An interview with Three Sisters director Jay O'Berski  

by Nicole Quenelle

Three Sisters on Ice is 'a cautionary tale' ...complete with hula, nymphomaniacs, Greco-Roman wrestlers, Bollywood musical numbers and, oh yes, ice.

Director Jay O'Berski is not a classicist.

Just in case you missed that not-so-hidden clue in the title.

Furthermore, if you happen to be a classicist, that's fine. But he cautions that you might not be all that into his experimental adaptation of Anton Chekhov's classic Three Sisters playing April 27 through May 13 at Manbites Dog Theater in Durham. Who will be into it? According to O'Berski, anyone who is interested in a beautiful, heartfelt script void of modern clichés, and a staging in which things are happening. Lots of things. Lots of unexpected things. All at the same time.

I sat down for coffee at Broad Street Café with O'Berski to learn more. Looking adequately weathered from a week of intense rehearsals, he wore a tight black t-shirt (Target, $14.99), sipped an iced coffee with cream (Counter Culture Coffee, 47 calories), and declined to answer my questions about his skin-care regimen. He did, however, open up about his artistic process, and where he got all those crazy ideas for 'Ice'.

Three Sisters on Ice is obviously an adaptation. The original title of the play is just Three Sisters. So, tell me what this 'on ice' bit is about.

Well, originally it was meant to scare the right people away. And what I mean by that is that I didn't want classicists to mistake this production for a sort of lugubrious, slow, lyrical Chekhov, which is what you often see in productions of his work. And then I started to think about how the three sisters in the play are, at least symbolically, frozen and can't move forward. And actually nobody in the play can get out of their holding pattern. And although they all say they want to do something, they want to be with somebody, they want to attain some golden ideal -- they are completely frozen. And taking that idea to its extreme, we do have ice in the show, and we do have skates. How they're used, I can’t tell you that just yet.

So should the audience bring a sweater?

No. The opposite. Perhaps a fan. It’s gonna be hot. Symbolically, I mean. I think the AC at Manbites is working ok.

What got you thinking along these lines in the first place? Or was this 'frozen' concept always the way you've looked at Three Sisters?

I've always looked at it as a play about people who don't listen to each other and neglect each other and are overlooking the people who really love them. They're blind to them and they're projecting onto people who don't care about them. So that traditional love triangle of Chekhov is there: everybody's in love with a different person, and they're just not aware of the person they should've ended up with. For example, Olga and Kulygin should be together in the play. They're very much alike and would have a great time together but they don't get together. He loves Masha and she loves Vershinin who loves his own wife and so on ... and in the end we see how blind we all are to that. So I think all of Chekhov is just about this sort of cautionary tale. It's about how we ignore what's really there in front of us, we take that for granted, and we're frozen. It's like the people we used to know. The people you see when you go back to where you came from and they're still doing the exact same thing. They haven't moved forward and you have. So, for me, the audience is watching a cautionary tale of a collection of different flavors of people who talk and talk and talk ... and don't do.

Well, in the play itself, that seems to be what's happening a good deal of the time. People are just talking and having these banal conversations. How do you make that interesting for an audience? Wouldn't that get boring?

It very easily could, and that's exactly why we’re not having people sit around and just talk in this adaptation. There's a lot of subtext that needs to be punched up and we're doing that with the ensemble by working to sort of "explode" emotional moments.

OK. So, how does one "explode" an emotional moment?

There's a lot of fantasy that goes on. A big example of that would be the beginning of the sort of love scene that goes on between Masha and Vershinin. We've got it staged as a Bollywood musical number. And the reason is because it's probably just a dream sequence for them. It's what they imagined could happen between them -- because their actual relationship is much more buttoned down and staid than that. But a smaller example of this would be with the character of Irina, the youngest sister. She has these long speeches about work and just wanting to "work and work and work." And we thought that perhaps that could be a sexual trigger for her. So whenever she talks about getting a job and actually getting out into the real world, this 20-year-old woman (who is actually treated and dresses like an eight-year-old girl) gets the idea of being a free and independent woman. And she suddenly enters this sexually charged nymphomaniac place. And so for me, that's a minor "explosion" of what's already there. So often it's done with this shiny "gee whiz" kind of attitude, and I'm just not interested in doing it that same way that's been done over and over again.

