Studying The Cherry Orchard (3)

Chekhov family in 1874, with 14-year old Anton standing second from left

32-year old Anton, front and center, with family and friends in 1892

Growing up in a middle-class family on the shores of the Sea of Azov in pre-Revolution Russia, Anton and his sister and five brothers went fishing, played tennis, and spent leisurely days in the country at their grandfather's. A great lover of nature, young Anton was robust with activity and intelligence, always making jokes, affectionate and playful with his siblings. They also worked hard in their father's shop (now a museum, the "Chekhov Shop") where Anton collected memories and ideas for future stories based on the people he met there. He studied music and was a voracious reader, spending afternoons at the Taganrog town library (now named after him). For many years until his death he sent books to be added to its collections. He read literature and the Greek classics including Homer, and also works by Miguel de Cervantes, Ivan Goncharov, William Shakespeare, Ivan Turgenev and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. A French governess taught the children languages. To add to his already vivid imagination, Anton's nurse entertained the children with fantastical tales while their mother told them of her travels around the world with her father as a young girl. "Our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother." (from The Letters of Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Clara Garnett, 1861-1946). Anton's father, born into serfdom, had a great love for music. He was a very strict, religious man but they were a close-knit family, sharing evenings after school singing, playing musical instruments, and singing in the church choir and attending Mass on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings.

Reference: Anton Chekhov.

I love reading about Chekhov abiding curiosity and budding intellect at a young age.  I find that just as inspiring and instructive as his work of art.  I was like that, too.  We arrived in Chicago, from Manila, and 3rd grade was my first year in an American school.  I knew English, but my command and grammar were weak at best.  From there, through junior high and high school, I methodically improved my English and read deeply if not quite widely, from Harold Robbins and Erica Jong, to, in time, Sigmund Freud and William Shakespeare.  I loved the arts, and I loved life in general, like Chekhov.  But as I embark on stage and film projects, among many arts, I don't have any designs per se on following his footsteps.  Simply, I want to find learning and inspiration, and carve a path that is uniquely my own.

Studying The Cherry Orchard (2)

I found the playbill to The Cherry Orchard staging at Northeastern Illinois University, which I wrote about previously in Studying The Cherry Orchard (1).

Beth Ann Smukowski in front and center as Madame Ranevskaya

Lily Stephens affords us comic relief as the housemaid Dunyasha

Mark Dodge as the pragmatic but often dismissed Lopakhin

I really appreciated director Dan Wirth's notes, as they illuminate not only the world of the family, but also the staging of Chekhov:

Chekhov's plays have a reputation of being sad, slow, tedious, and boring. There is a problem with that because Chekhov isn't any of those things. Those sorts of performances are conducted by people that have a misapprehension of Chekhov, and perhaps they themselves are sad, slow, tedious, and boring. Chekhov himself always claimed (even protested) that his plays were comedies, and who am I to take issue with that? He is the one that wrote them. He should know, after all.

Wirth has a point well taken.  But, you see, how a director stages this or any other play is, to whatever extent, inevitably a reflection of him or her.  It is always autobiographical in one way or another.  Sad and slow is one thing, but tedious and boring means a failed staging of the play.

My first exposure to Chekhov was a production of his play Uncle Vanya. I was in college in Michigan and took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Canada where it was playing. I really had no idea what I was in for. I was introduced to a collection of confused and contradictory people who were often unaware of both their best and worst qualities. They either had plenty of ideas about what to do to make life better or they had no ideas at all, but either way, they lacked the capacity to take action to do anything about it. Their struggles were very frustrating - and very funny.

I suppose that kind of inertia, in Chekhov's handling of it, can be frustrating for the action-oriented, practical sort and funny for anyone who can see a certain absurdity and farce in life itself.  Somehow The Myth of Sisyphus comes to mind for me.

