Dramaturgical Perspective
For our model book, we have decided to transform The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov into a farce. We feel that taking the serious subject matter of Olga, Masha and Irina’s suffering and turning it into a comedy will demonstrate a separation of text and performance. It will distance the audience from the characters themselves. It will create a subtle alienation and demonstrate the same type of feeling that the sisters have to go through during the play. The inspiration of the farce will be taking content from the Canadian television show, The Trailer Park Boys and implementing it into the characters, text, and scenography. By replacing the old environment, we hope that the environment, a trailer park, replicates and enhances the character’s state of being.
We are drawing from several dramatic methods for our farce. The first one would be Richard Schechner. He stated in his essay Performance Theory, that the drama, script, theater and performance are four different identities that work together in order for a production to progress. For our farce concept, we want to the drama out of context from the other two and therefore causes the performance (communication between actors and audience to become blurred). The scene that we have chosen from The Three Sisters to demonstrate our dramaturgical method starts with Vershinin’s line, “what a wind” and ends with Natasha’s reentrance, from page twenty-four to twenty-eight, The drama has been revised to fit the language found in The Trailer Park Boys. Our production aims to separate text and performance, by taking away the ritualistic manner of how naturalist plays were and are usually performed. We separate the text from the performance by changing the text and allowing as many changes from the original script as possible and by adding in quotations from the TV show element to change the ritualistic nature of what this play by Chekhov originally represented. To separate the text from the drama, we changed the text to be more comical and crude to make the drama a different form of drama that is completely different from the original text. Schechner termed drama as “a written scenario...that can be taken place to place or time to time independent of the people who carry it.” The revised drama that we have created stands alone from the original and manifests into its own being. Our production took complete artistic freedom through the use of the text and it’s new performance style and dramatic set up, and we take some pride in the fact that we tried to use comedy to not only change the tone of the production but also to get the true message across: the fact that people enjoy watching others suffer (especially if it’s funny) as long as it isn’t them, because it’s entertaining and separate from their own lives. From these three prominent influences, our shape of the production became a completely different shape from the original and that was our main goal.
Therefore, the audience will find their actions comedic. In laughing at their antics, the audience distances themselves emotionally from the character. We are drawing upon Brecht’s idea of distancing effect as well as pulling from an idea we learned from last year by a man named, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes wrote that “laughter is an expression of power and superiority – most individuals like to watch people “worse” than them perform actions that confirm their feelings of superiority.” In the original version of The Three Sisters, the situation that Olga, Masha and Irina and other characters in the play face is very depressing and disheartening. The audience feels pathos for them while they experience this traumatic moment in their life. In our version, the audience will laugh at the characters while they face their problems because of their method of crude reaction. The characters will argue, fight, yell, and everything in between that is unsophisticated and unmannerly. This beastly behavior will result in the audience’s laughter. The laughter proves Hobbes’ claim. The audience will not be able to emotionally attach to any of characters in the revision version of the play because they will laughing to hard from the antics to feel empathy to the struggles presented in the play. The stakes are completely the same for both of the plays however the farce version will have a wall between audience and character because of the displeasure that occurs on stage.
As well, some of the line revisions that have been used in the farce are direct or paraphrased quotes from The Trailer Park Boys such as “Don’t you have any offs to fuck?” and “Have a nice day and go fuck yourself.” So we are replicating the method Charles L. Mei uses to make his own scripts. Mei says that there is no original work out in the world because everything is somehow connected to one another. Our revision of Three Sisters shows his point because we used something in the media to inspire dramaturgically and fuel our creative juices. Everything that we have in our scenographic description are images that society would associate in a trailer park. Some of the characters are based off characters in The Trailer Park Boys and follow their mannerisms such as Vershinin being Bubbles. In this respect, basing Vershinin off Bubbles it demonstrates a formalist type of thinking when it comes to characters. We are matching vocal patterns and gestural habits that will give the presence of Bubbles in order to bring out a different side of Vershinin. As well, we are not only incorporating the context of the show but adding in its actual content. The quotes work so well in the revision showing Mei’s ability to transition from one text to another. The use of this pop culture reference such as The Trailer Park Boys allows us to make commentary about present day society and ideals that Chekhov wouldn’t have address in his original. We have discovered many different themes from our revision such as state of environment mirroring characters’ lifestyle choices, women empowerment, men and women as equals, and the sexuality of women. These themes come out not only through the text but also through the scenographic elements we have come up with. So it’s interesting to discover new ideas from just a simple concept.
