At La Cartoucherie, a former munitions factory on the outskirts of Paris and the home of Ariane Mnouchkine’s legendary avant-garde Théâtre du Soleil, the prolific American playwright Richard Nelson is holding a master class in naturalistic storytelling. His splendid Our Life in Art, which he also directs, is about the Moscow Art Theatre’s tour of America in 1923 and one hard day’s night with the ensemble around a kitchen table in a Chicago boardinghouse. It is the best American play I’ve seen in many seasons.
The play’s title echoes Konstantin Stanislavsky’s celebrated autobiography, My Life in Art, and foreshadows the fine linguistic filigree to follow. The simple pronominal shift from “My” to “Our” telegraphs the play’s own distinctive point of view: this is a family portrait of the Russian troupe surviving in a foreign land, “a fictional account based on known facts,” according to Nelson.
Stanislavsky preached the gospel of ensemble. “The director is no longer king,” he said, laying out the division of labor in rehearsal. “The first stage is one of experiment, where the cast helps the director; the second is creating the performance where the director helps the cast.” By the time Stanislavsky arrived in Chicago, the actor-director, who had co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, was world-renowned.
His innovative productions of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky had streamlined stage naturalism and showed the way for a more nuanced, psychological examination of character. These revisions of the acting and production process were on show for the first time to American theatricals and proved inspirational to the development of the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, both in New York City, whose performers and playwrights brought new depth and emotional precision to their storytelling.
Here, in telling the story of the ensemble, the warp and weft of Nelson’s deft, meticulous dialogue works onstage the way negative space does in painting. Beneath its ordinary surface, the specificity of the badinage is a sleight of hand that manages to trap under it both the life of the theater and the life of the times. “Our work as artists is to create the complexity of human beings,” Nelson has said. Here, on the 25th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre, the actors drink, joke, gossip, argue, sing, prepare, and eat a celebratory meal. This symphonic hubbub refuses reduction to any one theme or narrative algorithm. Nelson doesn’t provide answers; he engineers imminences. Out of the subtle accretion of gestural and verbal detail, Nelson manages to summon up a universe as vivid, confounding, and compelling as life itself.
The play is bookended by two letters from Stanislavsky to Joseph Stalin. Both are written in the late 1930s, and both obliquely set out the play’s ironic historical parameters: a time between Russia’s Great Famine in the early 1920s and the Great Purge of the late 1930s. The first, which serves as the prologue, is an abject apology for the time to which the body of the play flashes back. In it, Stanislavsky (Maurice Durozier) kisses the authoritarian hand that now feeds him but with an extra mouthful of humble pie.
Nelson’s deft, meticulous dialogue works onstage the way negative space does in painting.
The second is a bread-and-butter letter of another craven kind, written in 1938, a strategic piece of chicanery concocted for Stanislavsky, who was forced to sign in order for his theater and his art to survive the purges. If actors are technicians of the spirit—and they are—then in order to exist under the totalitarian system, the actor’s public masquerade must also be a private, moral one. “You have to show nothing. Hide everything. It’s an art in and of itself,” one of the troupe’s actors says, explaining the early Bolshevik re-education lectures they were forced to attend, to Richard Boleslavsky, a former company actor now self-exiled in the West who serves as the troupe’s pathfinder in the American wilderness.
Boleslavsky (Arman Saribekyan) reads out the play’s prologue, then promptly walks into the story. It’s three a.m. on a Sunday. The company straggles into the kitchen to greet him. He’s been to New York, and “there’s a lot to talk about.” This throwaway detail is a typical crafty piece of Nelson’s dramaturgy. Boleslavsky’s news must be important—why else would they get up at this ungodly hour?—but there’s no theatrical drum roll to announce the plot point’s significance. It’s just a narrative fillip, which adds to the specific gravity of the reunion. He’s back in time, but for what? The occasion seems to be the next day’s 25th-anniversary celebration, but that hardly warrants an arsenic-hour congress. So what is it? And who are these people? Nelson’s scenes hold the known and the unknown together in some mysterious and compelling equipoise.
Nelson’s game is to show, not to tell. He’s a dab hand at impressionistic strokes of dialogue that catch glints of character and disguise exposition. Whatever its import, for instance, Boleslavsky doesn’t immediately blurt out his news. First he must drink tea. Then there’s gossip about a fracas at a bar between two cast members. The hotheads are produced and disciplined. One of the older actors has been caught at the matinee, kissing an ingénue backstage. His wife, also an actress in the company, has had a meltdown and moves tearily into another room. In all this commotion, what of Boleslavsky’s New York news? “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Stanislavsky tells him when he finally arrives in the kitchen. Is Stanislavsky just tired, or is he forestalling news he knows is bad?
Around the kitchen table, as they eat their Russian specialties and gossip about the situation back home—“You can buy things now in Moscow”—the troupe seems confounded by the spectacle of American capitalism and the wealthy Chicago White Russian émigrés who embrace them. Coming from a culture of scarcity, the Russians are flummoxed by American conspicuous consumption, and the vindictive triumph that comes with the show of surplus. They are at once seduced and repulsed by it.
