From left: Alexandra Conlon plays Voinitseva’s wife Sofya Yegorovna; an audience member is the schoolmaster Platonov; and Paul Reid plays the young doctor Nikolay Ivanovich Triletsky in Dead Centre’s bombastic production of Chekhov’s First Play at the Irish Arts Center.
The Irish experimental theater company Dead Centre is taking a wrecking ball to Chekhov’s unwieldy five-hour play Platonov (also known as Untitled Play) with its new metatheatrical work, Chekhov’s First Play. Devised and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, this 70-minute production is a radical reworking of the original four-act drama, playfully magnifying its follies and the overreach of its young playwright, who penned it before he was 20.
The show opens with Moukarzel addressing the audience in a stage whisper. He describes Chekhov’s first attempt at playwriting as a protracted piece of juvenilia: “Chekhov was nineteen when he wrote this and, as you’ll see, it’s not a very good play, but it’s hugely ambitious. It’s like all his other plays were in there waiting to get out, all his ideas.”
In the highly volatile Act II, an audience member plays Platonov (left) and Dylan Tighe is the General’s son Sergey Pavlovich Voinitsev in Dead Centre’s iconoclastic production of Chekhov’s First Play. Photographs by Nir Arieli.
Moukarzel promises to help get the audience, who wear headphones, through the rough patches in the piece. He presents an overview of the dramatic terrain ahead. He explains that a traditional Chekhov production will unfold in real time (Andrew Clancy’s historical set design, lighted by Stephen Dodd, wonderfully anchors this iconoclastic work), as his running commentary continues. He then exits into the wings. But his voice continues to come through the earphones, unpacking the play, archly noting each character’s idiosyncrasies and the key themes that surface: property, inheritance, loneliness. The director soon finds himself at sea, however, when he tries to interpret the multiple subplots that weave throughout the work and the slipshod acting of the performers. Ironically, what started out as the director’s clear-eyed exegesis of the text devolves into his raw realization that Platonov is a literary mess.
Chekhov’s unexpurgated text for Platonov has 20 characters, 83 scenes, several melodramatic seductions, and various suicide attempts. In the current version at the Irish Arts Center, Moukarzel and Kidd have ruthlessly pared down the dramatis personae to six, although they also enlist an audience member to portray the central character, Platonov. They have conflated the story, and divided the drama into two acts. Platonov, who is supposedly endowed with the charm of Don Juan and the moral hesitancy of Hamlet, doesn’t appear until the play’s midpoint, and when he finally does, he doesn’t utter a word. That said, the character theoretically remains the cynosure of the story. He makes the local tongues wag and the women swoon.
“Chekhov’s unexpurgated text for ‘Platonov’ has 20 characters, 83 scenes, several melodramatic seductions, and various suicide attempts.”
Although it’s difficult at times to know what co-directors Moukarzel and Kidd are up to in this extended riff, it is quite evident that they have purposefully derailed much of the original narrative and kept only the meaty parts that resonate with Chekhov’s canonical works. Take Anna Petrovna Voinitsev (performed with poise by the excellent Ali White), the manipulative widow of General Voinitsev, who stoically remarks in Act I that her estate has more permanence than herself. Her deeply felt connection to her home eerily calls to mind the similarly deep-rooted attachment that Chekhov’s Lyuba Ranevskaya has to her own country home and cherry orchard in The Cherry Orchard. Or, as Anna Petrovna poignantly puts it: “These old homes are built to last, not their inhabitants. Think of everything these walls have seen.”
Spoiler alert! There’s literally a wrecking ball that arrives in the play’s second half that creates utter chaos on stage. How the characters survive, react, and cope with the aftermath of the demolition reveals their mettle and capacity to hope when faced with tragedy.
From left: An audience member as Platonov, Tighe as Voinitseva, and Reid as Triletsky joyously drink shots of vodka.
Admittedly, this show isn’t for the weak-stomached or faint-hearted. But for those who give the play a chance to rise Phoenix-like out of its own ashes in Act II will find, if not a song to hum as you exit the theater, a deeper understanding of Chekhov.
The acting is truly an ensemble effort, with the able Alexandra Conlon (Sofya Yegorovna), Tara Egan-Langley (Aleksandra Ivanovna), Daniel Reardon (Porfiry Semyonovich Glagolyev), Paul Reid (Nikolay Ivanovich Triletsky), Dylan Tighe (Sergey Pavlovich Voinitsev), and White all holding their own on stage. If there is any star turn in this fast-paced theater piece, it surely belongs to author-director Moukarzel, who shepherds the production from both sides of the footlights: first, as the director who broadcasts his commentary through the audience’s headphones; secondly, as Chekhov’s First Play’s coauthor and director with Kidd.
Time will tell whether Dead Centre’s adaptation will prove a viable alternative to the original text of Platonov. But one thing is certain: Chekhov’s First Play isn’t boring.
Dead Centre’s production of Chekhov’s First Play runs at the Irish Arts Center (726 11th Ave.) through Nov. 6. Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit irishartscenter.org or telecharge.com.
