Kevin Kline and Gerald Gutierrez discuss Chekhov

YOU CAN'T DIG ENOUGH:
KEVIN KLINE & GERALD GUTIERREZ DISCUSS CHEKHOV

Taken from and © The New Theater Review, 1997

Several weeks before the rehearsals for Lincoln Center Theater's "Ivanov" were set to begin, actor Kevin Kline and director Gerald Gutierrez sat with the editors of The New Theater Review to discuss their student days at Juilliard and their work on this production.
Kevin: We were in the same class, well -
Gerald: But not of -
Kevin: Yes, we were from different classes, from different backgrounds, but in the same class at Juilliard. Gerry is from and still lives in Brooklyn. I hail from St. Louis.
Gerald: St. Louis....I was at Juilliard in the Music Department, the preparatory division, for seven years. And the only chance I had of my parents agreeing to let me go to college for theater was that it was Juilliard. Because Juilliard in my house was like a holy word, and from the time I was about three or four, "Juilliard, Juilliard." Then Kevin came in - you'll find this surprising - as an advanced acting student.
Kevin: Gerry has never gotten over this....He spent four years at Juilliard. And I learned all there was to learn in only two. And, ironically, I too started out in music, in piano and composition.
Gerald: Yes, but wasn't it at Indiana University School of the Arts? Home of humidity in the arts? ...Michel [Michel St. Denis, a founder of Juilliard] was around very much the first year of school. Sort of part time the second year. And then he was gone by the time Kevin got there. We'd killed him.
Kevin: Yes.
Gerald: And then his wife, Suria, was around a lot. I was quite close to her.
Kevin: I was too. I was closer to her.
Gerald: You had slept with her. Oh no, that was the other Kevin. Oh no, no, no - I slept with her. I'd forgotten that. St. Denis's book, "Rediscovery of Style," on which they based the original curriculum, is the most articulate writing about theater training I've ever seen....One day, St. Denis was giving us a lecture. I must have been eighteen, and there was one great moment when I got the point - the point that Naturalism is merely a style like other styles, and that there is one best style for any text. And the reason a certain style is better for a text is because that's the style that takes the play and gives it the most life. But it would be stupid to think that same style can be applied to Shakespeare and to all other plays. It was a thunderbolt when I realized that all the behavior of Naturalism - that's just a style. And they had to learn how to do that style, Stanislavsky and the others. He was avant-garde. And that was a big day for me.
The thing about Chekhov is the more you dig, the more you find, as opposed to most plays, where you can dig too much. Sometimes you realize, oh my god, there's nothing underneath. Shakespeare is the same as Chekhov - you can't dig enough. The difference is Shakespeare gives it to you all in the language. What his characters think is what they say - at the moment they're thinking it, they're saying it. It's so great. In Chekhov it's not all in the language, although a lot of it is. It's in the behavior, it's in the subtext....It's different from "The Heiress," for example. There is a point beyond which you don't dig because there's nothing there. So you've got to find a certain style for "The Heiress."
Kevin: Because it's about a certain period of time, a certain class of people.
Gerald: Yes and no - there's a style to "The Heiress" that is a Forties Broadway play. It isn't Henry James. It's got very little, in fact, to do with Henry James. It gives the illusion of it, but it is a Forties Broadway show. A style is developed to give a text the most life; it makes it the best. And there's only one best way.
Kevin: For that group of people, with that director, for that time.
Gerald: Don't you agree? I think that's the basis of any art form.
Kevin: In any art form, it's the artist who transforms, and the artist has to embrace and study and understand the tradition in order to transform it. So, the text of Shakespeare, or Sophocles, or Arthur Miller, or Chekhov brings with it a tradition. But then the ensemble brings the immediacy to a production. In "Rediscovery of Style", I remember Michel St. Denis quoted a French writer: "Style is the man." And if Style is the man it's not only the man Chekhov but the men and the women in the contemporary company's interpretation of Chekhov. St. Denis said that the theater served "to bring works of the past to life in contemporary terms." I hope we will forge a style that is our own.
