Review: 'Ivanov' @ UCLA Live

Fog rolls in throughout the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz’s production of “Ivanov.” But even though the effect is largely confined to the stage area, it’s a sure bet that anyone attending this UCLA Live Seventh International Theatre Festival offering with the hope of encountering Chekhov’s early drama will find themselves completely fogged in.

Maybe it’s better to leave the Russian playwright out of this. Or at least give him lower billing. This is a deconstruction, which ipso facto puts the director in the spotlight. But to be honest, I was only intermittently aroused by the shock of Bulgarian-born auteur Dimiter Gotscheff’s straitjacket interpretation.

The real reason to investigate this work, which runs through Sunday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, is to marvel at a world-class ensemble capable of enlivening a monochromatic canvas with a certifiably antic theatricality. Of course, I’m writing this for that theater-going subset who won’t mind sitting for nearly 2 1/2 hours without intermission glancing at English supertitles as actors howl in German.

Ah, leave it to the European avant-garde to come up with seriously playful solutions to problems of its own crackpot invention. The production, imported from one of Berlin’s leading centers for theatrical innovation, reduces “Ivanov” to a drama of “existential despair,” as the program notes diagnose it. Saddled with a stagnant concept, the actors are charged with rescuing the audience from total stupefaction by deploying as much hyper-theatricality as they can muster, sometimes to a few orchestrated strains of such mawkish pop hits as “My Heart Will Go On” and “All By Myself.”

Chekhov is often erroneously dismissed as “static,” but Gotscheff’s austere version really grinds the action to a halt. The irony is that “Ivanov,” the tale of a neurotic suffering an identity crisis as his universe crashes down around him, is loaded with melodrama. The first act introduces us to “Ivanov” (Samuel Finzi) and his paralyzing melancholy. The second act ends with Ivanov’s wife, Anna (a husky voiced, daringly unangelic Almut Zilcher), who has been cut off by her parents for marrying outside the Jewish faith, discovering her husband in an embrace with the infatuated young daughter of his impatient creditors (Nele Rosetz, looking like a new member of the B-52’s). The third act culminates with Anna being told by Ivanov (in the most vicious manner possible) that she is dying from tuberculosis. And the final act climaxes in, let’s just say, a 19th century bang, which the playwright learned to avoid only after “The Seagull.”

Gotscheff transforms this Chekhovian soap opera into “Endgame.” Now, a Beckettian reading of Ivanov is no more wrong than a Beckettian reading of “King Lear,” as Peter Brook taught us to appreciate. It all depends on how it’s done. The trouble here is that the director would rather take a facile leap into the absurd than match the playwright’s brooding reflection on the imprisoning nature of character.

The cause of Ivanov’s depression is the subject of general dispute among his friends and family. He’s in need of love, he’s the product of his environment, he’s one of Russia’s “superfluous” men (i.e., a Hamlet-like kvetcher who doesn’t see the point in doing anything). When Anna, pushed to the brink by his behavior, accuses him of being the fortune-hunting scoundrel that gossiping tongues say he is, he utters unretractable cruelty that for all intents and purposes seals his doom.

Our protagonist, neither a closeted hero nor an abject villain, is already disgusted by his own moral and emotional failures. He just can’t abide others, especially Lvov (Max Hopp as an evangelical fop), the self-righteous doctor treating Anna, imposing their simplistic definitions on him. In fact, Ivanov feels he got into the mess by trying to lead an idealistic existence he was ultimately incapable of sustaining.

Samuel Finzi, shuffling about as though he were weighed down with ennui, is extremely adept at theatricalizing Ivanov’s alienation — his every gesture reveals what a burden human connection has become. And no wonder when you take a gander at the circus freaks Gotscheff has vibrantly assembled as a stand-in for this provincial Russian society.

Dressed for a Fellini carnival, these ghoulish figures are trapped in solipsistic quicksand — a reasonable assessment, though more effective as an image than as a dramatic experience. The skillfully audacious cast members certainly leave you wondering what double-jointed theatrical trick they’ll do next, but be grateful that the fourth act is replaced with a spray-painted stick figure, a few crashing dummies and some lines interpolated from “The Cherry Orchard.”

Is any of this resonant? Only marginally so. But then postmoderns find new thrills in turning classics into potpourri.

-- Charles McNulty

"Ivanov," Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. $40 - $60. (310) 825-2101 Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (no intermission)

Top photo: Almut Zilcher as Anna Petrovna and Samuel Finzi as the title character in "Ivanov." 

