End of the Semester

My dear Sir,

We are now at a "wrapping up" point for the semester as the cast and I have a few weeks off before soldiering on. The past few months have been extremely productive, and ended with a real breakthrough this past Sunday.

Beginning the process, I did mountains of reading about yourself and about Russia at the time, and on critical takes on your plays. I covered my dining table with a stack of papers and books at least a foot high. I was afraid to move them, and after a few weeks, when they were moved for me, I was thankful that they'd been placed out of sight. I'd digested them, and didn't need to have them standing before me as an obstacle. As you know, I used time and its imagery as my way of initially accessing the text. My actors developed tempos for the characters to inhabit, and we worked with that for a few weeks as they got more and more familiar with and involved with the play. We reduced monologues to their most important sounds, and created movement pieces based on these. We created the timeline previously mentioned, which seemed to have a great effect on the actors in realizing the vast difference between the fast, American times they live in and the much more legato time of the play. The actors wrote character bios and reactions to the work we'd done. We created movement exercises to explore what time might feel like for the characters (though, since this was at the beginning of the process, these were not quite as fully realized as they might be were we to try the exercise again, which we might do). We explored what happens when all the characters' tempos exist in the same room, what happens when those explorations lead into text, what happens if the actors improv mundane situations both in and out of those tempos.

We then started some very basic exploratory scene work, first reading a scene out loud and then trying to improv our way through them. We also improved through a number of scenes that do not occur in the play, including Andrei asking Natasha to meet his family for the first time and also that initial meeting. We continued to work on this for the past few weeks, making steady but very slow progress. I showed the actors the film Vanya on 42nd Street as we tried to explore what it means to talk, just to simply talk, trying to overcome their impulses toward performance. We had a number of conversations about conversation itself, its rules, its meanings, how and why we do it.

And then, Sunday, improving our way through the end of Act I, it happened. Only for a brief moment. The second time we tried the improv that day, the actors all listened to each other for a moment, and responded. The scene had gotten off-course, and I wanted to stop them, but since they were actually conversing, I let it run until the conversation became forced. We tried it again, with Kris clarifying a bit before we started, and then, for a minute or two, there was magic. They were around the table, and the sisters were needling Natasha through subtext. Conversation happened, they talked, they listened, they responded, and they made Natasha uncomfortable through actual conversation. They conversed around the notion of making her unwelcome. It was beautiful.

And then it ended abruptly. But for a group of actors who want so much to DO, and not just to LIVE, it was an amazing moment, and I couldn't be more happy that we reached it before adjourning for the semester.

I've personally learned so much through the experience so far, working in this new, extended way. What happened on Sunday for that brief moment was richer and deeper than anything I've been able to achieve with actors on other projects. Having given up staging for the time being, and working with them to discover the play and its possibilities, my ideas for staging are growing along with their work, though these are still far from being formed. It's just so exciting to me to see these young actors challenge themselves and grow, and to be excited by the growth itself.

I'm still not sure how this experience will affect my work on other projects that I don't have months and months to mount. But I'm sure it will. As we go into next semester, with its promise of actual performance at the end of the Spring, and with new actors joining us next month, I'm sure I'll solidify those notions.

12/1/2009

My dear Sir,

My project working on your play is a "Directed Independent Study." That means that I will receive graduate credit for it towards my MFA in directing degree, and I have a faculty member who oversees and assigns a grade to my work. I've always been "about" grades, and I'm an anxious person to begin with. So the thought of getting a grade for my work on this project sometimes inhibits me, though I've done well so far in overcoming that so far. My professor, Kris Salata, has come to a few of our work sessions, and until today, his presence has quite terrified me. What if he doesn't like what I'm doing? What if he thinks I'm getting nowhere?

As of tonight, I no longer have that fear. Kris came to visit us today. In the previous times that has happened, I felt I needed to "show him something." Today, I just did the work. Actually, I hate to call it work. I organized the PLAYING, like I always do. And the playing was good.