So this adaptation has nymphomaniacs on ice, a Bollywood musical, exploding moments, etcetera. Were these ideas inspired by the ensemble you cast, or did you cast the ensemble with these elements in mind?

All of these actors are really willing to just put it out there and go for it. They're not prudish actors, so they're really willing to express themselves viscerally and sexually and that sort of thing. So most things we're doing were triggered by me seeing them do something early on in rehearsal. There's not a whole lot I imposed on them from the beginning. I did have two images in my head before I started: hula and Greco-Roman wrestling. And both those things have found their way into the play, so...

So...something for everyone?

Yep. Mmmmhm.

You have a 12-person cast. I'm sure most of them were already familiar with the play going into it. So how has that been? Having them take the play in a completely different, unorthodox direction versus what they might be used to?

Nobody's had to take their character in a very far different direction. I don't think there were many character conceptions that I smashed going into it, but there's been some tweaking here and there. But I do think the actors are sort of turned on by it. I was called (in what I thought was sort of a loving way) a "puppet master" the other day, because I was saying, "Well try this, try this, try this, try this" -- and it was really, totally moment to moment that I was adding stuff in. I'll let them get going and then stop them and say, "Oh yeah you almost did this! What if you did that? Do that! Grab him there! Hit her!" But I've never had anybody, at the end of working a scene, say, "No way – that's way off." They're usually like, "Whoa that really opened that up and made it so clear and easy to play. I don't have to force emotions because I'm doing something."

So has your approach with this ensemble and play been different than it's been with anything else you've directed?

I've never done a show with so much going on. I have done these sort of three-ring circus shows but not like this one where the focus is so loose. It's the fact that you could be looking at anyone or listening to any of these conversations happening on stage at the same time. And so it's new for me doing that sort of juggling act and it's made me not want to go back to plays with two people talking in a vacuum... The thing it reminds me of is the film Gosford Park. When I first started watching it I was like, "God I can't hear all this. I'm missing the exposition. This is killing me!" But I realized shortly into it that I had to just submit to it and let it kind of wash over me. And in the end, there were about 24 characters in the film, and I felt like I understood very well what they wanted, where they were headed, what they were up to. So to me, that's what's going on with all these things happening at the same time in our show.

Do you think that people are going to be struggling to figure out what they're supposed to be listening to and what they're supposed to be watching with so much going on?

It comes and goes. It's not the entire play. We create a cacophony to try to get down to diamond-like precision at those moments where there are just two people or one person talking -- so that it's almost like you've earned your clarity by being sucked into the maelstrom of confusion and then coming out of it. And that way we can also stay ahead of the audience, which I think is one of the hardest things. As an audience member I always feel like I'm getting ahead of the play or the film that I'm watching. Where you know what's happening, you know where it's heading, and you're like, "Please give me another piece of information. It's been so long since I got the last new thing." The sculpting of this show is designed to make sure that you could follow it without getting ahead of it, and to know that if you get confused, you're not so far knocked off and alienated that you can't return to the path.

That being said, what would you say to someone who just doesn't like the idea of adapting a classical play? Someone who thinks that would just be 'weird'. Why should they see this? Or should they?

Well we are telling the story and these characters are probably about as fleshed out as they would ever see them. So all of those things are constant and I actually think it's a very truthful, straightforward telling of the story with these added elements that are not meant to alienate, but they are meant to punch up the relationships and the conflicts that are going on. So, I think there are classicists who just want it done the same way over and over and over again, and I would discourage them from coming to see this if that is what they want. But there are people who may just be afraid that they're not going to understand what the symbols are. So for example, someone in some experimental play might come out in a leotard and say "I am Triangle Man and I represent death" (which we are not doing, by the way), and the audience would have no idea why that was in there and they would think they were somehow stupid for not understanding it – because maybe they missed something in junior high school English class. So that is not the kind of experimentation that I am into or going for.