Gerald: Absolutely. Because I think that in art you give of yourself and so if you're connected to life, you read the paper, you live in New York, and it's 1997, some of that is in the art. It has to be. That's why it's not a museum piece. Until the day I had that thunderbolt, I used to think style was frilly handkerchiefs and the way you hold your feet. And that's horseshit. That's just the ink. The style is the point of view about the text. This is how we're going to dig into "Ivanov" and give it life.
We did Chekhov once at Juilliard. We were in a successful production of "Three Sisters" that would not die. It was in the rep for several seasons, directed by Boris Tumarin.
Kevin: We had seen his production of "Three Sisters" with Juilliard's Group Two, the class behind us. We had just graduated. We were in the Company. We saw their production in a little flourescent-lit studio, done with rehearsal skirts and a couple of pieces of furniture. And it was just one of the most moving, thrilling productions. I had only read Chekhov. And you can't just read Chekhov. You can't tell one name from another, much less picture them all. It was written to be played, as was Shakespeare. And here it was presented in this very pure, unadulterated way.
Gerald: No lighting. Oh, candles. Remember candles? They used candles. In the middle of the day.
Kevin: Act three.
Gerald: They used candles. All candles. Because I stole that later. Years and years later. It was "Geniuses," Off-Broadway.
Kevin: We all ran to John Houseman [then the director of the drama division at Juilliard] and said, "You've got to let Boris direct us. You've just got to. We want to do this." And he did. And Gerald was Fedotik.
Gerald: I gave the world my Fedotik.
Kevin: And I gave the world, at age 26, my Vershinin....Boris was a romanitc. And it was a romantic view of the play.
Gerald: Probably not the way we would do it ourselves now.
Kevin: I don't know. I've seen "Three Sisters" done so many times since then, and I've seen these three neurotic shrews ....So many American directors make it about what total failures the sisters are, but they leave out so much.
Gerald: Also, I think what's moving about the play and not pathetic is that they don't die - they're broken and they're still in their youth. That's why we are moved by it. And if the sisters are in their forties, it's merely pathetic. Its a thing that also occurs in "Ivanov"....Russia breaking people down and making them older.
Kevin: Before their time.
Gerald: Ivanov is a man who is old. Physically he's not, but spiritually he's crushed. It's like he's violated.
Kevin: He sort of starts where Vanya ends up in the last scene of "Uncle Vanya." ... "I'm forty-six - how will I endure the next fourteen years if I live to be sixty?"
Gerald: It's Chekhov's theatrical sense. That's the thing about the plays. If you have any intelligence as an actor, you can't wait to act them. You want to jump in there and play it. There are scenes in "Ivanov" - in the second act and the fourth act - that if I had seen when I was a kid I would want to jump up and be in. The party scene before Ivanov comes in is so funny. You want to be in it because it's all of the fun and none of the responsibility - if you're like me and you can't act. It's a group. And of course Chekhov was writing for a company. He knew who he was writing for ultimately. And before that, the wedding scene. Oh, I'd love to be in that. You know what I mean? They're written for actors.
Kevin: I had read several translations of "Ivanov" and had been fairly uninspired to play it or even to see it. But when I read David Hare's adaptation suddenly it not only sprang to life as a piece of theater, but I could feel the uniqueness of Chekhov distilled.
Gerald: But I think it's a trap to start talking about him in exalted terms, because this play was so brazen and its emotional violence is stunning and startling. And the anti-Semitism is shocking....I view the rest of Chekhov's plays with a new lens now, a clearer lens.
Kevin: He embraces the paradox of the human condition and of human nature. People are villains capable of the lowest actions, of committing the meanest kind of depravity - and there is simple nobility in a gesture, in a word that is spoken or muttered at the dinner table. There's not hopelessness. Redemption and salvation are possible. It's always in the future, of course. Chekhov is ruthlessly honest while also being affectionate and even forgiving of his characters. That's what makes him unique: his refusal to take moralistic stances, refusal to make it easy for audiences to judge simply in black and white. He is much more interested in the gray area, which is the area most of us live in, much more interested in the complexity and paradox.
Gerald: What I find so surprising about Chekhov is how damn funny it is. A new kind of laugh, because it's so honest. And that's why I think his plays regenerate - that stays, as long as we're human.

© (copyright) New Theater Review, 1997

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