Kris is as excited about the project as I am, and the actors are excited, too. They suggested we get together to play in January before classes start. I'm so lucky to have supportive faculty, and just as lucky to have excited actors. I'm lucky to have TIME to explore your play. I'm lucky that because of that time, I haven't had to focus on results... that can come later. I'm discovering how I can work, and how I can play at the same time. THIS is what I want to do, and thank goodness I am drawn to an academic setting. Hopefully I can find a place to teach that will allow me not only to rehearse a show for a month, as we do here in America, but to explore over a long time in addition to that. We haven't started "staging" anything yet. And when we do stage, next semester, we'll be all the better for it. THIS process is exactly what I need right now. And I'm determined to find a way to work this way again

Luxury and continuance

My dear Anton Pavlovich,

For the past few rehearsals, we've been continuing to consider and discover what it means to talk. One of the exercises we've tried taking scenes from your play and improving our way through them, though the results have been mixed. The actors want so desperately to DO, and rightly so. Theatre is doing. But I think maybe that, in order to really delve deeply into your play, we've got to figure out just how to BE before we can DO. People who don't like your work often claim that nothing happens in them. Of course, you and I know the exact opposite to be true; a lot happens. Lots and lots. But it doesn't happen in a way we're accustomed to today. There aren't huge plot turns, or bits, or sitcom-inspired set pieces. And these are the things we're used to working with, so you challenge us to let those things go.

So, the other day, we improved through the scene in which Vershinin introduces himself. We had only our Vershinin and our sisters available. The scene that occurred was interesting, but only began to tap into actual life. One of the things that happened was that the sisters got... nervous is the only word I can think of. They were quite taken with this new man who appeared in their home, and wanted to entertain him. Olga kept disappearing to "get some cookies" and often Irina would go with her. We could hear them whispering and giggling behind the door. I'm not sure the Olga and Irina of your time and place would do such a thing, but I think it was a good way for the young modern actresses I work with to find a relationship with the situation. I'd like to play that scene again, maybe change the rules: maybe it's too rude to leave the room, maybe you have to stay.

Today at our rehearsal, I want to improv through a scene that's NOT in your play. I believe I want Andrei to bring Natasha home for dinner for the very first time, to introduce her to the family. We'll have Chebutykin with us, and we'll see what happens. Kris, my professor, has suggested that we have an actual dinner party, and I think this "scene" would be a perfect one to play with in that setting. I'd love to make it a real dinner. Have the sisters and the doctor show up 20 minutes before Natasha and Andrei. Doing it at a restaurant just wouldn't work; my home is too far away for my busy students to get to. Kris has offered his home, but since it's the end of the semester, everyone is so busy there's just no time to do it.

Speaking of the end of the semester, we've decided we won't do a performance per se this semester. The work we're doing is stimulating and (I think) remarkable, but it hasn't yet quite begun to lead to performance, though I know it will. We are going to have an "open rehearsal" next week for the faculty committee, and just show them what we've been doing. I know it may seem that we've just been playing and that we don't seem to be getting anywhere. But I think we really ARE getting somewhere. We're finding the place and the time and the themes of the play on a really physical level, and it takes time to work like this. We ARE playing. We're working, but it feels like play because we like the work so much. So the Project will continue into next semester, with a performance then. We've been granted the true luxury of being able to explore. Really explore, without trying to dictate where those explorations take us. Perhaps the major benefit I'll take from this project is an arsenal of rehearsal techniques I'll be able to use on projects which DO have a timeline and a performance objective.

The rehearsals also function as a class for some of the actors, and it's changed in practice from what I thought it would be. They were somewhat unfamiliar with the play when we started. I'd hoped that in our collaborations we'd find ways of staging and looking at things that would come together in a performance more "about" your play than "of" it. But it's really turned into sort of an acting class for them, which is fine with me. I say that's fine because the new ways we work on the acting do inform me as to what staging, etc, should be, and certainly helps me every day with my analysis and understanding of the play. As they explore the characters and situations, themes are brought into relief then fade, and other themes surface. I try to explore them thoroughly before we move on. Sometimes I'm able to, sometimes not. I suppose that's the nature of the beast.

