Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya"

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

ONE YEAR, GUYS.

One whole

Huge

Crazy

Intense

Inspiring

YEAR!

I started this blog so that I could make content -- to explore new plays as well as reach out to those who wanted to do the same. And that’s exactly what has happened. I have never solicited this blog in any way -- never mentioned it to the masses on Facebook or bought Google AdWords, but already we have over 3,500 views and counting. That’s more than almost anything I’ve ever made.

It’s almost like being famous.

So thank you.

ANYWAY. Enough of that.

(Feelings? Gross.)

This week we’re celebrating the anniversary of the blog by revisiting the playwright we started with: Chekhov, in another of his brilliant works.

UNCLE VANYA

by Anton Chekhov

Like most Chekhov this one is a little hard to explain.

I think the best way to do it is to start with what IS at the top of the play:

Vanya’s been supporting Alexander Serebraikov (hereafter called The Professor), his dead sister’s husband, for years. He breaks his back and wastes his youth to provide The Professor a living in Moscow. At the top of the play The Professor has come to live on Vanya’s plantation, and what Vanya has learned is that the man he has been giving his life to support was never the shooting star he thought he was: The Professor is in disgrace with the academic community. On top of this, Vanya is desperately in love with The Professor’s young, beautiful second wife, Yelena, making him extremely jealous of the sick man (The Professor has gout). The Professor’s gout draws Doctor Astrov to the plantation. Doctor Astrov is a handsome, overworked county doctor quickly enchanted by Yelena. The Professor’s plain daughter, Sonya, who is in love with Astrov and already resentful of her stepmother because of their proximity in age, carries her resentment for Yelena openly at the start of the play. Also present on the plantation is Vanya’s mother, Mrs. Voinitsky, who still adores The Professor; Marina, the family’s old nurse; and Telegin, a poor neighbor.

That’s where we begin.

Then… they talk. Vanya confesses his love to Yelena (again); she rejects him. He rails against The Professor. Astrov comes to visit, and drinks and complains about how busy he is. Sonya and Yelena make up over Sonya’s love for Astrov, and Yelena realizes she’s enchanted with him, too. Sonya pleads for Yelena to ask Astrov if he loves her, and if he doesn’t, to ask him to please leave. Yelena does so (he doesn’t love Sonya), but really ends up telling him that she loves him. He asks her to run away with him and kisses her (Vanya sees) and it’s way more than she bargained for. The Professor announces to everyone that he has a great plan -- sell the estate and live off the profits! Vanya, enraged, tries to shoot The Professor. The Professor and Yelena decide to leave. They do, it’s tearful goodbyes -- Astrov begs Yelena to come with him, she says no. The Professor and Vanya make up, with Vanya agreeing to go back to supporting The Professor the way he always has. The couple leaves. Then Astrov leaves as well, making Sonya miserable because she knows he’ll never be back. Sonya, Vanya, and Marina are left onstage, proclaiming that the only way to combat their misery is to work. Sonya consoles Uncle Vanya by reminding him of the promise of eternal rest, and the play ends.

Comedy, guys.

Comedy.

(No, but seriously, Chekhov wanted all productions of his plays to be hilarious.)

Anyway.

Today we are looking at

YELENA

In this monologue, Sonya has just left the room after asking Yelena to please ask Astrov if he loves her. He doesn’t, and Yelena knows this. At the top of this monologue, Yelena has no idea that she loves Astrov, but by the time she’s sympathized with Sonya, she’s realized just what she’s missing out on. The two things characters in this play say about Yelena is that she’s bored, and she’s beautiful. I (personally) think this is true, but she’s frustrated with both, in a way. Something to think about.

Sidebar: Uncle Vanya’s words to Yelena are: “My darling, my heart’s delight, use your imagination! You’ve got mermaid’s blood in your veins, so be a mermaid! Let yourself go at least once in your life, fall head over heels in love with a merman, dive in with a big splash, and leave the Herr Professor and the rest of us standing on the shore, helplessly waving our arms!”

YELENA:  (Alone.) There is nothing worse than knowing someone else’s secret when you can’t help them. He's obviously not in love with her, but why shouldn't he marry her? She's not pretty, but she's so clever and pure and good, she would make a splendid wife for a country doctor of his years...  No, that’s not the point, it’s not the point.

