ANTON CHEKHOV

Excerpts from Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov by Stella Adler

Chekhov and Stanislavsky

Chekhov says that beauty brings a sense of loss; that the possibility of happiness is too far
removed. Life can give you a little, but beauty has a way of disturbing you because you can't
have it all. It isn't easy to define this kind of unhappiness, but he explores it in the plays.
Chekhov has no theory of life to explain things like Shaw or Ibsen or Strindberg. But he is
perhaps the greatest author in the understanding of human beings. He understands that the human
life is lived inwardly. Chekhov in Russia is considered greater even than Tolstoy. I would say
that he is my favorite author.
He criticized himself right down to the depths. He said, "I'm a cheat, I'm a liar, I don't
love anybody, I'm a lousy writer." He is constantly battling with his apathy and need for self-
approval. You meet characters in The Seagull who have that apathy but who have the ambition to
fight through, the will to struggle for something better. The individual he admires most is the one
who at least tries. In Chekhov you get an understanding of the man or woman who makes an
effort. It can be a weak effort—there is a kind of fragility in it—but they make it. "I'm going to
work, I'm going to change my life." It doesn't have to be strong, it doesn't have to be large, if
even for a moment they can see, "I have to push myself ahead a little bit."
There is great weakness in Chekhov's people. He doesn't have a lofty sense of man, in his
time, with dignity. "What difference does it make? I'm defeated. To hell with it. Give me a
drink." Most men of his society have given in. Chekhov has a feeling that the great past of the
Russian intellectual is over.
Chekhov was preoccupied with studying man despite the fact that life had lost its bigger
meaning, which made him able to smile at certain things instead of scream. He is interested in
man. Most audiences find this close to their heart—the fact that he is close to the inner meanings
of human emotions. He sees the world for beauty but does not think it is full of great
significance. That is lost and he knows it. It is our loss, but we can't help it. He felt no obligation
to explain life, but to put it down as he saw it truthfully. He was able to see what other writers
before him had seen but did not understand. He put it down for the world to understand: man as
he functions as an individual, with the suffering inside.
Chekhov stopped preaching at an early age and became an observer. His understanding of
life brought out the empathy he felt for people and you feel as actors when you do the play. The
compassion Chekhov brings out universally is why he is so much more played than other writers.
Chekhov is an artist you understand if you think of him as a man whose art is expressed best
with no words, like painting or music. You feel Chekhov the way you feel music or realize a
painting. It is not the words, it is something without words that comes through to us, because it is
on a human level. The experience is inside. He presented the life around him as it was lived
physically and inwardly. The times were turbulent, and Chekhov chose to show with truth and
precision the hopeless longing that one felt in one's heart. He reached that part of the soul which
is touched by the arts that speak without words. He studies man in a world full of beauty and
wonder and sorrow. The real theme of Chekhov is the destruction of beauty in the world, which
is always very sad.
What makes Chekhov different from any other writer? Why did an entirely new system
of performance have to be worked out because of him?
The introduction of Konstantin Stanislavsky into Chekhov's life and plays was an
intrusion on the whole realistic theater. You cannot work with plays anymore unless you do it.
From now on, you must come with a complete understanding of what the character is
experiencing. You cannot come onstage and look for the experience on the set. You can only
come on after you have injected into the character his essence that you find from the external

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things.
You have to come in with a past for your character. You have to bring what's in you to
the lines. You must know how Chekhov builds a character, a relationship, a scene.
Chekhov couldn't have done it without Stanislavsky because he is the kind of a writer
who puts so much into the past of the character that unless the actor knows how to understand
that past he can't get the present or know what's going on on the stage. Each character comes in
with his former life. You can't come on and expect the stage to feed you without knowing your
past.
The reason most actors can't play Chekhov is because they think, "These people are
Russian, they are different, they are strange." But Chekhov creates them and the play in such a
way that makes it possible for you not to follow so much the plot as the people themselves. Read
the play to see what the differences between these people are. Their actions are human. People
live life, not a play. We live, "I went there and now I'm here at a class and then I'm going home
and out to dinner." It is not a play. We don't live a play, we live a scene at a time.
So Chekhov doesn't write a play where this scene connects with that one, and that scene
connects with the next. He writes this scene and it is perfectly disconnected from the next scene.
If you can understand that, you can understand Chekhov.
It is worth understanding.

Chekhov understands that every man needs to know why he is living and is puzzled about the
rules—where have they gone? Who should we look up to? Tolstoy is gone. Turgenev is too
delicate and trimmed, like having drinks at the Plaza. I like Turgenev a lot, God forgive me, but
he's a little too classy. Chekhov doesn't like that. He says everybody knows the problems and
that the society is going to change. Here, everybody knows Mr. Reagan is not really interested in
how many poor people will die on the street this winter. We are living in a rotten time, too.
Chekhov says you are spiritually going downhill. He said, "I know my words won't do anything."
So he built cottages for poor people himself, and his sister who was a nurse treated thousands of
people with cholera. Never asked a penny for it.

