'Seagull: True Story'

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater, even those who aren’t theater folk, probably know that Anton Chekhov, the renowned turn-of-the-20th-century Russian dramatist, is a beloved figure in the Western theater world.  Actors and directors, especially, love to do his plays.  He has a prominent place in nearly every repertory theater’s repertoire. 

[Chekhov’s plays are translated into almost every known language.  They’re also adapted and modernized almost as often as William Shakespeare’s are.  Below is the story, told via an interview with the play’s 34-year-old director, of one of those adaptations.  

[The play, The Seagull, which is about theater and theater people—two actresses and a playwright, has become a vehicle for the director, an exile from Chekhov’s own country, who conceived the adaptation, to tell his own story, 118 years after the playwright’s death.]

“RUSSIANS WHO FLED AFTER UKRAINE INVASION
STAGE FRESH TAKE ON CLASSIC PLAY IN U.S.”
by Jeffrey Brown, Zeba Warsi, and Anne Azzi Davenport

[This segment on PBS News Hour on Tuesday, 19 May 2026, caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it was an interesting theater story: a young, émigré Russian stage director of some accomplishment who fled Putin’s autocratic regime under duress, made a play based on a Chekhov classic that told his own story, got it produced at New York City’s esteemed Public Theater to considerable acclaim.

[And two, I hadn’t heard about it—or him—though he’d been here, working, since 2022 and his play has been staged a few times since early 2025!  So, maybe others missed the memo, too.]

Two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S. Senior Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series, exploring how art and democracy shape one another, as part of our CANVAS coverage.

Geoff Bennett [Co-anchor of “PBS News Hour”]: Now a different kind of migration story, one involving theater and two Russians who left their country after the invasion of Ukraine and are now rebuilding their lives and careers in the U.S.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a recent production in New York for our Art in Action series exploring how art and democracy shape one another as part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: a performance; singing in Russian.] It’s a play within a play, with cabaret humor, even slapstick, alongside the drama of loss of friends, family and country.

Alexander Molochnikov: [Giving a curtain speech.] And I’m very thankful to all of you for allowing me to tell the personal, sometimes even dramatic story in a playful way.

Jeffrey Brown: For Alexander Molochnikov [Александр Молочников; often romanized as Aleksandr Molochnikov; b. 1992], the creator and director of “Seagull: True Story” [written by Eli Rarey (b 1977), with music by Fedor Zhuravlev (b. 1995)] this is personal. It’s based on his own story.

[Molochnikov is a writer, filmmaker, and internationally acclaimed theater director. He worked for over 10 years in Moscow where he directed five major productions in drama, a ballet, an opera, two feature films, and a TV show.

[Molochnikov has created and directed over 10 shows and films in Moscow including the most-viewed six-episode TV series, The Monastery (Монастырь – Monastyr), in 2022. His production of the operas The Telephone and The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre, along with his ballet, The Seagull: Interrupted Flight, which was honored with the Golden Mask (Золотая маска – Zolotaya maska; the Russian equivalent of the Tony Awards) for best ballet of the year.

[Since 2014, his first play, 19.14, an antiwar cabaret play about World War I, had been running in repertoire for over 11 years at the Moscow Art Theater of Chekov. However, the theater has removed his name from all materials. The billing now says “Directed by Director” because the names of directors who supported Ukraine in 2022 no longer appear in print.

[In 2022, he spoke out against the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and then in August, he moved to New York. Molochnikov is now unable to return to Russia. He became a U.S. citizen in early 2026, roughly four years after fleeing Russia.

[His feature film, Tell Her (Скажи ей – skazhi yey), about moving to the U.S. as a child, premiered in 2020 at the 47th Seattle International Film Festival. He premiered a cabaret-style stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), at the Tel Aviv Gesher Theatre in December 2024. He is working now on a feature film related to the novel.

[His short film Extremist (Экстремистка – Ekstremistka) premiered at the 2025 Telluride (Colorado) Film Festival and won the 2025 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Student Award for Live Action (as well as the Special Jury Prize); he is now turning it into a feature.]

What did you most want to bring out in this play?

Alexander Molochnikov: I think the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it. With choosing between food and art, anybody would choose food if we are dying of hunger.

But, for me, I literally realized through this experience how, without doing theater, I start kind of dying inside.

Jeffrey Brown: [On screen: scenes from the play.] “Seagull: True Story,” recently at New York’s Public Theater [26 March-3 May 2026], plays off Anton Chekhov’s classic “The Seagull” and tells of a young Russian theater director named Kon, Molochnikov’s alter ego, about to achieve his dream of directing a play at the world-renowned Moscow Art Theater, when a very different kind of drama intervenes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Russian playwright and short story writer, premièred in 1896 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. (Its title is sometimes rendered in English as The Sea Gull, A Seagull, or A Sea Gull. The Russian title, Chaika [Чайка], has no article (because there are no articles in the Russian language), so it can also be translated as simply Seagull.)

