Theater bigs have been arguing about how many props to have onstage forever it seems. My preoccupation with the question of how much stuff is much less hoity-toity lit crit metaphorical than Meyerhold’s, much more technical. To put it bluntly:
If we can’t see the characters’ things, how do we know how rich they are?
How much should we care about these rich people? For the wider public that was actually the big debate around The Cherry Orchard. The formerly enslaved tree-chopper vs. the aristocratic tree-hugger.
Despite their differences, Chekhov thought Stanislavsky was the best actor ever. Chekhov wanted him to play Lopakhin, son of the enslaved farmer who wins the estate. Stanislavsky chose Gayev, the impotent, oblivious, aristocrat that loses the estate. He liked that part so much, he played it as his last role.
Though his upbringing was more like Lopakhin, the serf who became a landowner, Stanislavsky said he so much empathized with Gayev, “I am starting to become him”.
Stanislavsky knew, of course, that more aristocrats like Gayev sat in his audience than former serfs like Lopakhin. He described the performance of The Cherry Orchard one evening in 1917 when the great over-turning of the social order that the Russian revolution was obviously underway, and civil war was imminent:
It seemed to us that all of them wanted to wrap themselves in the atmosphere of poetry and to rest there and bid peaceful farewell forever to the old and beautiful life that now demanded its purifying sacrifices. The performance was ended by a tremendous ovation, and the spectators left the theater in silence, and who knows — perhaps many of them went straight to the barricades. Soon shooting began in the city.
“Reticence” - that is the word that scholar Donald Rayfield ascribes to Chekhov’s attitude toward political questions, big cultural questions. Reticence requires that we don’t tip the scale. Just show the characters as they are and not tell the audience how to respond. Of course, our biases will always creep in. But we can allow our empathy to be omnipresent, too.
I like reticence and omnipresent empathy for theater design.
I think most of us are reticent towards wealth anyway. Any level of wealth. And we have empathy for everyone. Actors and directors know that empathy is the default state. Stanislavski stayed onstage at the end of The Cherry Orchard. That was not in the stage directions. The curtain should go down with both Gayev and Ranevskaya, but he stayed onstage. He got the final empathy moment.
Stanislavski was showing empathy for the audience members. They are Gayev.
It has taken me decades to put together who theater is talking to. It is a powerful artform with rich backers and a moderately wealthy audience. Not all theaters, but most. Sure, we can make theater that is not so income exclusive….but until we do - we can own our reticence towards that wealth sitting in the audience, our own wealth and the big wealth that pays our bills. And we can have empathy for them (and us) as we put a mirror onstage.
What is the final feeling you want the audience to have at the end of the show? for The Cherry Orchard, I want amused and abashed recognition of ourselves. A clear sense that the rich folks do have to go…and real pain when we hear the thwack of the axe knocking down the cherry orchard.
Final plug for a tree! Some rich folks do a great job of saving trees or whatever pretty wildlife pleases them most - buffalos in Montana or ice bergs in Patagonia.
Okay! Back to a modern play that is quite similar to The Cherry Orchard; A Prayer for the French Republic. Joshua Harmon, the playwright, understands who is in the audience and is speaking right to them. Whether or not the show lands with a contemporary audience, with the reticence and empathy it can, depends on how you dress everyone, how rich they seem. Whether we see what is lost when they go.