'Lapdog' strays but returns to Chekhov

By Ed Siegel, Globe Staff, 9/18/2003

CAMBRIDGE -- It seems that a calling card of the post-Robert Brustein American Repertory Theatre is to begin each season with an Anton Chekhov adaptation that will have many of the Russian playwright's most ardent admirers fuming.

Last season debuted with an "Uncle Vanya" that highlighted the Samuel Beckett side of Chekhov. The 2003-2004 season is ushered in with an adaptation of a Chekhov short story with traces of Franz Kafka and Abbott and Costello. The ART's "Vanya" made a strong case for toughening Chekhov up. But Kama Ginkas, the Russian auteur who adapted and directed "Lady With a Lapdog," is less convincing in adding bells and whistles to Chekhov's perfect short story "Lady With a Lapdog."

Sometimes translated as "Lady With Lapdog" or other variations, the story focuses on a middle-class Russian man who thinks women are good for only one thing until he meets a sad, young married woman in Yalta. When he returns to Moscow, he finds that he has fallen in love and begins to obsess about her.

The story is less than 20 pages, so how does this make for a two-hour, four-character play? Send in the clowns. Two characters in long bathing trunks and derby hats follow the lovers around, playing fool and foil to their romantic and sexual aches and pangs, threatening to make their liaisons more Dangerfield than dangerous.

The four characters also narrate the story, again injecting slapstick and other Ginkasisms -- endlessly repeating a word, hamming up the neuroses. The first half-hour of this is excruciating as it substitutes Ginkas's tiresome jokiness for Chekhov's pitch-perfect prose.

It also doesn't help that the stage is set up to accommodate the beachfront property on which the first half of the play takes place -- it comes at the expense of the audience. The people in the first few rows have to crane their necks while some on the left-hand side aren't able to see the center of the set design -- a boat in a sea of blue -- as they're blocked by a row of beach cabins onstage. The result Tuesday night was people scurrying for new seats as the play began. A couple of people just sat in the aisles, blocking the actors who race up and down the stairs.

Yet for every patience-trying aspect of the production, there is something that clicks. Most important, the ineffable beauty of the story -- the search for meaning outside one's self, for a semblance of happiness -- comes through clearly. Life is a mystery, and love is its most unfathomable clue.

As the prologue recedes and the lovers connect -- he from atop a giant ladder, she on the ground joined to him by a large dropcloth -- the mood of the play begins to shift, and the lead actors come into their own. Stephen Pelinski, as Dmitry Gurov, seems less like a Tony Roberts stand-in from Woody Allen movies, and Elisabeth Waterston as Anna Sergeyevna seems less like a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

Instead, their personalities take on more psychological and humanistic weight. Pelinski, in particular, is masterful at conveying Gurov's mood swings from hope to despair with a look here and a gesture there instead of big sweeping emotiveness. The program notes describe Ginkas's method as "Stanislavsky without the Freud," yet the best moments onstage are Freud with a minimum of Stanislavsky. What is at the root of Dmitry's obsession and Anna's depression? Why do we have so much invested in the success of their adultery?

Both Chekhov and Ginkas are content to let those questions lie unanswered, and it's that unbearable lightness of being that Ginkas captures in the second half of the play with spare theatricality. Pelinski narrates his character's pacing back and forth while sitting in a chair and moving his index finger from side to side. A scene in which he outlines the curves of Waterston's body, holding his hand a few inches from her, is more sensual than if he were actually touching her.

Even the clowns, Trey Burvant and Robert Olinger, add to the sense of sadness, playing his rejected sons in one scene, while also contributing more punch to Ginkas's other flourishes -- such as rushing Waterston off the stage as if they, the clowns, are the train leaving the station in Yalta.

Not all of these touches work. I hate to sound like my parents, but does Leonid Desyatnikov's fine Russian tango have to be played at ear-splitting level? And in general, I'm not sure that the play is ultimately any more effective or affecting than if Pelinski just sat in a chair and read the script. At least the audience's sight lines would be better.

But the ART's adventurous approach to theater is often too lightly dismissed, particularly its championing of Russian and East European directors whose contemporary stylings were born from the repression of the Communists. Artists such as Ginkas often turned to the classics because they could find freedom in adapting Shakespeare or Chekhov while their own writing would be censored. It's not clear that you can find those political resonances in "Lady With a Lapdog," other than in Gurov's need to lead a double life.

Yet in his particular theatrical style, Ginkas ultimately does embrace the playwright's essence. It's pure Chekhov, if not Chekhov for the purists.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.

Lady With a Lapdog

Play in one act adapted and directed by: Kama Ginkas. From the short story by Anton Chekhov. English translation by Ryan McKittrick and Julia Smeliansky. Set, Sergey Barkhin. Lights, Michael Chybowski. Costumes, adapted by Barkhin from designs by Tatiana Barkhina. Music, Leonid Desyatnikov. Sound, David

Remedios. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre.

At: the Loeb Drama Center, through Oct. 11. 617-547-8300.