[The character in the original version who becomes Kon, the avatar of Molochnikov in the adaptation, is a symbolist playwright named Konstantin Treplev. (Prior to its Public Theater run, the play was presented Off-Off-Broadway at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club from 16 May to 1 June 2025. From 17 to 19 January 2025, a workshop version of the play was staged under the “working title” Seagull Fucker at La MaMa as part of the Under the Radar Festival.)  

[The first production of Seagull in Saint Petersburg was famously a failure. Not only the play, but Chekhov’s reputation as a dramatist was all but written off.  Then, in 1898, the famous director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater, directed it for his troupe, and the production was a success.

[The playwright’s career was saved and The Seagull has since generally been considered the first of Chekhov’s four major plays and one of the masterpieces of modern Western theater.

[The famous Moscow Art Theater opened in 1898, after Stanislavsky, a talented, forward-looking amateur actor and director from a wealthy family, and the successful professional, establishment playwright, critic, and drama teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), met at Nemirovich-Danchenko’s invitation for an 18-hour discussion in 1897. Both men, who knew only each other’s reputations, wanted to reform the clichéd, melodramatic mainstream Russian theater.

[To develop and teach his acting “system,” which eventually changed the acting style and actor-training practices of almost all Western theater (and formed the basis of the Method), Stanislavsky began opening MAT studios for training actors in 1912, and MAT eventually opened the MAT School in 1943. 

[The theater, which went through a series of name-changes—it didn’t actually become the Moscow Art Theater until 1901—split into two theaters in 1987: the Gorky Moscow Art Theater, the descendant of the original theater, and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, the house in which the young Molochnikov worked.]

Alexander Molochnikov: In the beginning, you don’t think it’s forever. Or maybe some people understood. I didn’t.

Jeffrey Brown: Four years later, Molochnikov, who in his 20s had already directed productions at leading Moscow theaters, including the Bolshoi . . .

Man [actor in cast rehearsing on stage]: Happy birthday!

Jeffrey Brown: . . . celebrated his 34th birthday with the cast of “Seagull” in New York, where he now lives and works.

Alexander Molochnikov: Oh, wow.

Woman: Make a wish.

Sofia Kapkov, Producer: I had a team of 40 people who was working for me. I signed all documents and I left.

Jeffrey Brown: Also a new New Yorker, the producer of “Seagull: True Story,” 47-year-old Sofia Kapkov [b. 1978].

Sofia Kapkov: I came here without any plan, so I stayed with my friend. I told him I’m going to be there for a week. I ended up for a month. And then after a month, I realized that’s it. That life is gone.

Jeffrey Brown: That former life included heading her own production company that put on prominent contemporary theater and dance performances in Russia and abroad, not overtly political art, but she says a form of activism nonetheless.

Sofia Kapkov: I wanted to open this window to the freedom to show them, OK, another world exists. There is different type of art, for example, or different forms of art. And in a way, this is my type of activism to show something that is relevant, that it’s timely.

Jeffrey Brown: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that. She left within days, taking her two younger children, joining an older daughter who was studying at NYU.

Sofia Kapkov: I had a nice life back then. I had a comfortable life. I had home, friends, projects, successful business.

But I had my doubts in my country. I woke up in the reality that we are killing our neighbors. For me, it was obvious I need to live for the sake of my kids. I don’t want them to get used to the idea that war is normal. And it’s a very hard decision, because you’re not just changing your life from one comfortable life to less comfortable.

You’re changing the destiny of your kids. It’s a very big responsibility.

Jeffrey Brown: Huge changes, big struggles documented in a memoir titled “Arts Hustler: A Story of Resilience” [MART Foundation, 2025], along with some advantages, including having international experience and contacts.

And within two years, she had co-produced “Our Class,” a play [by Tadeusz Słobodzianek (Polish; b. 1955)] set in Poland during World War II about neighbors turning on neighbors. It had successful runs in New York [Classic Stage Company, 12 September-3 November 2024], Boston [Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 13-22 June 2025], and most recently San Francisco [Z Space’s Steindler Stage, 27 March-5 April 2026]. 

In prewar Moscow, Alexander Molochnikov had demonstrated in support of prominent Russian dissident and opposition leader Alexei Navalny [1976-2024]. And after the invasion of Ukraine, he registered his protest with a series of anti-war posts on social media and danced to Ukrainian music in the Russian version of “Dancing With the Stars” [video clip of Molochnikov dancing]. 

His name was taken off production credits and he says he received death threats. In August 2022, he left Russia, enrolling in a graduate film course at Columbia University.

[Immediately after he publicly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Molochnikov says, he received threats against his safety from the state-funded Wagner Group, the private military company controlled at that time by Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961-2023), a former close ally Vladimir Putin (b. 1952; President of Russia: 2000-08 and 2012-present). The young theater artist reports that mercenaries from the Wagner Group sent him photographs of his parents’ houses in Moscow and Saint Petersburg with such text warnings as “Be careful walking there, you might slip and fall into a pond.”]

