Lee Jacobus – Lit Bits

Chekhov’s Three Sisters: On Production and Interpretation

One of the issues I mull over in teaching and writing about drama is the effect of actual production on the interpretation of a dramatic text. Theater people are sometimes said to privilege performance over the text, while English teachers are sometimes said to privilege the text over the performance. Because there is plenty of wiggle room in any such question, I know the lines are not drawn hard and fast. But wherever one begins talking about a play, it is clear that every production, like every reading/discussion/analysis, is an interpretation of the text.

The recent Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which Sara Ruhl helped to translate with Elise Thoron and Natalya Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati, concentrates on the text. Ruhl’s decision to produce a translation as close as possible to the rhythms of Chekhov led her to make some choices that resulted in a few awkwardnesses in English. For example, she often left out pronouns supplied by earlier translators and left in literal translations that were peculiarly Russian and more oblique than English equivalents. And because of Ruhl’s interpretation of the sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, she presents them much more as looking forward to their uncertain futures outside their home rather than looking backward to a time when their father provided security and an orderly life. Continue reading “Chekhov’s Three Sisters: On Production and Interpretation”

Seeing Molly Sweeney

I decided to read Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney just before I went to see the Irish Repertory Theatre’s recent production. This is not something I always do. Often, of course, I would have read or sometimes even have seen a classic play, but usually not immediately before seeing it again. I was concerned that my emotional response wouldn’t be as immediate with the lines so fresh in my mind. Molly Sweeney is a young woman, blind for forty years, just about to experience an operation that would give her sight. It is a profoundly emotional time in Molly’s life and in her husband, Frank’s, life.

I read the play knowing John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1905), on a similar theme, and also knowing that Friel had been moved by Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not to See,” which is about sight and knowledge. All of these influences were here, but they were dwarfed by the power of actors Simone Kirby (Molly), Jonathan Hogan (Dr. Rice), and Ciaran O’Reilly (Frank). Molly’s first speech caught me immediately. Kirby’s delivery of the lines was so direct, so innocent, so filled with the ambiguity of fear and joy that I felt a rush of emotion. If anything, reading the play immediately before seeing it intensified my pleasure and my response—even as I anticipated the lines I remembered best.

Everything depends on how the actors deliver their lines because this is a play with little overt action. I’m sure some theatergoers might doubt that it is a drama at all. In the tradition of Friel’s own Faith Healer, the actors stand and speak one after the other to the audience, telling them their very distinct view of the same story. This may seem undramatic—and in the hands of a lesser writer it almost certainly would be. But Molly Sweeney is riveting in part because the story is surprising and the actors are moving. Storytelling in Molly Sweeney, especially from three points of view, constitutes significant drama.

Being able to bring your students to the theater after reading a play is usually regarded as a good idea. I can see the reasoning behind it, and in this case I wasn’t sorry I’d read before, but I don’t always feel it’s the best idea. What do you think? What have your experiences been, taking students to the theater just after reading a play?

Drama as Theatre; Drama as Literature

It is not always easy to distinguish between drama as literature and drama as theatre. My view has always been that good drama is based on good literature, but having said that, we all know that there are moments in the theatre when the action moves far beyond the printed page and its stage directions. Those are the moments when we realize that drama is theatre.

This meditation is a result of my having just seen a wild adaptation of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself directed and adapted by Christopher Bayes, whose roots are in the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Bayes tossed out the standard text and built a commedia dell’arte version on the comic bones that Molière had provided beneath the dialogue. Continue reading “Drama as Theatre; Drama as Literature”

Riders to the Sea

One of the things that humanizes the classroom is storytelling. In their reviews of my teaching, my students have often mentioned that our drama classes were enlivened by some of the stories I told of my own experiences in the theater seeing plays. That surprised me, but on reflection I realize they were right.

For example, when I taught John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea I told my students about the first time I saw the play. It was 1957 in tiny Theater East when the Abbey Theatre brought its company to the United States for the first time since the war. Siobhan McKenna played Maurya.

I was brought there with a group from my undergraduate class, taught by the late David Krause, who was an Irish Studies expert and my drama teacher. I had no idea what to expect. We had not read the play in advance. It followed the performance of Synge’s one-act In the Shadow of the Glen and seemed to us a riveting drama. Continue reading “Riders to the Sea”