My dear Sir,
I should like to introduce myself as a graduate student working with your plays. I study directing for the theatre, a notion that though new in your time has since become an accepted and important discipline over the past century. I hope you don’t mind receiving the occasional letter from me. Feel free to throw them away, or burn them, though I hope you might be willing to share your ideas with me and help me to critique my own.
My project concerns your play Three Sisters. I’m afraid I’ll be doing all sorts of things to it that you might not approve of, though since you’re dead that doesn’t concern me too much. I know you felt that Stanislavsky’s realism didn’t do the play justice, and I think you’ll find my own approach somewhat less bothersome in that way. I hope that you would find my work at least an interesting investigation into the text, though we won’t actually be playing it as you wrote it. In fact, I am using your words as a “jumping off point,” and I really have no idea where the investigation will lead.
In my initial research, there are a number of questions I’m having difficulty answering. Just how rural is this town? Vershinin mentions 100,000 people, but is that some conjectural town or the one they’re actually in? If you’ve based the location on Perm, well, Perm had nowhere near 100,000 people at the time. I know the house is in town, or close to it, since Irina is able to walk home from her job, and the fire brigade need to go through the garden to get to the river for water to put out the fire. And what is the layout of this house? If Chebutykin lives downstairs, just how does that work? I ordered a book on Russian architecture, but it turned out to be a coffee table book and not much help. It does help with some details, but I was hoping to find a large home in a small town, not apartments in St. Petersburg. How far is your home in Yalta from the town itself? Could you walk to the market?
All these people talk a lot about time, don’t they. Time time time. That’s what I’m going to be looking at. You break a clock right in the middle of the script, and it’s sort of glossed over. That’s pretty important, isn’t it? I think we may begin with that- don’t be angry. We’re playing with your play; I think you might like that idea.
At rehearsal this week, we’ve been reading the play out loud. I’ve got four women and two men, and they’re taking turns reading each part. I’m so glad to find that they’re laughing at most of the things I laugh at. They especially enjoy moments when multiple conversations are going on, but are arranged to comment on each other. We’ve had a few moments of “I can’t believe she SAID that!” All the different timelines happening at once on a sort of micro-level. They whirl around each other, combine and converge. The actors especially loved the little fit Masha throws when Vershinin goes home to deal with his wife’s latest suicide attempt.
And we have another one of your doctors, as different from Astrov as can be, but with another dead patient. I wonder, did you have a patient who died during treatment that obsessed you? Maybe one of the biographies will tell me. I’ve amassed a great pile of books on my kitchen table, and sifting through them is a daunting task. And I’ve still got to read Turgenev and Gogol. Find some folk songs or popular songs of the day.
I believe I may have taken up enough of your time today. I’ll write again in a few days when I’ve finished the reading I’m doing on rural Russia. We’re quite removed from that society here in 21st Century America, and I know I’ll have some more questions for you.
Gratefully yours,
Curtis Young
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