In Girl Crazy, Ira Gershwin wrote, "With love to lead the way, I've found more skies of gray than any Russian play could guarantee." St. Louis Actors' Studio's current offering, Anton Chekhov's Ivanov isn't depressing. It feels more like it's about boredom, at least for most of the play, when it's a frequent complaint among several characters.
But it certainly isn't a boring play. Ivanov (Drew Battles) is an intellectual semi-aristocrat running a large experimental farm, and running it, so to speak, into the ground. He's deeply in debt. His farm manager Borkin (Dave Wassilak) specializes in hare-brained schemes to make a fast ruble. Four years ago in the throes of love at first sight, Ivanov married a Jewish wife (Julie Layton), who converted, but now she's very ill. The doctor (Reginald Pierre) visits frequently and upbraids Ivanov for his seeming distaste for aforesaid wife, explaining that he speaks up because it's in his nature to be very honest. That's a self-description we will hear often. (Chekhov, himself a physician, may be excusing his own behavior?) The household, at least above stairs, is completed by Shabelsky (Bobby Miller), a penniless count who's Ivanov's aging uncle.
Ivanov has borrowed money from Zinaida (Teresa Doggett) and her husband Lebedev (B. Weller). Even though deeply in arrears, he visits them nightly to socialize – he and Lebedev are old school chums. Is he really unaware that their teenaged daughter Sasha (Alexandra Petrullo) has been making googly eyes at him for … well, years?
Possibly. What at first seems to be the boredom he claims and his hair-trigger temper eventually rise to a pretty accurate picture of clinical depression. He certainly meets the criteria for feeling helpless, hopeless and worthless. Even when Sasha declares her love, he seems unable to respond in either direction with much energy.
Director Wayne Salomon keeps things moving briskly. More importantly, he's assembled a crackerjack cast. Battles' volatility from apathy to rage to dispair is fast and on the money. Reginald Pierre as the doctor, for all his studied insistence on honesty, is almost inscrutable. We begin to wonder if perhaps he's fallen in love with the wife.
To the modern eye, the women's roles in the play – first performed in 1887 – are dated and narrow. Still, Layton as Anna, the wife, shows Ivanoff wide-eyed adoration despite his incomprehensible distaste for her, and Petrullo as the girl who's crushing on him offers him a fierier version of the same. Good work in limited roles.
Attention must be paid to Miller's masterfully crochety count, funny and unpredictable, and to Wassilak. He manages to make his schemes sound completely logical. In addition, he wears jodhpurs better than anyone I've ever seen.
Theresa Doggett not only seethes as Zenaida, she created the delicious costumes. Patrick Huber's set, deceptively simple with wood and blue lights, is a serious asset and his lighting design keeps rapid pace with what's going on onstage. Salomon has chosen to put nearly the entire cast onstage for most of the play, either facing the stage or with their backs to it, a move that enhances the intimacy of the evening. The script is the Tom Stoppard translation and Stoppard's gift with words is, as it often is, stunning. There are also bits of French and German and/or Yiddish thrown in to add to the flavor.
It's not a perfect show – some of the speeches do go rather long, for instance – but it's fascinating multi-layered theater.
Ivanov
through May 1, 2015
St. Louis Actors' Studio
Gaslight Theater
358 N. Boyle Ave.