Dear Friends,
I’m sharing some thoughts on a theater production at La MaMa. I’m going to write every so often about theater and visual art and and, in general, not share it by e-mail since it tends to be New York City-specific. But definitely feel free to visit the section on this sort of stuff at this link.
Best wishes,
Sam
DIMITRY KRYMOV’s The Americans (La MaMa, 2022)
On January 5, 1923, Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre arrived in New York on the R.M.S. Majestic. They had a program of primarily Chekhov plays - performed entirely in Russian - and, the more I understand about theater, the more it strikes me that that run was pretty much the entirety of American theater (and film) history from that day to this. Lee Strasberg saw their repertory around a dozen times, not understanding a word of it. The experience - naturalistic, ensemble acting as per Stanislavski’s system - imprinted itself on his imagination and, as the guiding force of the Group Theatre, he established a sort of cargo cult, devising a series of techniques (‘the Method’) to access the deep emotional states that he had perceived in Stanislavski’s actors. The Group Theatre became the dominant strand of American drama in the period leading from Strasberg and Clifford Odets to Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; and the acting techniques developed out of the rapturous experience of the Stanislavski plays would be disseminated to Marlon Brando and the generation that introduced a more visceral, emotionally-felt style of acting to Hollywood. (Among many other examples, The Godfather is really only a single artistic step away from the R.M.S. Majestic - Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall all studying directly with members of the Group Theatre - and Strasberg himself, in the role of Hyman Roth, given pride of place as capo dei capi.)
Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I’d like to believe that the arrival of Dimitry Krymov, his residency at La MaMa, and the exodus of a cohort of Russian artists fleeing Putinism is a similarly seminal event to the R.M.S. Majestic. To a startling extent, American theater has evolved very little after the departure of Stanislavski’s company. Meanwhile, Europe - and Russia itself - have very much moved on. There was the turn of Meyerhold, the turn of Brecht - but no corresponding shipment of European theatermakers to America. Edward Albee can be understood as a Brecht-derived Theater of the Absurd imported to America, but the premier American theatermakers of the next decades - Kushner, Mamet, Wasserstein, August Wilson, etc - are all solidly in a realist tradition. And, meanwhile, almost completely unbeknownst even to high-brow Americans, a very different theater has taken root in Eastern Europe.
Krymov is - to an annoying extent - a cult object within Russia. His father, Anatoly Efros, was a premier Soviet director, making Krymov theater royalty. Krymov had been a set designer, initially working with his father, distanced himself from theater to be a painter, and then returned to theater when he was in his 50s and promptly introduced a completely different kind of theater - the scenographer’s theater. If Efros had been the acme of a ‘director’s theater,’ less interested in the originality of a play, emphasizing deep psychological work, physicality, and sense of complicité among the actors, Krymov created a ‘scenographer’s theater,’ visually-driven and wrapped around the idea of the ‘obraz’ (the image).
The ‘scenographer’ doesn’t exist in the Anglo-American theater I grew up with - in that theater, the playwright is more or less god, the director the playwright’s all-powerful emissary in the world, the actors the marionettes carrying out the director’s wishes, and the set designer is, along with the costume designer, lighting designer, and ‘props mistress,’ one of several flunkies scurrying around in the background, carrying out the director’s whims - but in Krymov’s scenographer’s theater the hierarchy is very different. The playwright may as well not exist. And the visual elements of the production come together in the ‘scenographer,’ a new figure dedicated to finding visual representations of the inner world of the play, which are then interwoven with the action. The stage itself seems to become a living, breathing entity, with each object expressing itself fully. As has been described to me, “if there’s a chair onstage in the scenographer’s theater, it might be stood on, hid under, might be thrown - but the one thing that won’t happen is for it to be sat on.” In The Americans, for instance, a pair of beers poured (as part of an evocation of Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’) are poured not, of course, as fake alcoholic liquid but as a full cup of foam, which is then promptly hurled onto the stage to slowly evaporate. A canary - in Hemingway’s ‘Canary For One’ - is, again, not a fake stuffed bird but a mass of feathers that fall over the stage when the bird flies away.