The other day, Kris asked me to come into his Performance II class and talk about you and your work as they began their own explorations. He asked me why I wanted to work on your play. I thought you might like to know, too. I love Three Sisters for so many reasons, but primarily because I see myself so clearly in all of the characters. I KNOW these people. The burden of everyday-ness weighs upon them in a way that other playwrights just can't seem to give. Masha brushes her teeth. And it affects the rest of her life. These people have bills to pay, and carpets to put up, and trains to catch, and books to read, and work do to. They walk home exhausted from jobs they hate, and still have to deal with the people around them. They have ENCOMPASSING lives.

Sometimes I wonder what I could do if I just didn't have to deal with MAINTENANCE. With the brushing of the teeth, and the "I have to eat now, though I don't want to, because I won't have time to later," and the need to clip my fingernails and clean the toilet. All these things sometimes weigh on my SO HEAVILY. And these are the things that the characters in Three Sisters are weighted with. ALL of life. And that's why I love your play so much.

Yours
Curtis

Text messages...

My dear Anton Pavlovich,

The actors in my project sometimes surprise me with text messages about your play and about our process that have made me smile. Thought you might like to read some of them:

I think i was wrong about masha. She lives in the present.

This uta hagen really knows what she's talking about.

I'm officially in love with this play. Just thought you should know!

I'm at my new job, and I'm online passing the time, so i'm doing checkov research. The picture i'm looking at of him looks like edward norton.

And my favorite:
Oh sweet Jesus. Curtis, you're special.

11/18/19

My dear Anton Pavlovich,

I regret that it has been so long since I last wrote to you. We've done some lovely work on your play, and I'm still not sure exactly where it's going to lead us. We worked a lot on time, and tempo, and rhythm for the individual characters, and have begun to find out what happens when these characters bring their various attributes together. I hope we can find a way to find casualness (which may or may not be the right word)... We have played some with improvising "this is a day in Act II that is not in the script." The normal day when "nothing" happens, though, of course, so many things happen on "nothing" days. So we played around with that for about an hour yesterday, to mixed results. I'm afraid too much is going on; the actors want so badly to do exciting things. I was hoping we could spend some time doing NOT exciting things, since so much of life is not exciting, but it's just THERE. Anyway, we'll keep working on it; perhaps I can find a different exercise to tap into that.

I'm hoping today we can start to tap into casual conversation, just chit chat. I don't mean to say necessarily that chit chat is what happens in your play, because that isn't it at all. But so much happens DURING chit chat, doesn't it? Actors so often want to do things with their words. They want the words to function this, and accomplish that, to encompass huge amounts of meaning. Words are always a tool, of course. They always are spoken for a reason. But quite often what we say and what we are doing are two very different things. Sometimes we speak just to speak. To pass the time. To chat. Actors so often end up with stilted cadences, and oh, they push push push the words. I don't want them to act the words. I want them to act the play. I just want them to SAY the words.

Anyway, I have a feeling that our work with Three Sisters is actually going to take us into staging the play as you wrote it next semester. I think the work we're doing now will really inform us, and hopefully the performance will be much richer because of it.

Yours,
Curtis

10/15/09 again again

Dear Anton Pavlovich

We had a great class meeting/rehearsal today. As you know, I was "stuck." So I tried an exercise that I read Peter Brook uses. We took the monologues the actors have been working on, and distilled them through a number of processes down to single phonemes and gestures. What they wanted became crystallized and pure, and when they performed them all together, that section of the room became a veritable PIT of longing. It threatened to pull the whole room into it.

That's what I have to do. I have to distill the play- how the characters relate to time in its purest, most immediate form. Script distillation over the weekend. Thank you for giving me such a rich text to work on. I think you might like where I think I'm headed!

10/15/09 again

Dearest Sir:

Here's a little more information I've found. I went through the text to see how often characters discuss the past and the future.
Here's what I found:

Mentions of the PAST

Act I:

OLGA: Father died just a year ago today, on the fifth of
May-your saint's day, Irina. It was very cold then and
snowing. I thought I could never live through it; you
were lying in a dead faint. But now a year has passed
and we can talk of it freely; you've a white dress on,
your face is beaming. (The clock strikes twelve) And
the clock was striking then too. (A pause) I remember
as they carried Father along, the band was playing,
and at the cemetery they fired a volley. He was a brigadier
general; but at that there were very few people
walking behind his coffin. It was raining, though, then.
Heavy rain and snow.

Olga: Father was
given his brigade and left Moscow with us eleven years'
ago, and I remember distinctly that early in May, at
this very time, in Moscow everything is in bloom, it's
warm, everything is bathed in sunshine. That's eleven,
years ago, but I remember it all as if we'd left there
yesterday.

Olga: Father trained us to get up at seven.

Tusenbach: I have never worked in my life. I was born
in Petersburg, cold, idle Petersburg, in a family that
never knew any sort of work or worry. I remember
when I came home from military school the footman
pulled off my boots while I fidgeted and my mother
looked adoringly at me, and was surprised when the
others didn't look at me the same way. I was shielded
from work. Though I doubt if they succeeded in shielding
me, I doubt it!

Chebutykin: And I re"'ly never did any· '
thing. Since I left the University, I haven't lifted a '
finger, I've not read a single book even, but just read '
the newspapers ....

Tchebutykin: (To
lUNA) My dear, my little child, I have known you since
the day you were born. . . . I carried you in my
arms .... I loved your dear mother ....

Vershinin: I remember-three girls. Your faces
I don't remember now, but your father, Colonel Prozoroff,
had three little girls, I remember that perfectly, I
saw them with my own eyes. How time does pass! Oh,
oh, how time does pass!

Vershinin: Your father was a battery
commander there, and I was an officer in the same brigade.

Vershinin: I was at school in Moscow and began my
service in Moscow, served there a long time, was finally
assigned a battery here-moved here, as you see. I don't
remember you, as a matter of fact, but only that you
were three sisters. Your father is fresh in my memory; I
can close my eyes now and see him as plain as life. I
. used to pay you calls in Moscow ....

Masha: Now I remember! Do you remember,
Olya, at our house they used to say, "The lovesick"
major." You were a lieutenant then and in love with
someone, and they all teased you for some reason as
the lovesick major.

Masha: But you had only a mustache then ....

Vershinin: But you had only a mustache then ....

Olga: And we lived there, too ....

Vershinin: At one time I lived in Nemetzky Street. I
used to walk from Nemetzky Street to the Red Barracks.
There's a sullen.looking bridge on the way, and
under the bridge you hear the water roaring. A lonely
man feels sick at heart there.

Vershinin: I knew your mother.

Tchebutykin: She was a lovely woman . . . bless her
soul!

Irina: Father was a military man,
but his son chose for himself a learned career.

Masha: Alexander Ignatievich used
to be called the lovesick major and he didn't get a bit
angry.

Andrei: Our father-bless his souI!-loaded us
down with education. It's ridiculous and stupid, but
all the same I must admit that in a year after his
death, I began to fill out and get fat like this, as if my
body were freed from the load.


Vershinin: And all my life I have hung around little
apartments with two chairs, a sofa and a stove that always
smokes. In my life I have lacked just such flowers
..•

Kulygin: A
history of our high school covering fifty years, written
by me.

Irina: But you've already given me a book like that at
Easter.

Kulygin: The Romans were healthy because
they knew how to work, knew how to rest,
they had mens sana in corpore sano. Their life flowed'
on according to fixed forms.

Irina: With us three sisters, life hasn't yet been
beautiful, it has stifled us as weeds do grass


ACT II

Ferapont: And in Moscow, so a contractor was saying
the other day at the District Board, some merchants
were eating bliny; one of them, it seems, ate forty
blinies and died. It was either forty or fifty. I
wouldn't remember.

They married me off when I was eighteen years old,
and I was afraid of my husband because he was a
teacher, and that was when I had barely finished my
courses. He seemed to me terribly learned then,
clever, and important.

