A Good Time with Anton Chekhov

Michael Frayn's The Sneeze
by Paul Pierog

A vibrant acting group, The Watchdog Theatre Company, dished up a snack of Anton Chekhov short stories and plays at The Access Theater in Manhattan for a few weekends in late July and early August.

The show was called The Sneeze. That happens to be an overall title given by Michael Frayn to a set of translations and adaptations of stories and plays he put together. (One of the pieces is called, ironically, "The Sneeze.") Mr. Frayn is a noted and exciting British writer of novels and plays as well as essays and scripts for movies and television. His farce, Noises Off, and his play of ideas, Copenhagen, have been international hits. He has regularly translated and adapted Chekhov for the British and international stage.

It's hard to get Chekhov right. He sometimes is considered historically an inventor of the modern short story. He's able to get to that level of identification with people at which the most trivial and ridiculous particulars of individual lives become strongly tragic and richly funny at the same time. The advice about acting mentioned in Shakespeare's Hamlet—to suit the voice and the action to the word—applies critically and exactingly to making Chekhov's writing come alive on stage.

It was achieved most strikingly by actor Harold Todd Moeller in The Evils of Tobacco. In this short play, a man is giving a public service talk he doesn't want to give because his wife has forced him to do it. It was staged very simply, but the close exactness of the actor to the human's predicament made it extremely painful and funny as he avoided the subject of his speech and complained about his discomfort with his marriage instead. The same actor was able to take this emotional precision into articulate comic mania in The Proposal, playing a man who comes to propose to a woman, but can't bring himself to do so.

Actors Jon Okabayashi and Christopher Conant hit the life of The Inspector General by paying keen attention to each other so the audience could feel the connection between two people who seemed to speak to each other without necessarily recognizing each other. At times, in The Bear, Jon Okabayashi and Ellen Lindsay became attuned enough to each other to make their characters' unexpected and unlikely mutual attraction humorous and touching.

While the company did not always hit the mark in such an exciting and demanding way, they generally played through various characters with creativity and dynamism so that the evening mostly became a happy occasion throughout.

The set designer, Claudine Vermot, provided colorful abstract painting that suggested a lively, if incomplete, visual response to the evening. The costume designer, Leonard Zelig and the lighting designer, Miranda Hardy, actively participated with vivid and striking momentary choices under the guidance of director Blake Baldwin. All in all, the creative team, including adaptor Michael Frayn, produced a lively hit-and-miss evening enjoying Chekhov's manifold creativity.