What’s with these New York experimental theater companies and their disdain for the moral rights of playwrights? Last year it was the Wooster Group trampling all over Eugene O’Neill’s Glencairn plays, crushing the life out of them in stiff, robotic fashion. This year it’s Mikhail Baryshnikov teaming up with Big Dance Theater to turn two of Anton Chekhov’s 19th-century, fragile love stories – “Man In a Case” and “About Love” – into flashy multi-media events replete with film footage, pop songs, radio-theater touches and dance routines.
Both the Wooster Group and Baryshnikov & Co. can get away with taking these liberties because the playwrights are dead and copyright protection has expired. This leaves the deconstructionists free to indulge themselves to their heart’s content.
Paul Lazar has been quoted as being “completely allergic to Chekhov plays where people are wearing 19th-century clothes. I literally don’t think I can see one again. I like Chekhov so much I feel like that gets in the way of my experience.”
That’s all well and good; Lazar is entitled to his opinion. But why do Chekhov then? Why not just develop your own original material? Or, if you do insist on mounting a Chekhov play, why can’t you somehow remain faithful to the playwright’s original intent and spirit?
Instead, Lazar and his cohorts have kicked Chekhov aside and substituted their own sensibilities for his. Subtle realism has been replaced by vaudeville shtick. In other words, the director has declared himself superior to the lonely Greek teacher in a small Russian town. Clad in a black suit and porkpie hat, Baryshnikov channels Buster Keaton here; he commands your attention when he moves but loses it when he speaks. He simply doesn’t have the acting skills to carry the play on his shoulders.
Tymberly Canale, as Barbara, a kooky Ukranian woman, does her best to pump energy into her doomed love affair with Belikov, but her efforts are wasted. As such, Man in a Case never really comes to life.
The same can be said, unfortunately, for the second story dramatized here, About Love, which also deals with a man unable to face up to the challenge of love. Despite all the video projection, dance interludes and kibitzing by the other characters (Jess Barbagallo, Chris Giarmo and Aaron Mattocks), the play just lies there like a lump of dough and refuses to rise.
