The Black Monk

By David Rabe, adapted from a novella by Anton Chekhov
Review by Feste

Yale Repertory Theater,May 31, 2003

If a play mentions but does not actually require a cute kid, dog, or, for heaven's sake, a miniature snow white horse to show up, don't materialize one. If you can't resist, don't expect an actor of Sam Waterston's caliber to cower while the audience goes, "ooooh." Director Daniel Fish, perhaps with justified anxiety that his audience might not warm quickly to David Rabe's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's novella, "The Black Monk," sent in the emotional cavalry at the opening of his otherwise abstract production. Waterston, with the familiarity of one who knows well both horses and theater, gave the horse a comforting, resounding thump on its side and sent it north-quite literally upstaging the adorable creature.

By the end of his month playing orchard maven Yegor Semyonitch Pesotsky, Sam had grown an almost full beard (a handsome salt and pepper) shed all his McCoy mannerisms and made heavy withdrawals from banked years of classical training and intervening experience. He looked like he was having the time of his life. He also seemed to be one of the few people involved in this ambitious effort who truly understood what he was doing. Both author David Rabe and Director Daniel Fish should swallow their pride and attend more to Chekhov. Sam obviously did.

In his short stories, Chekhov often targets a social danger-say, bourgeois complacency and its ability to smother originality-and pours that humor into one character. The prototype is Olga, the smothering woman in "The Darling." But when Chekhov moves away from narrative into the spacious world of drama, he will not use his humans as such metaphors. In his plays, all but his most minor characters are full-bodied, complex characters patched, as my namesake would say, "but with virtue" or "patched with sin." Waterston knows that. Chekhov saw his plays as comedies, Stanislavsky saw them as tragedies, and so they perform best as tragi-comedies. A compromise between two visions. The "neither-nor" of true life. Sam's Pesotsky is an egotist obsessed with his orchard. But he is no narcissist. As Sam plays him, this gardener's sheer joy in that orchard is contagious. His belief that everyone should love some work with his same passion is inspiring in an age when respect for "an honest day's work" has lost all meaning. Waterston plays this eccentric as eccentric, not manic, and not deliberately destructive. Yet Pesotsky does knock over lives as he goes about his merry way. His daughter, Tanya, is the one most often knocked out of the way, but Sam invokes a Prospero-like love for her which, though also ego-driven, challenges as mere notions the gardener's repressive ideas about women and their inadequacies.

Sam's scenes with Tanya (Jennifer Bacon, once cross-examined by Jack McCoy) are especially tender. The man is made for duets and Bacon responded well to his cues. Bacon ultimately let Tanya make quite clear her love for the orchard she had not chosen and her love of a father life had chosen for her. That late realization made her self-delusion, her need to "find herself " in Moscow sweetly painful to watch. Sam somehow made us all parents to Tanya, a move which really should lead Rabe back to his text. He has missed something in his own preferred fascination with Pesotsky's chosen child, the "adopted" Kovrin.

Waterston's scenes with Thomas Jay Ryan,who plays Kovrin, do not fully succeed. Then again, one-sided badminton is a hard game to play and the director never handed Ryan a racket. Ryan is a talented actor but he plays Kovrin as a Rabe character, not a Chekhovian one. Who is at fault? The very fact that Kovrin is meant to be "the lead part" suggests Rabe may be. There are no leads in Chekhov's plays. There certainly are no heroes or villains. But rather than just adapting, hasn't Rabe the right to adopt rather than be adopted by Chekhov? If that is Mr. Rabe's conscious or unconscious ambition, he should craft for himself or for us a far more humane representative than the current Kovrin.