My first experience with The Cherry Orchard occurred a year or so later when I was in graduate school. My classmates and I were enjoying a unit on Chekhov and we were reading his four major full-length plays. I went to the library and listened to an audio recording of a performance of the play. It was a production from The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, featuring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, directed by Tyrone Guthrie.

As I sat listening I realized I was having the same experience I had with the production of Uncle Vanya. Here again was a collection of deeply flawed and deeply human characters. They were caught in a trap and were struggling to get out, but they themselves had made the trap, and they alone would be able to devise a way out. However, they couldn't see that. They thought the trap was their fate. Some couldn't even see the trap.

I have argued in my Theory of Algorithms that he must grasp reality as it is and things as they are, if we are to solve whatever problem we face.  That reality and those things speak to our human nature, what I have come to call The Human Algorithm, that is, the elemental essence of who we are and what we are made of.  So just as with Shakespeare, Chekhov helps us understand the characters he has created and the nature of our humanity as a whole.

This is how it is with Chekhov's characters. It's as if they are wearing blinders and can only see certain things. And when it comes to their own flaws, they either beat themselves up over them or project them and make others guilty of the very things they dislike in themselves. In either case, nothing gets done about them. When his plays are done well, the audience has sympathy and empathy for the plights of the characters, and they also feel annoyance and frustration because the characters are often so unbearably stupid. Audiences feel sad when the characters lose, and at the same time they laugh at how ridiculous they are.

Much has been written about the gloominess of the Russian people, the so-called Russian "cult of suffering," as though the people of Russia have the market cornered on being sad and mopey and depressed. It is an interesting stereotype, and as with all stereotypes there may be a grain of truth to it, but I think Chekhov was writing about all of human-kind, not just Russian human-kind. In viewing Chekhov's plays, we are viewing ourselves - our foibles, our denial, our strengths, our weaknesses, our victories, and our defeats. I think of Chekhov's plays as a mirror held up to our souls. The mirror has some Russian trimming around its edges, but the center reflects us back to ourselves just as we are.

Reference indeed Theory of Algorithms. 

At one time or another perhaps all of us have said or will say goodbye to our own personal cherry orchard.

Very well said, Dan Wirth. 

Studying The Cherry Orchard (1)

As part of writing The Room, a play on housemaid abuse, I study iconic plays.  I had the pleasure and privilege of studying drama and comedy, along with poetry and Shakespeare, for a year each at Northwestern University.  So we read the likes of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw).  I've watched film adaptations and stage productions of these plays over the past two years.

But what else?

Enter The Cherry Orchard. 

I read Three Sisters at the university, and my wife and I saw a production at the Goodman Theater in Chicago years ago.  But I had otherwise not read Anton Chekhov.  The Cherry Orchard sidled into my radar, as a play within the film Henry's Crime, and I was intrigued.  So I found this staging at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago from a year ago:

The following are notes from my journal on The Room: 

I like how this production plays up with the audience, in a natural way, that is, in the flow and theme of the play. There is existential humor to this play, clearly. For instance, one character wants to talk to somebody, but bemoans that she doesn’t have anybody to talk to.

I want to make sure sound from the actors is clear throughout the play. I have to work out the enters and exits of the characters. I thought about billiards as a metaphor for what happens to people in a play I can write. What about a title like The Sampaguita Orchard?  The sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines. 

The house is a metaphor for an era, and its sale because of unpaid debt is the end of that era.  The cherry orchard is a kind of mythic reference for the family, but the fabric of their lives together is actually stitched inside the house.

Studying Death of a Salesman (3)

Arthur Miller

John Lahr with The New Yorker offered the following introduction (2012) to his conversation with Arthur Miller (1999):

For an essay in the magazine on the fiftieth anniversary of the first production of “Death of a Salesman,” I visited Arthur Miller at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1999. With his wife, the photographer Inge Morath, we went to the cabin in the woods that Miller built in order to write the play. (Morath herself had never seen the cabin in all the years they’d been living in Roxbury.) The following is selection of some of the things Miller said about the play during our day together. The newest Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Linda Emond, and Andrew Garfield, directed by Mike Nichols, with the original stage design of Jo Mielziner, opens at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway on March 15, and continues through June 2.