So you think what you're doing and the elements you're adding to the play are more accessible to people?

I do. Absolutely. In fact, the acting itself is straight naturalism -- as real as you would see in pretty much any film. Some of the situations might seem a little strange, but when you think about it, they completely make sense. So for example, at the beginning of the play the three sisters are getting ready for a birthday party for the youngest sister, and we have them learning how to hula so they can do it at the party -- which is a completely viable option.

Rather than having them just sit around reading or fanning themselves, right?

Yeah. Boring, right? But that's often the case in Chekhov productions. One of the sisters is reading. One is staring off into space or something... so what we have them doing is a physical action that the actors can latch onto and the audience can identify with.

Wait... don't you just sit around reading when you’re getting ready for a birthday party?

(laughs) Exactly. No one does that. And the other thing is, they're all wanting to get out. They're dying to get out of the house. So everybody is always doing something all the time that's very keyed up and antsy like lab rats in a cage. We also have music playing the entire time. There's a record player and a CD player on stage, and whatever the tempo and rhythm of the music is at any given time is informing what the actors do and their speed and how they do it -- as opposed to being this soundtrack that's sort of just pasted on.

In addition to your ensemble, have there been any other productions or artists who particularly inspired you for this adaptation?

The Wooster Group was one. They are an experimental group in NYC. What they often do is juxtapose seemingly disparate elements in a piece. So, for example, they'll put together scenes from a minstrel show and juxtapose them with Our Town to put together a piece about smug, middle-American racism. But the audience kind of has to work, they have to look beyond the obvious. What the Wooster Group does that I'm not as into is they use a lot of technology. Like they'll use microphones and video and things like that. So like in their production of Three Sisters there was a character that was all on video, and another character was played by old Godzilla footage whenever they referred to him. And to me, that's kind of like saying "fuck you" to the text, and I actually happen to really love this text, and I want as much of it in there as possible. And anytime I've been in Russia this idea of exploding moments is seen a lot with the Russians. They'll throw in these seemingly random actions to punch up an idea and bring it forward or to bring it to a different level.

Three Sisters was obviously originally written in Russian. So which translation are you using?

We are improvising from the Brian Friel translation.

What does that mean? You're improvising the lines?

It's a beautiful translation. But Friel is Irish, and so he uses lots of Irish turns of phrase. He'll use crazy idioms that we don't say here. So rather than put those in, everybody is improvising in their character's voice.

So are they improvising in rehearsals and then setting the text that they'll be using in performances?

It actually keeps changing. People know cues and where they need to come in, but there are a lot of times when people are all talking at the same time. There is a shape to follow, but it's not ever totally set.

So I could go see it two or three times and hear a different thing every night in some lines?

Yeah. There are turns of phrase that are constantly changing and we're continuing to refine them so that it will sound like an actual person talking rather than a stale translation, which is so often the case with classical plays that were written at the turn of the century and then translated in the 1920s.

This play is more than 100 years old. Why do you think Chekhov is important to do now, and why specifically Three Sisters?

Um, well, because he's not full of shit. And most entertainment today is. It's crass and it's about lying and liars, and if it tries to get to a real heartfelt place, usually it has to do it with cliché. Chekhov is one of the few people that every note he ever wrote rings completely true and heartfelt and unsentimental and graceful. So, one of my theories was always that you worked on the classics to understand modern plays and you worked on modern plays to understand the classics. And after doing a bunch of new plays recently, I'm getting back to that. What definitely works? And how do you extrapolate it into new work so that you don't live in the past? And how do you tell this story for the ten millionth time without it seeming like a dusty antique? You put it on ice.

 

Nicole Quenelle is a local writer and actor with a degree in journalism. As a member of Little Green Pig, she is happy to contribute both onstage and off to the company's inspiring productions.