Then again, Thomas Jay Ryan need not have stuck to the surface of his identity, that of a great thinker who has, given this text, no great thoughts to share with us. Clearly meant to be as sympathetic as Pesotsky though persecuted because his apples are ideas, Ryan locates no inner warmth. Sam laughs; Ryan pouts. Sam becomes a stiff old man still running about; Ryan (a depressed thinker?) saunters and struts; Sam's voice shows the ever worrisome signs of strain but his diction is clear; Ryan, one can only hope under direction, slurs words, saying "ta" instead of "to" etc. Especially in the first half of the play, Kovrin seems callow and callous, egotistical and narcissistic. He has no charm. Sam does. The contrast is devastating. By intermission, the words Kovrin and the words "toxic personality type" kept coming to mind more than "misunderstood genius."

Fish's experiments with temporal dislocation, both in set design and in his direction of Ryan, were perhaps meant to bring Kovrin and Rabe closer to us, place Chekhov and Pesotsky further in the past. But the temporal split only highlighted a gap in the play. Waterston, on the other hand, absolutely inhabited his character. In addition to locating Pesotsky's "spine" as it were, he hung the rest of his skeletal frame to that psychic one, reshaping his very posture. Sam kept his tight farmer's boots on even when his suit pants covered them. Doing so did not just save time. It reminded Sam that now he had arthritic knees. In order to freeze his typical loose limbed upper torso and the shoulder and neck rolls he has used so long as Jack McCoy, Sam formed his arms into a strange, semi-frozen bear hug. That movement also curved his spine and helped age an actor who really does look younger in person than under t.v. lights and t.v. makeup. Sam Waterston became a seventy something hyperactive Russian gardener.

Yes, from the time Sam slapped that horse on its side, through the moment he stretched out flat, a bedcap-with-earflaps laid over his face to hide embarrassment (where does this man get his hats?), to his last scene, doubled over by Kovrin's verbal blows, audience sympathies rested with Pesotsky. Unfortunately, Kovrin was supposed to be his victim. Rabe needs to re-weight his play if a good actor, reading his part right, can so unsettle the balance. He should stop worrying about neglected aging boy geniuses and realize that Kovrin, like Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, is just as flawed-and just as redeemable-as is Gayev, the man who buys the cherry orchard and chops it down. He should look to Tanya if he wishes truly to adapt rather than consume Chekhov. Rabe's own fascinating play is trying to tell him about her, about her love for two men who loved but never knew her. But he should know her-and let this orchard live. This one grows apples, not cherries. The recipe for apples which tempt has not yet been lost. David Rabe wrote some of the most important plays of late last century. He, too, hasn't lost the recipe; he's just poaching in the wrong trees.

As for Sam? He plays conflicted characters better than just about anyone alive. That's not just because of talent and training. Sam Waterston knows something about the generosity great authors like Chekhov and Shakespeare brought to their plays. When The Black Monk was over and the cast took their bows for the last evening performance, it was clear the audience at Yale for their reunion weekend had come to see Sam. But with as much wattage as eye-beams ever have shot, he kept directing attention to center stage, to Thomas Jay Ryan, an actor at the beginning of his career. Yes, he was waiting for Ryan to take his bow, but he was very much putting him in a spotlight while he did so. Such is the magnanimity of a man who remembers what it was like to begin. How few of us act on what we remember. Or trust what is best of the past to have value in the present.

What of Sam Waterston's stage future? It was good to see him laughing-McCoy seldom gets to smile. It was good to have him make us laugh. Sam's comic skills are far too under-utilized. And so I, invoking the power of an allowed fool, have decided which major role Sam should take on next. Let's add it up. Sam is classically trained. He is adept at conflicted characters. He has comic flair. He is against war. He is "of a certain age." Let him play Shakespeare's Antony! Absolutely. Directors have finally come to realize that Cleopatra is a comic part. Well, Antony is a tragic hero who comes to realize he prefers comedy. A great man caught between not honor and love but between two very different visions of honor and love. Quite conflicted. A role made for Sam.

As for "what is the Black Monk"? It's whatever stops you from doing what you love. Damn the critics, damn us all. Oh, and the producers. Especially any ungrateful t.v.producer.