Reference: Walking with Arthur Miller.

I love hearing the artist speak to the reasoning, experience and process of creating what was to become, in this case, an American masterpiece.  When Lahr asked if he knew he had written a great play, Miller said he did the moment he finished writing it. 

Studying Death of a Salesman (2)

Designed by Social Realist painter Joseph Hirsch

I have one or two book copies of this play, and they're either in a moldy box in our basement or somewhere in some storage in Dubai.  I have only a vague memory of the covers, but this one by Joseph Hirsch is powerful in that we see, and we sense, the weight of the world on Willy Loman's weary shoulders. 

The New York Times also asked students at the Parsons the New School for Design to give the cover a go:

Designed by Aija Gibson

Designed by Isabel Castillo Guijarro

Designed by Ashley Butler

Designed by Alina Petrichyn

Designed by Nick Vidovich

Designed by Erik Freer

Death of a Salesman was first performed in 1949, so this iconic American play may have predated these young designers' parents.  The New York Times took the liberty of engaging a design critic to weigh in on these pieces and thankfully also of enlisting the designers themselves to speak out on their work.  Me, I am less concerned about the critique, and more intrigued by how a young audience views what must be an ancient play, judging by the hip media and tech culture of today. 

So in this respect, for better or for worse, I find all of these illustrations compelling.  Note how Willy is either absent (traveling) or partial, even disembodied and amorphous.  Of course I wonder how much the students studied the play itself and how well they were taught and guided on understanding it.  But this is part of my intrigue, too, that is, what happens at school.

To read what the critics and students say, here it is Life of a 'Salesman'.

Studying Death of a Salesman (1)

As part of writing The Room, a play on housemaid abuse, I study iconic plays.  I had the pleasure and privilege of studying drama and comedy, along with poetry and Shakespeare, for a year each at Northwestern University.  So we read the likes of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw).  I've watched film adaptations and stage productions of these plays over the past two years.

But what else? 

Enter: John Moore and The Denver Post, who surveyed 177 people centered on theater, in order to come up with The 10 most important American plays:

So I begin with the cream that rose to the top.

This storied Arthur Miller story seems to have escaped my curricula at the university, but no matter it is easy enough to find it and research it.  So I watched this production by the Bronx High School of Science: Act One - Death of Salesman and Act Two - Death of a Salesman.  It's a fine effort by these students, but it's a performance meant for their learning and development, if the cast and crew have serious designs on a career in theater.  We as the audience must be forbearing, then, of a less than compelling performance.  Still, I managed to appreciate how the director worked the staging and how the actors navigated their space. 

Then, I found this complete audio recording:

The YouTuber offered no description, cast or credit, but I believe it was the 2012 revival directed by Mike Nichols.  It starred the ubiquitous (now late) Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy, Linda Emond as his wife Linda, and Andrew Garfield (aka Spider Man) as his son Biff.  This is what the Bronx High School can aspire to, as immediately the tone, import and mood of this staging come through in mighty, polished measures.  Here, also is the PDF of Death of a Salesman.

Art has Value

Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto

1. Art is cross-art by nature
2. Art is always autobiographical
3. Art is sensuous
4. Art is synesthetic
5. Art is never completely original
6. Art has value

Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:

• Poetry in Multimedia 
• Shakespeare Talks! 
• Dramatis Personae 
• Art Intersections 
• T'ai Chi Empower

My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the last of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 

(image credit)

A talented artist friend

When I lived in Dubai, a Filipino friend invited me to his first solo exhibition.  His paintings were astounding, both in breadth (they were huge) and in theme (they were profound).  His creative talent wasn't narrowed to painting, but extended to photography, sculpting and performance.  At this exhibition, for instance, we all wondered where the hell he was.  Two hours into it, and he still hadn't shown up.  Then he arrived, wearing exactly what he wore in a sizable self portrait, including clown makeup, and pulling the same red wagon depicted in that photograph.  He was like the Pied Piper, as he snaked through the crowd, picking up odd things on the floor, and us opening up, making way for him, and regathering behind him to follow along.  It was a tour de force show.