At one party, which Stanislavsky describes, the host gives him two leather-bound volumes of Pushkin. “I told him I can’t take them. They must be worth a fortune. And guess what he said then. ‘Why not? Why not?’” At another swank gathering, he and his lead actress, Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, are guests of honor who find themselves objects of conspicuous waste. “They’re talking. Not a soul around the table is even looking at us. All just seemed involved in their—‘whatevers,’” Stanislavsky tells the group. “Their own thoughts? Are they talking business? They’re probably all millionaires. So they do business … ”
The actors may be wary of wealth, but they want it. “We’ll have money when we get home,” one of them says, dreaming of buying a dacha south of Moscow. As a group they understand that in Russia their travel and their success make them objects of envy; they mull over how to behave and pre-empt the inevitable hostility when they return. The radical change of government has brought with it a radical change in popular taste.
The Russian clippings passed around the table signal the cultural blowback: the Moscow Art Theatre dismissed as a “peephole”; its great playwright Chekhov called out as “bourgeois”; a cartoon depicts “Lord Stanislavsky” bowing to an American millionaire, with a caption reading, “How glad I am not to see before me Soviet scum.” In the ebb and flow of the high-spirited conversation, a cable arrives, ordering the troupe to return home “within a few months” or be considered “political fugitives and so criminals.”
“Why a few months?” one actor questions. “So we can make them a little more money,” Stanislavsky responds, brushing away the threat for the more serious issue of his anniversary toast to the troupe. “Does any other creature ask itself: Where is my place? Why am I here? Where do we belong? Only we do that.... And from that we make theater.”
But theater is show business, and the nobility of the actor’s calling requires cash as well as creativity. When Boleslavsky finally delivers his New York news to the theater’s stakeholders—its major players—the fact is brought home with a wallop. Proceeds from the weekly charity shows are siphoned off by the Soviet Union, swallowing any lingering profits. Neither the actors nor their Russian lawyer have understood the fine print of their American contract, which guarantees the New York producer against all losses for the tour but not for the charity shows, whose enormous production costs are borne by the Moscow Art Theatre. They’re a succès d’estime—that is, a success that’s run out of steam.
“Everything you’ve saved in the past 10 months or so. It’s gone,” says Boleslavsky. “How do we live?” one of the actors asks Stanislavsky. “We live as best we can. What’s our choice … ?” he says. To pay off the debt, Stanislavsky says, there will be immediate wage cuts for the minor players; the major ones will have to work for free. As the company digests this discombobulating news, Boleslavsky adds yet another insult to their injury. “Canada has refused us entry.” And when an actress asks why, the irony of his answer hangs in the air. “You’re Bolsheviks,” he says.
The actors may be wary of wealth, but they want it.
In Nelson’s clever telling, as a way of solving their money problems, the lifeline of a possible Broadway season is dangled in front of Stanislavsky, only to be refused by him with a terse “I’m sorry” to his actors. The mystery of Stanislavky’s stoic behavior is winkled out later when he shares a photograph of his son at a Swiss sanitarium, where he is recovering from tuberculosis. The boy is wearing a new suit—the clothes are a gift from the parents of a dead tuberculosis victim. “My wife is very proud. At first she didn’t want to take the clothes. She felt humiliated.... ‘Look what we’ve come to,’” he explains. “She said there are times, times like these, when we forget our pride, accept humiliation because all that really matters now—all we can ask of ourselves and others—is to try and keep our boy warm.... Because, as we must know, winter is coming.”
At the finale, in a robust, defiant song about the vagabond life, the chill of compromise is temporarily banished. Boleslavsky momentarily steps away from the playing and singing to read Stanislavsky’s second letter to Stalin to the audience, then rejoins the song as it ends. There is a pause, and the lights fade. The power of it is as much spatial as aural. It plays as both a celebration and a haunting of more terrible compromises to come.
On the night I saw the play, the cast took five curtain calls, and the audience never stopped applauding between them. Nelson was coaxed up from his aisle seat to take a bow. It was a wonderful occasion. Our Life in Art is one of the few true-to-life plays Mnouchkine’s company has mounted. The 10 alternating actors (plus the actor playing Stanislavsky), who are used to a more presentational style of performing, met the internal psychological challenges of the complex script well.
Afterward, they huddled around a table in the main hall, toasting each other. They had done themselves, and the audience, proud. The sight of their elation reminded me of Stanislavsky’s envoi to his actors at the end of the 25th-anniversary boardinghouse celebrations. “We are actors. We watch. We watch, observe how people go about their lives.... Oh, there is meaning there. There is life.” Nelson’s play is a gorgeous testament to that credo, the artist’s endless and proper work of attention.
Our Life in Art is performed in French. (Mnouchkine translated the script after rehearsals had already begun.) I don’t speak much French, but I know how to say “Chapeau!”
Our Life in Art is on at the Théâtre du Soleil, in Paris, until March 2
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty
