Rough Times

I will have to be as brief as possible since I have many things to do this night and not enough time to get them all done. That has pretty much been the standard here so far: classes from 10-6, then a show at least 2 or 3 times a week, and you're home by about 10PM.

It has also been trying, at times, to study with the group I'm in. As many of you already know, living and working with actors can be the hardest thing in your life when you're trying to be a normal person. Everything is an argument, everyone has the best way to do something, everything thing is either amazing or fabulous, and everybody loves everybody and hates everybody at the same time.

I want to take some quick time however, to make people aware in the States that MXAT in Russia is completely different from the idea of what MXAT is in America. The head of the theatre, Anatoly Smelianski, even talks about the "mystification" and "golden idol" that Americans make of Stanislavsky. Sure, MXAT is a very important theatre in Moscow, but there are other theatres here as well that do excellent work, for example the Bolshoi Theatre. The Russian people don't idolize it here like we idolize it in America; for example we went to Stanislavsky's house (which is a museum) and someone in the book wrote "thank you for our Mecca." And that's truly the attitude. Stanislavsky and Chekov are Gods to us, and to not respect the way they wanted to do theatre is heresy. And in all of this, where is Nemirovich-Danchenko? It's quite possible he saved the Moscow Art Theatre twice in it's history, and what do we know of him? Our teacher again compared the two to Mozart and Salieri, and he said that in most cases Stanislavsky was really Salieri, not Mozart. If I had more time I would list more examples (reactions by the Soviets to the theatre after the revolution, the fact that it is subsidized by the government actually being a bad thing, ect.) but I will leave a separate post aside for this purpose later. We know from MXAT only what we want to hear about it, because of how sacred these people are to the oldest of theatre practitioners. Everyone out there really ask yourself: why are we trying to do 80 year old Russian theatre for a contemporary American audience?

Also read True and False by David Mamet.

-Eric