The visuality of Krymov’s theater is what’s so exciting about it to Russians - and particularly the precision with which the visual elements of the stage ‘rhyme’ with the deep psychological lives of the characters in various carefully crafted ‘obrazi’ - but, for me, what’s most immediately inspiring is how chill it is, a fulfillment of Brecht’s vision. The sense is of entering into a theatrical universe that’s completely confident within itself. Actors chat amongst themselves as they’re painting or doing the various scenographic work that’s incorporated into the action. The dialogue itself is frequently improvised - in any case, it drifts haphazardly far from the Hemingway and O’Neill texts that serve as an underlying model. (The premise is that you already know Hemingway and O’Neill and the plots are only roughly pointed at while the emotional heart of the text is evoked in some crystallizing image.) And considerable ‘plot work’ is carried out by amiable, scatter-brained narrators who tell you what’s happening but keep getting distracted by their own small jokes. (And - in case you ever make the mistake of forgetting about the fundamental theatricality of the show - a stage manager in the back of the house might shout out to the actors a reminder of what they’re supposed to do; or the action might be broken by a pair of stagehands passing through the theater with an enormous fish to be dropped off at a production of The Old Man and the Sea at a theater next door.)
To me, that chillness points the way to a theater ‘without drama.’ The Anglo-American tradition remains committed to drama, with a play as a propulsive instrument that must be so carefully crafted as to arrive, on schedule, at a cinching crisis - and its plays are, as Annie Baker puts it, invariably performed at “a breakneck speed because we’re terrified of boring audiences that are used to looking at the internet while watching TV while talking on their iPhone.” Chekhov had pointed the way towards quiet, towards boredom - and that strain was never really picked up in American theater (even in the era of the Group Theatre) but was central to “the light continuous movement, the certain quiet fluctuations” of Efros’ theater and is extended further in Krymov. The willingness to forego drama, to accept boredom, is, of course, in line with meditative and spiritual practices - the idea being that presence is underneath boredom, that theater as an activity is intrinsically about presence and, just by flipping a certain switch, by having the actors chat with each other, having the narrators mumble through their lines or say what the play’s climax is going to be, it’s possible to signal to the audience that they can inwardly relax, forget about plot or dramatic tension, and just take in the rapturous experience of the ‘living stage,’ of the presence of the actors themselves.
For me personally - since I happen to be a verbal, as opposed to visual, person - the scenographer’s theater, with its abundant arts & crafts, its papier-mâché, isn’t exactly what I’m drawn to (and actors in it inevitably find themselves in the terrifying experience of having to paint the set with the audience watching or properly fold miniature seagulls). But the underlying chillness of it opens up vast new theatrical dimensions. The play no longer has to be this well-oiled machine in which a forgotten line or missed entrance is a catastrophe; everybody involved seems, fundamentally, to want to be in a theater - actually, the overriding sense is that there is nowhere that could possibly be better - and the play itself no longer needs to conserve all of its energies to point at some single dramatic resolution (in The Americans, the ‘dramatic resolution’ of Desire Under The Elms is played as a big joke) but can find its satisfaction throughout the performance, is free to move across a dizzying range of emotions, from pathos to absurdity. The emphasis on ‘chillness’ would seem to make for lackadaisical theater but there’s a real difference - Krymov’s theater creates an open space in which it’s possible to inhabit a particular scene with intensity or ferocity but without passing some point-of-no-return. The dramatic moment can reach its resolution, the narrators can make their little jokes, the actors can return to being perfectly composed, professional actors; the sense is that the emotion is earned through the gesture itself as opposed to requiring some ridiculous psychological exertion within the rehearsal process as in the Strasberg model.
This sort of effect is most directly realized through a favorite Krymov technique of holding on a gesture. The most memorable moments in The Americans are exactly that - some gesture being held longer than its natural lifespan, to the point where a deeper truth of the gesture starts to reveal itself. This appears in a couple of primo vaudevillian moments, a hungry train passenger asking for a bite of a carrot from an attendant and then lovingly, ravenously chewing her way through the entire carrot, attempting to say something important with her mouth full of carrot, taking all the time in the world as she does it; a surly waiter very slowly unscrewing a cap and pouring out a bottle of water just out of reach of a dehydrated train passenger. And it appears as a way of handling the central dramatic instances - the girl’s “would you please please please shut up” from ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ held forever, turned into physical comedy, into a kind of race around the stage, into a whole aria of all the many different things that she’s feeling at that moment. And, in the sort of ‘open plan’ of Krymov’s theater, the real payoff for that occurs an act later - the same actress (ostensibly playing a different character) catching sight of a group of white hills on the scenographic ‘scroll’ that serves as a set, asking ferociously of the narrator if the hills look at all like white elephants, being assured (as the entire audience holds its breath, bracing for drama) that, no, no, no, those white hills look nothing at all like white elephants, they’re just perfectly ordinary hills, and then the actress fixes him up with a look, sizes him up, and turns back, perfectly composedly, to her fresh scene.