The Seagull

[Synopsis of The Seagull: The legendary stage actress Arkadina returns to visit her estate with
her young lover, Trigorin, a famous writer. They and her doddery brother Sorin and her old lover
Dr. Dorn, among others, are to be entertained there by the unveiling of her son Konstantin's new
avant-garde play—and, in the subsequent acts, by all the volatile emotions and high comedy-
tragedy that lie in the confusion of art and life, and the connection between art and passion.
Konstantin's play-within-a-play serves to parody contemporary symbolist drama. His mother
hates it. He hates his mother for that. Only a murder or a suicide can end their struggle.]

In The Seagull, nobody has a cent. That is because of the moment in history. It is very important
for you to understand that you are not in Tolstoy-land with the upper aristocrats. You are with a
kind of society that has had the best of everything but is now going through something different.
The transition is very hard.
The Seagull is a play about theater people. There is discussion of theater, the
understanding of it, the people who are kept out of it, the people who want to stay in it. It is
about the catastrophes you have to survive. It is a play which deals with the intellectuals and a
better grade of people who aren't busy with money or selling anything, the landed aristocracy. If
anybody tells them anything about money they say, "Don't talk about it—you're upsetting me!"
What is happening in The Seagull? All the grain, everything from the land, is sold to keep

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up the estate. A manager runs it. The man who owns it doesn't know a thing about it.
God, how I understand him. Nobody in the world can bother me about a bill or money,
because I go crazy.
Konstantin, the son, says the famous writer Trigorin is "cheap." He says that because of
the new movement in Russia and France, the symbolist movement, led by the great French poet
Mallarme. Konstantin's play is written in this symbolist style. No wonder his mother says, "I
don't understand it." You can't talk symbolism to an actress who is going on the road. Konstantin
should know he'll be criticized, but he can't take it.
So this old aristocracy was busy with art. In this play, the whole emphasis is on which
side of art you take. Everybody is part of the fight of "What is art? Who is an artist?" This is one
of the great Chekhovian themes: "Who really is an artist?" You have this conflict of art all the
way through, motivating the excitement and tension in the play. It is not "There's a storm here,
let’s close the windows, please help me." It's not that at all. The storm is coming, but nobody
cares about it. They are so filled with the tension of their own lives.
Chekhov deals a lot with the weather that surrounds these people. In the opening scene
Masha says a storm is coming. If Chekhov puts that in, it means to reflect on the action. If a
storm is coming, it means the characters are stimulated, agitated. An upheaval in one Chekhov
character affects all the others. Konstantin s trying to stage his play and Masha is hanging on to
him until he finally says, "Go away. Leave me alone!" He is the temperament of the storm in that
scene.
So Nature comes in. "A storm is brewing" gives the actors a sense of restlessness in the
first act. It tells you somebody is going to be very disturbed in the situation. In the next act, the
sun is shining, which has a very different effect on everybody. The effect of the sun on each
character is different. It fatigues Masha. She says, "I feel as though I've been dragging myself
around for one hundred years." She can't take the sun. Whereas Arkadina is dancing and
laughing and eating candy. Laughter and sunshine go together. Storm and candy do not go
together. Each atmosphere in Chekhov has to be created on the stage.
Unless you go back to find out what the relationships are, you will not understand
Chekhov or any other good play. No realistic modern play starts with you. Remember, when
Masha comes on, that she was brought up in the same house as Konstantin all her life. Her
closeness to him has been from twenty-five years of knowing him and being rejected by him as if
she didn't exist as a woman. Masha is destroyed by this.
Arkadina knows how to survive. She doesn't need a twenty-five-year-old son around. She
doesn't need anything that will take away from "I am a star and don't you forget it." She needs to
look thirty-five. All her glamour, all her anger, comes from being at a moment in life where she
has to protect herself from growing old. No actress needs a son of twenty-five when she is forty-
three.
So Arkadina has to protect herself. What does she need young Nina around for? She has a
need to protect herself and her lover from this. Konstantin, a playwright in love with his leading
lady? Who needs it? This son is an embarrassment. He writes crazy plays. This new theater is
decadent. "Yes, I get it—you think I don't get it? I get it, but I don't like it." You have to have her
whole inner action of being threatened.
The theater fascinates the people around Arkadina. They love her because she's
glamorous. Whenever she leaves, all the servants come and the cook cries because they are taken
by her, in the same way people are by movie stars now.