Masha: At home, just before
Father died, it was howling in the chimney.

Irina: Two weeks ago he lost, in December he lost.

Irina: No. Not a kopeck for eight months. (Tchebutykin hasn’t paid rent)

Vershinin: I was graduated from the same school you
were, but was not at the academy; I read a great deal,
but don't know how to choose books, and read, perhaps,
not at all what I should;

Tusenbach: For five years I kept pondering it and finally decided.

Tchebutykin: I've had no time to marry because life
has flashed by me like lightning, and also because I
was madly in love with your mother, who was mar~
ried ....

ACT III

Olga: She's been these thirty years with us.

Olga: For two years he hasn't been drinking and here
all of a sudden he's gone and got drunk.

Tchebutykin: Last Wednesday,
I treated a woman at Zasip--she died, and I'm to
blame for her dying. Yes . . . I knew a little something
twenty.five years ago, but now I don't remember
anything.

Tusenbach: I'm
looking at you now and am reminded of how long
ago once on your saint's day you were all so gay and
happy, talking of the joy of work .... And what a
happy life I dreamed of then! Where is it?

Irina: I kept expecting us to move to Moscow; there
I'd meet my rea! beloved, I dreamed of him, loved
him.Notice how talk of Moscow moves into the past here, and not the future.

ACT IV
MASHA (Sitting down): Nothing .... (A pause) Did
you love my mother?
TCHEBUTYKIN: Very much.
MASHA: And did she love you?
TCHEBUTYKIN (After a pause): That I no longer remember.


MASHA: Is "mine" here? OUf cook Marfa used to talk
about her policeman like that: mine.

Andrei: Oh, where is it, where is gone my past, when I
was young and gay and clever, when my dreams and
thoughts were full of grace, and the present and future
bright with hope? Why is it that when we have barely
begun to live we grow dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy,
indifferent, useless, unhappy .... Our town has been
in existence now for two hundred years, a hundred
thousand people living in it, and there's not one who's
not just like the others, not one that's outstanding either
in the past or in the present, not one scholar, not one
artist, not one who's even faintly remarkable, and
would arouse envy or any passionate desire to imitate
him. They just eat, drink, sleep, and then die .... Others
are born and they, too, eat, drink, sleep and to keep
from sinking into the torpor of boredom, vary their
lives with foul gossip, vodka, cards, chicanery, and the
wives deceive the husbands, while the husbands lie,
pretend not to see anything, hear anything, and an unavoidably
banal influence weighs on the children, and
the divine spark dies in them and they become just as
pitiful, identical corpses as their fathers and mothers
were .... ALSO THE PRESENT


Mentions of the FUTURE

Irina: Brother will be a professor very likely, but all the
same he won't live here.

Olga: Masha will be coming to Moscow for the whole
summer every year.

Tusenbach: The time has come, something tremendous
is hovering over us all, a vast, healing storm
is gathering; it's coming, it's near already, and will
soon dear our society of the laziness, the indifference. the prejudice against work, the rotten boredom.
work and in another twenty-five or thirty years,
man will be working. Everyone!

Solyony: Twenty-five years from now you won't even
on earth, thank God! In two or three years you'll die of "
distemper, or I'll forget myself and put a bullet in your ,
forehead, my angel.

Masha: Just as we won't be remembered either. They'll forget
us.

Vershinin: Yes. They'll forget us. Such is our fate, it
can't be helped. What seems to us serious, significant,
highly important-the time will come when it will be
forgotten or seem unimportant. (A pause) And it's an
interesting thing, we can't possibly tell now just what
will be considered great, or important, and what pitiful,
ridiculous. Didn't the discoveries of Copernicus or, let's
say, Columbus, seem at first unnecessary, ridiculous,
and some shallow nonsense written by a fool seem to
be the truth? And it may be that our present life, to
which we are so reconciled, will seem very strange some
day,' uncomfortable, stupid, not pure enough, perhaps
even sinful. . . .