As well, the creation of this version of The Three Sisters is a similar to Brace Up! that the Wooster Group performed. We are embodied the Wooster Group in the aspect of revitalizing an old play and creating something new with it. Both ours and Wooster Group’s idea take the context of The Three Sisters in total opposite directions that Chekhov probably didn’t intend. But through these risky ventures, both ideas have made discoveries about the play that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. We are developing a type of performance that is unusual but engaging to watch and will affect the audience in a certain way. Our production aims to make a statement about social conventions and situations, by adding technology and modern references to the performance and by separating the text from the drama, the production comments that an old situation is relevant in modern society and is usually best portrayed through performance. Through laughter and disconnect from the play’s plot and characters through farce, the audience is forced to rethink whether or not it’s okay to be laughing.
Brecht is another person we are drawing upon especially when it comes to characterizations. There are twelve characters in the scene we decided to revise so we made sure to differentiate we gave most of them physical gestus. These are especially helpful for the audience to see because not only it gives them something to laugh at but it provides them with a physical gesture to associate with each character so they don’t get confused with the names. Each gestus enhances a characters’ personality. For example, Fedotik who is in love with Irina but unable to express unless through materialistic things has a gestus of rubbing his clammy and dirty hands together. It will demonstrate intensify the feelings he has for Irina but can’t say. He will vary the tempo of the rubbing of the hands to show the nervousness he is feeling. The faster the rubbing, the more nervous he is. As well, there is Anfisa, the nurse of Olga, Masha and Irina. In our version, she is actually related to them and is their aunt. This change of relationship will add a better connection between Anfisa and the other characters. As a servant she had no power in the scenes she was in. She merely did what she was told and no one paid any attention to her. So as her position as aunt in the family, she has more power over the women and the household she resides in. Her gestus is rearranging her breasts for comfort. This gestus will show the comfort level she has around other characters on stage. She has no shame and is a confident, independent woman who know who she is. These gestus are apart of our characters because they use them to express the emotions they are experiencing inside as a physical formative gesture. There are other character gestus such as Masha, Andrey and Chebutikin that can be seen in gif form on our tumblr page: tomoscoworbust.tumblr.com.
Our model book is in the form of a tumblr because it is a current representation of the social media faze that our generation is experiencing. We wanted to connect with our generation and use a current website to express this desire. It just adds a connection that we want to establish with our audience. However by creating this connection, we immediately blur it. We wanted to show another distancing effect our farce causes in even its developmental stage. We have our rough work and our inspiration photos on the blog as well as our finished work such as the dramaturgical analysis, scenographic description, and character description. However there is not order in the posting. So people who enter the blog have to wade through all the posts or look through tags to find the certain item they are searching for. The time they have spent doing the task distances them from the site. As well, we have added interviews, funny quotes and memes into the tumblr so they may get sidetracked from these posts and forget about the others. This is the same effect that we want to happen in our farce version of Three Sisters. We want the audience to get distracted with all the comedic lines that they don’t delve deeper into the characters’ actual state of being. It is all face value. It is their choice to go deeper and find the meaning in the decisions made on stage. It is kind of like Brecht’ Street Performer. We are allowing the audience to develop their own opinion and perception about the play and it is their job to understand what happened on stage in the way they see fit.
We drew from a lot of different dramaturgical theories to figure out what unique spin we were going to do with The Three Sisters. We felt that through a combination of these different ideas, we have made something that can be actually put on stage and performed in front of people. It needs to be more fine-tuned however the skeleton is there to create a great comedic production of Chekhov’s play. Theatre is taking the creativity you have in your head and transferring it own stage. For us, it was about taking the trailer park and throwing the world of Three Sisters into it and we think we accomplished that task.