Remembering Chekhov

This piece was published some years ago in Under the Gum Tree, shared here in honor of Chekhov’s 101’st birthday, Jan. 29, 2022

Last summer, I was invited to play Liubov Ranyevskaya in a staged reading of Acts I and II of The Cherry Orchard in Eagles Mere, the community where I spend summers, where for years, my husband and I ran our own summer theatre training program for high school actors, now on hiatus. I found myself playing a character mired deep in denial, unable to take action to save the orchard she so loved.  Liobov is expansive, joyful in her return home and utterly unable to hear the protestations that she must subdivide and sell off the orchard to save her estate. From my folding chair in the front of the Fire Hall, I looked out and saw Eagles Mere, not an orchard in frothy bloom, but the place I love most in the world, and the place I last saw my own brother.  Liubov grieves her little son; I was grieving my brother and the innocence I lost the day he died. Denial is her recourse.  I recognized her longing, her powerlessness.

I fear loss in all its forms--that the time might come when Eagles Mere isn’t possible for our family; the houses too expensive, the lake no longer suitable for swimming.  Every time I am away from my family, I fear the worst. In Eagles Mere, I am full of memories of my family, my brother, of teaching acting to decades of teenagers right here in this Fire Hall, urging them to do less, to trust more, to be vulnerable.

Vulnerable.  A word it has taken decades to understand.

Until recently, I had forgotten my fourteen-year-old self, wooden and inarticulate, praised for her vulnerability on stage. In July of 1975, I studied acting at Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, PA, a regional company, a real theatre! In the morning, I took typing. Two afternoons a week, my mother drove me to Media for scene study class.  I remember the wood planked floor, windows, lots of afternoon light. For a long time, I couldn’t recall my teacher’s name, but it floated back eventually: Penelope Reed.  We called her Penny.

I loved being onstage, pretending, imagining I was really the character I was playing. In those days, however, simplicity was hard for me. Though I understood what the teacher meant when she asked others to show us without “telling,” to trust that the text, the work of talking and listening would be sufficient, I didn’t yet know how to do that. 

“You need to be more vulnerable,” she said kindly.  I had no idea what she was talking about.

I think I was playing Anya in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a dreamer. I had dutifully copied out the whole scene into a notebook, spiral bound, small, with a cover out of a type of thin reddish-brown cardboard that was old fashioned, even in 1975.  I felt serious, professional.  While we didn’t have to memorize our lines, I was proud that the notebook could lie flat on my lap where I didn’t often need to refer to it. I learned about beats and actions and Stanislavsky’s Magic If. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to want to go to Moscow, a place I had never been and didn’t yearn to see.

One bright August morning, my older brother died in a car accident.  I didn’t go to my acting class for two weeks, but by the middle of the month, frozen with grief and longing for life to feel normal again, I returned, telling no one.

It was my turn to do my scene with a scene partner whose name and face I have forgotten. Numb, I said my lines, listened, nodded, breathed, feeling as if I were an robot version of myself.  No one in the room knew what had happened to our family.  At the end, Penelope said, “Ann, that was lovely, so truthful.”  Was truth what happened when everything else was stripped away?

“So simple, so open, so vulnerable.”

I nodded, mute.  What was she talking about?  Was my brother dead or was I dead?  I couldn’t really tell.  I felt as if I were a paper cut out of myself covered in paste, the thick white kind, scooped out of jars in elementary school with popsicle sticks, as we inhaled its sweet, sickly scent.  I felt sticky, as if stray bits would attach to me and dry, disguising my real self.  I could not say what had happened, could not tell her.  As long as I never said it, perhaps it had not really happened.

The summer finished; I went back to school, wary of being looked at or whispered about or pitied.  I learned I could prevent none of it.  There I was, vulnerable offstage, too. Vulnerable, every day.  My feelings were Vesuvian, but, to the world, I appeared a well-organized, studious tenth grader, quieter, certainly, than I had been, moving through her life in a permanent state of disbelief.  How had everything turned upside down and why, day after day, could I not find my way back to before? Eventually, an extraordinary English teacher sent me to an audition at the boys’ school for the play, Our Town.  There, I figured out that acting could allow me to scream and sob and rage—behaviors not encouraged within the quiet contours of my silent, grieving family. Role by role, play by play, I picked off the hardened paste, dirty now, and found a new version of myself, a girl more vulnerable than she had been.

Vulnerable.  Undefended.  Helpless.  Ironically, this is the state actors seek, the quality directors and teachers prize.  Vulnerable is better than guarded or showy or strident.  Vulnerable means open, willing to be changed, affected by an emotion or a conversation or a relationship. Vulnerable, I learned, requires a kind of humble courage, the willingness to allow others to see you un-retouched, simple, true, naked.  The state began to scare me less when I stopped fighting it, welcomed it, in fact, and began to grow accustomed to its gifts.  I was a good friend, sought after for my empathetic listening, someone to be counted on.  I was a good daughter, far too afraid to misbehave, for look what had happened to my brother.  A designated driver?  I was your girl--hanging out with all the drama kids who drank and smoked pot, but holding myself back, unwilling to risk a vulnerability born of being out of control.  It was okay to be vulnerable on stage or in my journal or falling asleep at night; it felt dangerous to be vulnerable when other people were in charge.

The heart of that puzzled adolescent still beats in me--seasoned acting teacher and director. I think of the many young actors with whom I have worked, encouraging to be simple, to stop trying so hard and simply to talk and listen, to be vulnerable. 

I was medium in last summer’s reading--not terrible, but too full of feeling to summon technique, too out of practice. Just for a moment, on that hot July night, I remembered Anya and Liubov and my own powerful impotence in the face of situations that cannot, ever, be resolved, fixed, healed.  Cherry orchards, journeys to Moscow, girls grieving brothers, mothers fearing the unspeakable.

I was not in the car my brother drove that morning so long ago.  I lived. Perhaps this is what Chekhov reminds us to do.  To live. Not to squander time or relationships or the orchards we are given.  To allow ourselves to be our flawed, full selves, unfettered by the fear that nips at me, at all of us, of the circumstances beyond our control that render us impossibly, irrevocably vulnerable.