TUSENBACH: Who knows? Perhaps our life will be called
superior and remembered with respect.

ACT II

Tusenbach: And every day I'll come to the telegraph
office and see you home, I'll do that for ten, twenty,
Years for as long as you don't drive me away ...

Tusenbach: How many years there are left for us
, ahead, along, long row of days, full of my love for
you ....

Irina: If he'd lose everything soon, perhaps we'd go away
from this town. Oh my Lord God, I dream of Mas-cow
every night, I am like someone completely possessed.
(Laughing) We are moving there in June and
from now to June leaves still ... February, March,
April, May .... Almost half a year!

Vershinin: Let's dream ... for example,
of the life that will come after us in two or three hundred
years.

TUSENBACH: Well? After us they will fly in balloons,
the style of coats will change, they will discover the
sixth sense perhaps, and develop it; but life will remain
quite the same, a difficult life, mysterious and
happy. And after a thousand years, man will be sighing
the same: "Ah, how hard it is to live!" and mean~
while, exactly the same as now, he will be afraid of
death and not want to die.

Vershinin: It seems to me ,everything on earth must
change little by little and is already changing before
our very eyes. In two or three hundred, eventually a
thousand, years-it's not a matter of time-a new,
happy life will come. We won't share in that life of
course, but we are living for it now, working, wellsuffering;
we are creating it--and in that alone lies
the purpose of our being and, if you like, our happi- '
ness.

Vershinin: And yet it does
seem to me that what's most important and real I do
know, know solidly. And I'd so like to prove to you
that there's no happiness, there should not be, and
there won't be, for us .... We should only work and
work, and happiness-that's the lot of our remote
descendants. (A pause) Not I, but at least the descendants
of my descendants.

Tusenbach: Not only in two or three hundred but '~ ,
a million years, even, life will be just the sam~ as It
was; it doesn't change, it stays const~t, follow~ng Its
own laws, which are none of our affaIr, or whIch, at
least you will never know_Birds of passage, cranes,
for example, fly and fly, and no matter what thoughts,
great or small, stray through their heads, they wIll fly
just the same and not know why and where. T.hey fly
and will fly, no matter what philosophers spnng up
among them; and they may philosophize as much as
they like so long as they fly. . . .

Verhsinin: Let's suppose
that among the hundred thousand inhabitants of
this town, which evidently is backward and crude,
there are only three such people as you. It is obvious
that you cannot triumph over the dark masses that
surround you; in the course of your life you'll have to
yield little by little and be lost in the crowd of a hun- .
dred thousand; life will stifle you, but just the same
you'll still be there and not without influence; your
kind, after you, will begin to appear, six, perhaps,
then twelve, and so on, until finally your kind will
get to be the majority. After two or three hundred
years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful,
wonderful.

Tusenbach: After many years, you say, life on earth.
will be beautiful, wonderful.


Fedotik: So you will not
be in Moscow.

Vershinin: Just
as you won't notice Moscow when you live there.
Happiness we have not and it does not exist, we only
long for it.

Tusenbach: I'm going to work.

Tusenbach: And
I'll go with you, Andrusha, to Moscow, to the university.

ACT III

Anfisa: I'll get feeble and
everybody will say: get out! And where will I go?

Natasha: And when my Sofotchka grows up and enters
high school, I shall be afraid of you.

Olga: I shan't be the headmistress.

Natasha: You will be elected, Olitchka, that's decided.

Vershinin: I grabbed them, ran
and kept thinking one thing: What more will they
have to live through in this world!

Vershinin: And a little more time will pass, some two or three
hundred years, and they will look on this life of ours
now with fear and derision, everything now will
seem then to be all angles and heavy and most inconvenieut
and strange. Oh, what a life that will be,
what a life! (Laughing) Forgive me, I'm philosophizing
again. Allow me to continue, ladies and
gentlemen. I'd like awfully to philosophize, now that
I'm in such a mood for it. (A pause) It's as if everybody
were asleep. And so I say: What a life it will
be! You can just imagine .... Here in town there
are only three of your kind now, but in coming
generations there will be more, always more and
more; a time will come when everything will veer to
you, they will live like you, and then, too, later on
you'll get antiquated, there'll be people springing up
who are better than you ....

