, but at the same time it is not schematic, not two-dimensional, but alive, i.e. changing, developing with each mise-en-scène. And the audience can observe this gradual metamorphosis - from a gray and vulgar "chrysalis" a "butterfly" with bright wings gradually begins to appear, it moves differently, reacts differently, it evokes different reactions in us. And the audience can live through this transformation together with the hero.
Vyacheslav Kaganovich's partner on stage, Marina Karmanova, shows us an equally stunning transformation: from an American ashamed of her own immigrant origins, who despised those from the USSR stuck in the ghetto, she comes to understand that although life "there" was fundamentally different from American life, there was something important in that life for today. She begins to see not only an interesting personality in the inhabitant of Brighton Beach, but also reveals the previously incomprehensible motives of her parents' behavior. A person who grew up in America cannot fully comprehend the absurdity of many aspects of Soviet life ( just as today's youth cannot understand it ). But the more details a person learns, the more complete and accurate the resulting picture becomes. And this gradual enlightenment in the subtlest nuances is demonstrated on stage by Marina Karmanova.
Both performers completely dissolve in their characters, so while the performance is going on the audience can experience complex relationships – sometimes friendly, sometimes conflictual, sometimes playful, sometimes familial – of people who have become truly alive. Marina Karmanova and Vyacheslav Kaganovich will disappear, so that Wulf Goldiner and Mrs. Watson, née Zhenya Ravinskaya, who once lived in the same city in the former Soviet Union and now live completely different lives in the same “Big Apple,” will appear.
In the play “ Aydont understen ” there is a heart-wrenching contrast in the transition from light jokes to the theme of death, and bright, developing and revealing characters before the eyes of the audience, and a beautiful plot twist, when instead of the obvious, expected “answer” the viewer receives a different version, but one that fully corresponds to the internal logic of the development of characters.
This performance, I would venture to suggest, is very close to the theatrical ideal, when a trinity of the playwright’s concept, the director’s interpretation and the actor’s embodiment arises (and only in this case does the “unity of place, time and action”, usually mentioned by theatre teachers and critics, have value ).
As the insightful and intelligent readers who have made it through this long text have guessed, there were plenty of low-quality, worthless pieces of work at the two April Russian theatre festivals in Toronto. Nevertheless, for the sake of a few good and one excellent performance, even the hackwork can be forgiven.
I would really like these festivals not to die and at least once a year to provide an opportunity to come into contact with real, sincere Russian theatre. Who knows, maybe the Russian theatre school will give the world something no less valuable after Stanislavsky and Chekhov!
Posted on May 15, 2019 by khvostik