I was equally astonished, however, at how much he low-balled the pricing of his pieces.  It was par for the course for a lot of Filipinos in Dubai, that they hardly saw their true worth and hardly demanded it.  They smiled at whatever pittance they received, because after all they were the happiest people in the world.  But being dead bottom on the salary scale in an Arabian Business survey was emblematic, I thought, of how people and companies took advantage of their low salary expectations and how Filipinos themselves reinforced it with their acceptance and passivity. 

On the face of it, my artist friend was the same.  So a few days later, I got together with him, and asked him point black: If someone were to offer him 10 - 20 times more than the pricing he had set for any of his pieces, would he accept it?  I was glad to hear his response:  yes.  I wanted to advocate for him and to serve as his talent agent, and his response suggested that we had something to work with.  Had he said no, instead, there would have been little reason for us to go forward.

Art as the royal road to wealth

Consider the following documentary on very expensive paintings:

If this documentary doesn't take your breath away, then you may have little or no breath to begin with.  Certainly each artist may dream of a multimillion dollar windfall for his or her art.  For the vast lot of us, however, eking a living out of what we love most is a daily struggle or an impractical option altogether.

But how to determine art value?

A few years ago I spoke to a German friend, who at the time was pursuing her PhD in marketing and focusing on pricing as a specialty.  I asked her how the value of art was determined.  We chatted a bit, but mostly she just sent me a wealth of articles on the subject.  Evidently art pricing wasn't something she had looked into, as she really wasn't able to advise me.

I gathered the following were pricing determinants:

• Talent and renown of the artist
• Promotion, sales and marketing efforts
• Historical, social and political context
• Art market trends for particular genres
• Whim, ego and wealth of the art aficionado-collector

Over time, as my thinking advances and my knowledge grows, I will elaborate on these and other determinants. 

Dr. Ron Art in perspective

It took a few years to clarify the concept, create the platform, and launch it in earnest.  So when I spoke to the foregoing friends, this wide-ranging endeavor was still in its infancy.  I wanted to create art and engage others, but I also wanted to promote, negotiate and sell it.  (a) I've been posting stuff in methodic fashion, across Google+, Twitter and Facebook, and (b) writing articles like mad across several Blogger, Tumblr and Pinterest profiles.  (c) Plus I am working on specific projects, at various stages of progress:

• Poetry in Multimedia.  Searching for a multimedia publisher for `The Song Poems
• Shakespeare Talks!  Staging `A Midsummer Night's Dream in the community
• Dramatis Personae.  Writing my play `The Room, as advocacy against housemaid abuse
• Art Intersections.  Planning my photography project `Real Beauty
• T'ai Chi Empower.  Teaching students and coaching leaders on T'ai Chi  

I'm not yet at the point of formulating the pricing for whatever I'm going to sell, but I'm getting there, for sure. I have struggled, admittedly, and that may continue, but for me there is little that is ennobling about struggling or suffering. I appreciate its inevitability, and I do my best to learn from it. But I plan to get past it and delve even more into art, and I plan to become wealthy at it.   

Art is simply not something to dish out for nothing.

Art is Never Completely Original

Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto

1. Art is cross-art by nature
2. Art is always autobiographical
3. Art is sensuous
4. Art is synesthetic
5. Art is never completely original
6. Art has value

Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:

• Poetry in Multimedia 
• Shakespeare Talks! 
• Dramatis Personae 
• Art Intersections 
• T'ai Chi Empower

My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the fifth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 

The four points I've written about so far in my Art Manifesto - (a) art is cross-art by nature, (b) art is always autobiographical, (c) art is sensuous, and (d) art is synesthetic - came to me five years ago, but this fifth is a recent inclusion.  I crystallize it here.

