At Irish Arts Center, a wry, experimental iteration doesn’t do much to untangle the playwright’s unwieldy early work.
If Anton Chekhov gave a name to the early play that surfaced years after his death, we don’t know what it was. This is part of the lore around that script, a relished detail in the story of its discovery: The title page was missing.
The text is a mammoth, unwieldy beast, as playwrights’ juvenilia often is. Written when Chekhov was 18, or 19, or 20 — that fact is uncertain, too — it’s a stylistic mishmash that would run five or six hours, staged whole. But dramatists are drawn to it, in part because its elements are recognizable from his later work: the grand old estate, the money woes, the crowd of characters living restless, listless lives. And, of course, the gun.
So adapters dive in, gather what they like and leave the rest. Michael Frayn called his rendition “Wild Honey.” David Hare’s is “Platonov,” which is the usual title for the play in English. And if you remember the amusing spectacle of Cate Blanchett, on Broadway nearly six years ago, removing her bra without taking off her dress — well, then you’ve seen the version known as “The Present,” by Andrew Upton.
“Chekhov’s First Play,” at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen, is Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s wry, experimental iteration. Directed by the pair for Dead Centre — their Dublin company, familiar to New York audiences for the shows “Lippy” and “Hamnet” — it whittles Chekhov’s script down to a bare 70 minutes. That includes time for the location to shift from the late 19th-century Russian countryside to early 21st-century Dublin, and for a wrecking ball and a pneumatic drill to do some damage to Andrew Clancy’s scenery.
Languor escalates into havoc for the characters — among them Anna (Ali White), the financially indebted owner of a house she can’t afford; her friend Triletsky (Paul Reid), who, like Chekhov, is a doctor with tuberculosis that he fails to diagnose; and Platonov, who arrives quite late, played by an audience member. Not that you are likely to care much about the characters, let alone the plot, as story is not exactly at the forefront here. The performance we watch is, in a sense, the play within the play.
The whole experience is framed by Moukarzel’s running commentary, spoken into audience members’ ears via the headphones we wear throughout. (Sound design is by Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson.) It’s funny and often snarky; in one slightly crude line, Moukarzel sounds like a sports broadcaster giving a play-by-play of a rare Chekhov move. But Moukarzel also expounds on the themes of the play — like private property and the ravenousness of the rich — and laments that he cut so many characters from Chekhov’s script.
“It was hard to decide what matters,” he says, “and who you can just throw away.”
This, really, is the nub of “Chekhov’s First Play,” which had its premiere in 2015. That’s also when Irish artists were sifting through the human wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that collapsed into painful recession and left Ireland littered with abandoned housing developments.
When these characters talk of cancer, it’s a metaphor for harmful, unchecked growth; their scorn for banks is rooted in reckless lending that ruined lives. Even Moukarzel and Kidd’s decision not to give the Chekhov play a proper title is significant — because of that other meaning of title: legal ownership. Historically, one name for the found Chekhov text has been “Play Without a Title.”
Trouble is, the Celtic Tiger is so many crises removed from the present that it’s a little obscure, even at the Irish Arts Center, which co-commissioned the play.
Similarly, the headphones would have been novel in 2015 — the year that downtown theatergoers experienced Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” that way, and the year before Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter” gobsmacked headphone-wearing Broadway audiences with its binaural sound design. Now, as a tool, they’re underwhelming.
“Chekhov’s First Play” surely felt much bolder and fresher when it was new. But if you ask the question “Why this show now?” the answer seems to be that it was in the wings.
Chekhov’s First Play
Through Nov. 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