[A pause] I can understand how the poor child feels. She lives here in this desperate loneliness with no one around her except these colourless shadows that go mooning about talking nonsense and knowing nothing except that they eat, drink, and sleep. Among them appears from time to time this Dr. Astrov, so different, so handsome, so interesting, so charming. It's like seeing the moon rise on a dark night. Oh, to surrender oneself to his embrace! To lose oneself in his arms! I'm a little in love with him myself! Yes, I'm lonely without him, and when I think of him I smile. That Uncle Vanya says I have the blood of a mermaid in my veins: "Give free rein to your nature for once in your life!" Perhaps it's right that I should. Oh, to be free as a bird, to fly away from all your sleepy faces and your talk and forget that you have existed at all! But I'm a coward, I'm afraid; my conscience torments me. He comes here every day now. I can guess why, and feel guilty already; I should like to fall on my knees at Sonya's feet and beg her forgiveness, and to cry.

This play also has a couple other truly spectacular monologues. That final monologue of Sonya’s is one of the most famous in the western canon, but Sonya also has an excellent soliloquy about what it’s like to be plain. And Yelena has at least one other truly excellent monologue as well. So check those out!

As always,

Buy

READ

And post back!

Thanks guys!

Again, it’s been amazing to have had a full year with you.

This has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and again,

I’M SHANNON

ENJOY!

Proof, by David Auburn

HI.

IT'S SHANNON.

This is a very smart, moving play made into a movie in 2005 starring Gweneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhal. I'm not 100% in love with the casting of the movie, but the play itself has some very well-written scenes and excellently characterized arguments. A teacher I had once told me that fight scenes are all about characters trying NOT to fight -- just like crying onscreen is about trying NOT to cry and playing drunk is about trying to sober up. It's the conflict of resisting the impulse that makes a character compelling, and this play has some brilliant scenes which flourish by merit of that struggle.

PROOF

By David Auburn

Proof tells the story of Catherine, the brilliant, math-minded daughter of an even more brilliant mathematician (Robert). Her father's brilliance dissolved into lunacy not long after a mathematical discovery that made him famous. Catherine was left to care for him, quitting school and living in their Chicago home while her sister Claire moved to New York and got a job to fund their father's care. At the onset of the play, Robert has died. Hal, one of Robert's students in later years, is at the house, going through the graphomaniacal scrawls Robert wrote in in a series of notebooks. He asks her out, but an argument ensues. The next day is the funeral, and Claire, Catherine's sister, has come in from New York to take control. At the funeral, Hal and Catherine hook up, and he spends the night. She gives him a key to a specific drawer in her father's study. The next morning a hungover Claire breaks the bad news: She is sure she knows best and suspects that Catherine, who inherited Robert's genius, might have inherited some of his tendencies towards insanity as well. She urges Catherine to return to New York with her, and confesses that she's already sold their father's house. Catherine (understandably), is furious. Hal comes out, amazed and bearing a notebook -- the proof in the notebook is a mathematical discovery beyond belief. Catherine reveals: she wrote it. Claire and Hal refuse to believe her -- it doesn't end well. The next day, Claire rebukes Hal for his behavior towards Catherine, but urges him to take the notebook and investigate it at the University. The following morning, Catherine prepares to leave with Claire to go to New York -- she is resigned and has no choice.  Hal comes to see her off, and asks him to please, please explain the proof to him. She accepts, and the play ends.

We will be looking at

CATHERINE

(Claire’s also a great part)

This scene happens at the beginning of the play, during Hal and Catherine’s first fight, and he’s asking to continue to come back and go through her father’s notebooks, claiming that someone needs to know whether or not Robert was actually insane, or whether there’s genius in one of the books that could be published.

HAL: Please. Someone should know for sure whether ---

CATHERINE: I LIVED WITH HIM. I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there… Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. A very smelly ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed. My own father.

HAL: I’m so sorry I shouldn’t have…

CATHERINE: After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code.

HAL: What kind of messages?

CATHERINE: Beautiful mathematics. Answers to everything. The most elegant proofs, perfect proofs, proofs like music.

HAL: Sounds good.

CATHERINE: Plus fashion tips, knock-knock jokes -- I mean it was NUTS, okay?

HAL: He was ill. It was a tragedy.

CATHERINE: Later the writing phase: scribbling, nineteen, twenty hours a day… I ordered him a case of notebooks and he used every one.

I dropped out of school… I’m glad he’s dead.

HAL: I understand why you’d feel that way.

CATHERINE: Fuck you.

The last line of this monologue is optional, but since so much of it is directed at someone not in the scene, I thought it would be good to kind of clue back into Hal as your scene partner at the last moment. Take it or leave it. :)

As always,

Buy, Read, Post!

This has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and again,

I’M SHANNON

ENJOY!

Ashville, by Lucy Thurber

Hi all, I’m Hannah Roze and I’m thrilled to be joining Eileen and Shannon in MonoBlogging!

For my first week, I am sharing a piece cut together from Lucy Thurber’s ASHVILLE. (For the record: I cut it together, it’s not a true monologue!) The character is CELIA, and the piece is cut from scene eight.

ASHVILLE is one of my absolute favorite contemporary plays and Lucy Thurber my favorite contemporary playwrights. If you want to play girls with grit—intelligent, strong, down to earth, yet vulnerable females struggling against their roots— you should read Thurber’s plays, Especially the cycle of plays called THE HILLTOWN PLAYS, of which ASHVILLE is the second. (When completed all five plays were produced in rep in 2013, simultaneously in four different downtown theaters including The Rattlestick—that’s how good Lucy Thurber is!!

ASHVILLE is set in the springtime in rural Massachusetts, (where the playwright herself grew up,) on the porch and inside of a Row House that is divided into three apartments, with identical layouts. In one apartment resides:

CELIA, 16, a high school student.

SHELLEY…36, Celia’s Ma, a waitress.

Sometimes JAKE and HARRY sleep over.

JAKE…19, Celia’s boyfriend/fiancé, a construction worker.

HARRY…Shelley’s current hook up, a bum.

Inhabiting a second apartment, are:

JOEY… Jake’s older cousin, a construction worker.

AMANDA…24, a waitress, Joey’s longterm girlfriend.

The two really love each other in a lasting way.

And in the last apartment lives:

JOE…30s-mid 40s, he deals pot and is obsessed with Ulysses by James Joyce.

They are all blue collar, working people, stuck in their hometown. Best anyone can hope for is a good job and a good marriage.

This is the world Celia wants to escape.

And there is something special about Celia. There’s this hope and potential everyone senses and gravitates to, like moths to a light in the dark. She is just starting to turn men’s heads with wild curly hair and great ass. She is bright: won’t go out till her homework is done and is going to graduate high school. She doesn’t smoke like everyone else, but when she does goes out she will drink and tries an ecstasy pill.

But she is repressed, drowning in numbness. She swallows her own thoughts and feelings to be the “good girl” she is expected to be. To be the caretaker of the depressed, jealous Shelley and good girlfriend to her oblivious boyfriend, Jake.

Then: Shelley hits Celia. Celia goes over to Joe’s, gets drunk and lets him go down on her—but that’s their secret. The next morning Jake proposes; he slips a diamond ring on Celia’s finger without waiting for her answer. That night she is supposed to go out with him and the neighbors to celebrate their engagement, but ends up in a hysterics and instead runs off with Amanda. Amanda, her older, cooler, pretty neighbor, her mother’s rival. The woman Celia has secret feelings for. After a whole night running around town, avoiding their boyfriends, when it is so early it is late, the two are on the porch watching the sky and talking. And Celia makes her move:

CELIA: I want to tell you something. No. I want. I want to really tell you something. I have things to say but when I try to say them I feel like-like nothing, you know? I pick my words very carefully-I try to say what I mean- Do you see me? I want you to see me-Do you? I get touched but nobody touches me. I get kissed and I clamp on hard. I clamp down hard, I-I walk and talk. I eat, I…I want, I want someone to touch my back, to run their hand down my back…I want, I want! God, look at the sky…it’s so filled with light…And I feel…I actually feel…feel happy! Come on let's go some place else. I'll drive. Come on. We could go to New Mexico. I read in my geography book that the land is flat and the sky is big. We could get a hell of a suntan out there. We could sunbathe with our shirts off. Would you wanna do that? Sunbathe with me, with our shirts off? Would you like to see my breasts? What? This is going nowhere. Do something. Make something happen. I've been waiting all night. You said you loved me-You told my mother you loved me-I want to feel something too-I want-Fuck-You think I’m pretty. Give me a Kiss [me]. I know you want to. [Because] You’ve been staring at my mouth all night. You're gonna kiss me. You know you’re going to kiss me. You just want to talk a lot first. Don’t lie. Why are you making me make all the moves? You're older. You’re more experienced. So, Stop torturing me! [Please]

Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Okay, it’s happening. We’re going classic here. I know we started with Nina and all that, but trust me, this one is… bigger. And better, depending on your take. This week, we’ll be exploring my favorite monologue from one of the best and most iconic ingenue roles of all time:

ROMEO AND JULIET

by William Shakespeare

Looking at

JULIET

(of course.)

Now, you read this play in high school or university, but read it again, now. It’s brilliant. The balcony scene makes me cry every time with its innocence and earnestness, Juliet’s (often cut) tragic struggle to maintain control of a situation that is entirely out of her hands in Friar Lawrence’s cell -- ugh. Brilliant.

Doing Juliet has its danger, but it also has its freedom. Everyone has seen, read, knows, and has an opinion about this play. But if you do it well, no one will care. And the key to doing it well is DO NOT IMITATE OTHER JULIETS. I’m gonna repeat that:

DO NOT IMITATE OTHER JULIETS.

Shakespeare wrote humans, not archetypes, and finding where Juliet fits into you is just as important as nailing the verse, in my opinion. Every great actress has played Juliet at some point, and finding out what YOUR Juliet looks like is an essential part of the journey. If you walk into the room with Just Another Juliet, you’ll be walked out pretty quickly. But if you spend time with this piece and find where it lands on you, where it resonates, what you understand best about it and where you think it’s funny or quirky or interesting… that’s when you find an audition worth doing. Anyway, if you’ve been asked to bring in Shakespeare, they’ve seen everything anyway, so doing something you like is better than doing something ‘rare’.

Okay, enough ranting.

Also, I’m not going to summarize for you (#sorrynotsorry #readtheplay). Shakespeare summarized it himself, and so I’ll just use his:

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth, with their death, bury their parents’ strife.

The fearful passage of their death-marked love

And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

Which, but their children’s end nought could remove,

Is now the two-hours passage of their stage.

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

(Also, two hours? Ha. Shakespeare: an optimist, ammirite?)

On to the monologue!

This is sometimes known as “the potion monologue” because it’s the scene where Juliet, having been given a potion by the Friar, is about to go into her “death-like sleep.” Despite being secretly married Romeo, Juliet has been sentenced by her father to marry the count Paris. As a means of escape the Friar has given her a potion that will put her into a sleep that will seem like death, with the promise that Romeo (newly banished) will wake her in her family’s vault after she has been buried. Pretty morbid, eh? She’s just bid her mother and (more importantly) her Nurse (her best friend), farewell for the final time, and is about to take the potion.

JULIET:

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.

I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,

That almost freezes up the heat of life:

I'll call them back again to comfort me:

Nurse! What should she do here?

My dismal scene I needs must act alone.

Come, vial.

What if this mixture do not work at all?

Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?

No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.

(laying down her dagger)

What if it be a poison, which the friar

Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,

Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,

Because he married me before to Romeo?

I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,

For he hath still been tried a holy man.

How if, when I am laid into the tomb,

I wake before the time that Romeo

Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!

Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,

To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,

And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?

Or, if I live, is it not very like,

The horrible conceit of death and night,

Together with the terror of the place,--

As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,

Where, for these many hundred years, the bones

Of all my buried ancestors are packed:

Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,

Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,

At some hours in the night spirits resort;--

Alack, alack, is it not like that I,

So early waking, what with loathsome smells,

And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,

That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:--

O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,

Environed with all these hideous fears?

And madly play with my forefather's joints?

And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?

And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,

As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?

O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost

Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body

Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay!

Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.

Ugh. So good.

Juliet also has some other amazing monologues that are even MORE commonly done: “Romeo, Oh Romeo” in Act II, scene II, “Gallop Apace” in Act III, scene II, and… pretty much the whole play. Again, read the play, have fun with the monologues, and don’t let anyone tell you you can’t play Juliet: you totally can.

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!