We are all inviolably connected to each other, and we belong on long, billowing ribbons of life, since the beginning of life itself.  So while we may pull things together in a novel fashion, while we may take a radical leap of creativity, and while our work may strike others as duly original, the fact is we are never fully alone or isolated from others in the world.  Our art may be original to some extent, but never completely so. 

Literature

Consider the famous reflection by the English poet and cleric John Donne (Meditation XVII):

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

American novelist Ernest Hemingway drew from Donne for the title From Whom the Bells Tolls.  William Shakespeare, Donne's contemporary in the late-16th, early-17th centuries, drew quite a bit from his predecessors, and they from their predecessors, too, for instance, for `Romeo and Juliet:

• The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, and Palace of Pleasure by William Painter were primary sources. 
• In turn, for his narrative poem, Brooke may have translated the Italian novella Giuletta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello.
• There are characters named Reomeo Titensus and Juliet Bibleotet in the works by Pierre Boaistuau, who translated some of Bandello's novellas into French, such as Histoire troisieme de deux Amants, don't l'un mourut de venin, l'autre de tristesse (The third story of two lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other of sadness, rf. A Noise Within).
• One Bandello story was La sfortunata morte di dui infelicissimi amante che l'uno di veleno e l'atro di dolore morirono (The unfortunate death of two most wretched lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other, of grief, rf. A Noise Within).

So one of the most famous works in literature and theater follows quite a lineage of art.

Film

`Stoker is very stylish 2013 film by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, and in its simplest, most obvious theme it is about the coming of age of a young lady.  But it's more complex than that, and quite a lot move and shift in the interiors of this family.  The acting - led by Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman - is simply superb. 

For the purpose of this article, I want to highlight American film talent Wentworth Miller, the screenwriter for `Stoker.  The name didn't ring a bell to me.  But because I love film, and I am obsessively curious about the background and crew, I Googled him.  I found out that he played the younger Coleman Silk in another beautiful, very curious 2003 film The Human Stain, also starring Kidman and Anthony Hopkins.

[Miller] used the pseudonym Ted Foulke for submitting his work, later explaining "I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own."  Miller's script was voted to the 2010 "Black List" of the 10 best unproduced screenplays then making the rounds in Hollywood.  Miller described it as a "horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller".  Although influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miller clarified that Stoker was "not about vampires.  It was never meant to be about vampires but it is a horror story. A stoker is one who stokes, which also ties in nicely with the narrative."  Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt also influenced the film. Miller said: "The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction."

Reference:  Stoker.  

I have been enthralled with `Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for a long time.  I watched that Hitchcock film (1943), and it too was superb.  I'm sure the inspiration for Miller is a bit more intricate than we can know, but an evocative name like "Stoker" and a conniving character like Uncle Charlie are the threads that stitch Miller to his creative predecessors.

  

Poetry

The influences to my poetry are many, but Shakespeare, and poets WH Auden and John Ashbery are prominent.  For example, my latest poem - Swan Song of Ophelia - is about one of the most tender yet enigmatic women in Shakespeare.  Auden wrote a breathtaking commentary on The Tempest, titled `The Sea and the Mirror, which in turn inspired me to write a long poem about a patient I worked with, who committed suicide.  Ashbery, along with surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, were instrumental to the poetry I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But let's take one from my collection The Song Poems.  The idea is simple:  I take any music video I like from YouTube, then I let it take me wherever it wishes to take me.  These poems are an account of these journeys.

The following are the specific music videos that inspired me to write this song poem:

  

 

Nowadays social media, technology devices, and digital content all extend and tighten the ties that connect us to one another.  What I've captured here is just a small sampling of my argument that art is never completely original.  To come back to Donne, none of us is an island onto himself or herself.  There is no person born and raised in complete isolation, and biologically we are forever bound to our parents.   

Art simply gives us the means, the knowledge, and the opportunity to do what creative thing we wish to do with whatever and whoever came before us.