Irina: They
are taking the brigade from us, transferring it some·
where far away.

Irina: We'll be left alone then .... Olya!

Irina: Darling, precious, I respect, I value the Baron,
he's a marvelous person, I'll marry him, I consent,
only let's go to Moscow! I beg you, let's go! There's
nothing in the world better than Moscow! Let's go,
Olya! Let's go!

ACT IV

Fedotik: It's not meet again, but good-by, we shall
never meet again.

Irina: Some day we'll run across each other.

FEDOTIK; In ten or fifteen years maybe? But by then
we'l! scarcely know each other, we'l! greet each other
coldly ....

Roday: We won't meet again.

Kulygin: I am afraid you'l! marry there in Poland ....
The Polish wife will embrace you and say; "Kochanyl"

Tchebutykin: In a year they will retire me,
I'I! come back here and live out my little span near
you. Just one short year is left before my pension. (He
puts one newspaper in his pocket and takes out another)
I'I! come here to you and change my life from
the very roots. I'I! become so quiet, right-rightminded,
respectable.

Irina: I have everything all ready, after
dinner I'm sending off my things. The Baron and I
are getting married tomorrow, and tomorrow we are
leaving for the brickyard, and day after tomorrow I'll
be at the school, a new life is beginning. Somehow
God will help me!

Irina: And tomorrow evening I won't be hearing that
"Maiden's Prayer" any more, and won't be meeting
Protopopov ....

TCHEBUTYKIN: I don't know. I might return in a year ...
Though the devil knows .•. it's all the same ... ,

ANDREI: The town will be dead. As if they had covered
it with a cowl.

ANDREI: Our house will be empty. The officer. will go.
you will go, my sister will be married, and I'll be lef.
alone in the house.

Tusenbach: I'll take you
away tomorrow, we will work, we'll be rich, my
dreams will come true. You shall be happy.

Andrei: when I think of the futur~ Oh,.how good it is! I begin
to feel so easy, so free; and in the distance a light
dawns, I see freedom, I see how my children and I are
freed from idleness, from kvass, from goose with cabbage,
from naps after dinner, from despicable sloth .

Olga: By tomorrow there won't be an officer in town; it
will all be a memory and for us, of course, a new life
will begin. . . . (A pause) Everything turns out not
as we'd like to have it. I didn't want to be a headmistress
and yet I became one. Which means we are
not to be in Moscow.

Vershinin: Life is
difficult. It presents itself to many of us as blank and
popeless, and yet, one must admit, it gets always clearer
and easier, and the day is not far off, apparently,
when it will be wholly bright. (Looking at his
watch) It's time for me to go, it's time! Once humanity
was occupied with wars, filling its whole existence
with marches, invasions, conquests, whereas now all
of that is outlived, leaving behind it an enormous
empty space which so far there is nothing to fill;
humanity is searching passionately and, of course,
will find it. Ah, if only it were quicker!

MASHA: We'll
be left alone to begin our life ovet again. We must
live .... We must live ....

IRINA: The time
will come when all will know why all this is, what
these sufferings are for, there will be no secrets-but
meanwhile we must live-must work, only work!
Tomorrow I'm going away alone, I'll teach in the
school and give my whole life to those who need it
perhaps. It's autumn now; winter will soon come
and cover everything with snow, and I'll work,
work ....

OLGA: so gaily, bravely, and one wants to live. Oh, Lord!
Time will pass and we shall be gone forever, they
will forget us, they will forget our faces, voices, and
how many of us there were, but our sufferings will
turn into joy for those who will be living aftet us,
happiness and peace will come on earth, and they
will remember with some gentle word those who
live now and will bless them. Oh, dear sistets, our
life isn't over yet. We shall live! The music plays so
gaily, so joyously, and it looks .as if a little more
and we shall know why we live, why we suffer ..••
If we only knew, if we only knew!