Bottom photo: Zilcher and Max Hopp as Lvov.

Credit: Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Daniel Blinkoff]

I could not disagree more strongly with what Mr. McNulty has stated. Ivanov is all too easily portrayed in the most melodramatic of ways. Every incarnation of this play I have ever seen, especially Kevin Kline's interpretation at Lincoln Center a number of years ago, has failed to capture the underlying story of individual loss that's embodied in this play due to the fact that they usually get lost in an all too usual American sense that the melodrama is the key. This production doesn't "reduce Ivanov to an existential despair", but rather it reveals it to be that. The fog works as an underlying emotional character, continually spewing its moods and embracing the absolutely amazing work by this ensemble.
The last scene in which Ivanov and Anna confront eachother is the most simple and honest I have ever seen this scene explored. It is stripped of the melodrama, and perfectly reflects not only the depth of loss and pain in their relationship, but in the world that surrounds them. This is a must see for anyone who knows this play well. It will transform your understanding of it. For those who don't know it well, it will be harder to grasp, as this version is, as Mr. McNulty infers, a deconstruction. But to see Chekhov done in such a simplified manner, is a gift that it seems only European theatre companies are capable of embracing.

[Neil Jampolis]

Any fool can make fun of something he can't begin to appreciate. That's no reason to give such a fool the job of drama critic at the LA Times.
This man cannot love the theater, so he mocks it.
What a waste.
Go see it, everyone, and cleanse your mind of this stultified criticism.

[Robot Clam]

Yikes. Seems like every time an out-ot-town theater company rolls through town with a new idea, there's a critic or two waiting in the wings to beat them senseless for being saucy upstarts. Anyhow, my two cents: this was a beautiful "deconstruction" (hate that word, though) of the play that brought modern methods to bear on classic material. The result was a wondrous re-imagining of the play that retained the best of Chekhov and added the best of Volksbuhne, and was, for two-and-half hours, not "solipsistic quicksand", in Mr. McNulty's too-clever turn of phrase, but startling, emotional, overwhelming, hysterically funny, sexy, ridiculous, poetic, scary -- basically, the best that theater has to offer. On behalf of Los Angeles, I apologize to Volksbuhne for our provincial critics.

[Michael Fox]

I saw this production on Saturday and agree with the reviewer (and I'm neither a Philistine nor an Angeleno -- and I speak German). The director managed to reduce the themes of Chekhov's play to a two and a half hour experiment on the effects of a fog machine (the real star) on a theatre audience. The ensemble performance (mostly) kept the production from collapsing completely into the ennui that Chekhov parodied. The acting was often wonderful (when the actors weren't shouting at each other), and especially good in small scenes where the acting style was close to American naturalism. But like Chekhov's title character, the Volksbühne production succumbed to the fatal egotism of having no purpose beyond its own (expensive and posturing) existence.

[niko]

Killing Chekhov slowly, painfully and methodically was a punishment to watch. Depriving actors form inner life and truthful behavior was even more disturbing. Seen and done European theater long enough to recognize appearance vs. substance. Totally agree with Mr. McNulty, thank you!

[Greg Hohman]

I'm with the admirers of the production.

[james singleton]

It was a great evening of theater in which time seemed to fly. I was unfamiliar with the play, and the production made me want to search out the text. Just jam-packed with ideas. See it and "Synecdoche..." in the same week.

[Alan Templeton]

I saw Ivanov on Thursday night. Thankfully, I read the play in the weeks before the performance. If you know the story, it's much easier to follow this staging and enjoy it. The cast was first rate, and a lesser troupe would have failed miserably. The director cut out too many important scenes, thus weakening the emontional journey of the main characters. The aburdist elements of this production get laughs from the audience, but they damage the emotional integrity of Chekhov's work, and the play is all about strong emotions that are beyond the abilities of their characters to control. Ivanov understands the gravity of his failure as both a husband and as an educated landowner. His neighbors and his steward tend to be greedy, short-sighted schemers, but they are also very human and believable; this production turned them into absurd caricatures, and that is what I found so truly disappointing about it. And yet it was a pleasure to see such great German actors up close. Almut Zilcher was especially outstanding as Anna. Milan Peschel as Borkin, Ivanov's steward, epitomized the casual, callous greed at the heart of Chekhov's critique of Russian society.

[Tarik Goetzke]

Wer Gotscheff nicht versteht, hat keine Ahnung vom Theater!

Yours sincerely
from Berlin, Germany