A couple of weeks ago, as I sat in a downtown theater watching a production of The Real Ivanov, I thought, “How lucky am I?” But not because Chekhov scholar Laura Strausfeld’s adaptation and direction of the Russian playwright’s first staged play were flawless.
Dubbed “a comedy about despair,” the play follows Nikolai Ivanov (a compelling Sam Underwood), an in-debt landowner who feels trapped in an unhappy marriage and an even unhappier state of mind.
It wants better content.
A question as loaded as Chekhov’s gun
To be, as Lin-Manuel Miranda writes in Hamilton, “in the room where it happens,” is a privilege. Before the lights dimmed, a young woman entered my row and took the seat next to mine. We were both attending solo, and she quickly struck up a conversation. “Are you excited to see it?’ she asked. It’s a question as loaded as Chekhov’s gun.
I’m not sure “excited” was the right word. I see a lot of theater. It’s my job. But it is also my lifeblood. And that’s because whatever happens is in real time. A heel gets caught in a hem of a skirt. A guffaw from an audience member at a particular line causes a boomerang effect that can’t help but return to the actor who said it.
After the acting company took their final bow, my theater neighbor asked me a brilliantly simple question. Not “did you like it,” but what did you think?
Chekhov shared that his goal was to present his case to the jury, meaning the audience. I’d rather think of it as a dinner party where I don’t know who’s on the guest list or what is on the menu. “People are having a meal, just having a meal,” he wrote, “but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their well-being is being smashed.”
Seeing that unfold in real time, surrounded by a collective heartbeat, is wholly unique; each performance is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There is no rewind. The only option is to go forward.
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