“Any idiot can face a crisis” begins a quote frequently misattributed to the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov; “it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
But whether Chekhov’s or not, the statement aptly describes the sensibility of the great pre-Soviet writer. His major plays follow the decline of his nation’s minor aristocrats toward inevitable dissolution — a tragic arc that he can’t help intertwining with the ordinary travails of daily living: missing coats, aging servants, the ever-present niggling of the taxman.
It is also an excellent prologue to the production of his “Little Comedies” currently on stage at Houston’s Alley Theatre — a production where the only thing small is the intimate Neuhaus stage where Chekhov’s vision and sense are brought to vibrant life.
Never heard of a Chekhov play titled “Little Comedies”? There isn’t one. It’s a collection of five one-act plays — more skits and monologues, actually — that translators Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky have, thanks to a commission from the Alley for its Resident Acting Company, forged into a whole. Think of it as five windows into average Russian households at the end of the 19th century. Each is unique–different situations, varying cast sizes, and slight class variations — but all focused on the quirks of daily human existence and forming a time arc of adult life.
Consider the opening act, “The Bear.” A widow has decided to remain in mourning to spite her recently dead and philandering husband. She’s closed herself into her house till death comes to claim her just so in the afterlife she can shame her spouse with her fidelity. In strides a frustrated hulk of a man trying to collect a debt the husband has left in order to avoid the debt collectors on his own doorstep.
A widower, he has little time for niceties. They are two wagons headed in opposite directions — except, being male and female, they make a conneciton. Grigory accuses Elena, “You buried yourself alive, but you didn’t forget to powder your nose.” Elena calls him “A bear.” They agree to fight a duel and fall in love. “A real woman,” Grigory says to himself. “A fire. Gunpowder. A rocket. I’ll be sure to shoot her.” As played by Christopher Salazar and Melissa Molano, Grigory and Elena dance upon a tightrope from which they could easily slip into slapstick, but underplaying their emotions, they teeter and totter as they balance ordinary urges, emotions, and needs. Where they will end, the play leaves open, but it stretches out the foundation for the kind of human comedy the entire production will celebrate.
At the same time, each individual play is unique. The second act, “A Proposal,” gives an entirely different take on love and intensifies the comedy. Ivan, fast approaching middle-age, enters the home of Stepan to ask for Natalya’s hand in marriage. The elated father brings in his daughter, aware of her ticking marriage clock, and leaves Ivan to pop the question having only told his daughter “there’s a merchant who’s come for his goods.” “Trembling, like before an exam,” Ivan struggles to get to the point, until his conversation with Natalya veers into an argument about land ownership and dogs. As Ivan and Natalya, the husband-and-wife team of Chris Hutchison and Elizabeth Bunch tap the deep vein of irony that Chekhov has imagined. They mesmerize in their ability to show the human need for connection and the difficulty, the comedy of building it.
“The Wedding” dramatizes a dinner celebrating the union of Dashenka and Aplombov and cooks up a tour-de-force helping of communion gone awry. The guests bicker and chat as they pass the potatoes, each driven by different interests and desires until the party is interrupted by the arrival of Revunov (Todd Waite), an old soldier hired to bring a touch of class to the event. But Revunov is only an old ship captain who can talk in nothing but nautical terms — the perfect but unsuspecting boar that soon drives the other guests to distraction and despair. Waite as Revunov gives the first of two brilliant turns. He croons about mizzen masts and halyards as the groom might croon about his bride, making not a lick of sense but perfectly communicating who he is and defining the other characters who dip in and out of the conversation where, as in marriage, coherence is a thing in progress.
“On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” a monologue handled by David Rainey as Ivan, shifts the scene beyond first meeting, proposal, wedding, and now to focus on a man 23 years into his marriage. “My eye has started twitching,” this Ivan observes, and not surprising for a man living in house 13 and whose daughters were all born on the 13th, the twitch is well earned. “I’ve grown into a fool, a nonentity,” he says, and indeed he has become as worn and torn as the suit he wears and laments. Nevertheless, he works, and at his wife’s command is writing a speech on the harmfulness of tobacco—a speech that threatens to interrupt his self-pity but comically never does. It’s a subtle piece of writing, possibly better read than dramatized, but Rainey breathes life into it, even as he paces his way through his litany of lost steps.
The show’s final act, “Swan Song,” is a showcase for actor Todd Waite as Vassily, an aging actor in decline who, as the play opens, awakes from a drunken sleep to find himself alone in an empty theatre. “My soul’s cold and dark like in a cellar—old age!” he bemoans. But Waite captures the soaring love of the theatre that lies behind Vassily’s pessimism: “I’m old, time to die, let go. People go to church to prepare for death. Me? I come here.” Then suddenly he finds he’s not alone. Feklusha, the stage manager who also sleeps in the theatre and is played with great restraint by Melissa Pritchett, becomes a sounding board, an audience, for Vassily’s treasure chest of Shakespearean lines in which he finds his counterparts in King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Placing Shakespeare’s most famous poetry beside his own lines is a startling act of self-confidence on Chekhov’s part—who can measure up to the great Bard? But Waite’s heart-felt renditions of the words of both artists serve only to spotlight the power of dramatic art.
The translators have chosen well among Chekhov’s many short pieces, creating a delicate but powerful arc of his work. And director Richard Nelson pulls them together and allows the Alley’s cast to do their magic. There are no stars; the set has the beauty of simplicity; the lighting is subtle and stark. But most of all Chekhov’s ability to create a range of characters with whom the audience can feel empathy despite their distance in time and space is allowed to grow increasingly present, bright, and powerfully moving.
These “Little Comedies” are just the right size.
“Little Comedies” is at Houston’s Alley Theatre through Oct. 29.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.