From that came a short film titled “Extremist” based on the true story of a young Russian woman whose public protest of the Ukraine war, putting anti-war and anti-Putin messages on grocery items, led to her imprisonment. [Scenes from the film are shown, with balalaika music (“Kalinka,” Russian folk-style song written in 1860 by Ivan Larionov [1830-89]) from the soundtrack.] The film would win various international awards and was also short-listed for an Academy Award for best live-action short.

Today, Molochnikov can see the positive impact of the upheaval he went through.

Alexander Molochnikov: Because collapse motivates you to rebuild and really develop as a person. I didn’t really want it to happen again. We just, like, built something here. I would love a few more years to build more.

But the feeling of apocalypse – and, of course, I want to say that, like, this my little art apocalypse is nothing compared to what people lost in Ukraine. But, still, you lose your career that you’ve been building for 10 years. It’s healthy sometimes to lose it.

Jeffrey Brown: The second half of “Seagull: True Story” is partly based on Molochnikov’s experience after coming to the U.S., including the overt commercialism of the theater world here and what he says were different kinds of restrictions on language and expression he encountered.

[Since we don't have official censorship in the United States, as Molochnikov had experienced in Russia under Putin, when he speaks of “restrictions on language and expression,” he’s talking about “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” ideological conformity, and similar socio-political pressures.

[In 2025, in Cultured, a print and digital magazine about contemporary art, architecture, design, fashion, film, and music, the émigré director asserts, “There are so many things everyone is afraid to talk about [in the U.S.] because we’re afraid society will turn against you. We’re afraid of a witch hunt. We’re afraid to say something that would offend someone when you didn’t mean to offend them.”

[Last April, Molochnikov told the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University, that many Americans don’t seem to “know how to be free in their society, because of the control over what you can say, words you can use, things that are possible to talk about, and impossible to talk about.”]

And the play includes a moment amid the crackdown in Russia in which one character asked the American audience:

Actor [scene from the play]: And something like this could never happen in America, right?

Actor: Right?

Alexander Molochnikov: Right?

And there’s always – it’s interesting. It’s not a laugh. it’s not a clap. Everyone’s like, oh.

Sofia Kapkov: It just is a concern.

Alexander Molochnikov: I hope that that this play, maybe not in everyone, but in somebody, it would leave some thought or some concern about what’s going on in U.S. today, and I hear it a lot. And many people who saw it a year ago, now they’re like, wow, this is about Iran now.

Jeffrey Brown: Molochnikov and Kapkov say New York is their home now. Both have become U.S. citizens and aim to further build lives here with their artistic work leading the way.

Sofia Kapkov: Theater is very similar to democracy. It should be a free space. There people are allowed to ask any questions. I believe in democracy, and I love this country, and I have hope for America. I’m American now, right?

I don’t have any hope for Russia, unfortunately. And what Putin did, he destroyed life of many generations. I don’t like a lot of stuff that’s going on here in America, but America is even younger than the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

Jeffrey Brown: America, the country.

Sofia Kapkov: America, the country, United States.

[Though the famous theater, opera, and ballet company didn’t acquire the name Bolshoi Theater until 1825, the linear ancestor of the company, which actually had no formal designation, was founded on 28 March 1776 (by license from Empress Catherine II [1729-96; Empress of Russia: 1762-96; commonly known as Catherine the Great]). That’s exactly 98 days (or 14 weeks) before Independence Day, when the U.S. was officially born.

[The name (in Russian: Большо́й Теа́тр) means “Big Theater” or “Grand Theater” to distinguish it from the Maly Theater (Малый Театр), which means “Little Theater” or “Small Theater.” Many cities, such as Saint Petersburg/Leningrad and Moscow, had both, among the many entertainment venues.

[In 18th- and 19th-century Imperial Russia, the designations signified an official categorization of a theater's artistic discipline and its rank within the Imperial Theaters system. The Bolshoi Theaters were designated for grand-scale productions like opera and ballet, which require larger auditoriums to accommodate orchestras, large choruses, and elaborate sets. The Maly Theaters were authorized for dramatic plays, comedies, and spoken theater which are better served in intimate settings constructed so that the performances are closer to the audience.]

Jeffrey Brown: [Over a scene with singing and music.] Good perspective from the theater world to today’s political realities.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.

[I observed in my introduction to this post that the plays of Anton Chekhov are popular with theater people: repertory theaters like to produce them, actors like to act in them, and directors like to direct them.  I also noted that Seagull held a special place among Chekhov’s works because it’s about theater and theater artists.

[One example of the phenomenon is experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), about whom I’ve blogged many times on ROT.  He acknowledged that Seagull was deeply meaningful to him since he saw a school production of it as a prep school student.  Seagull stayed with Shapiro for the rest of his life.

[Before he’d ever staged a production of Seagull, Shapiro confessed to me, he’d long wanted to direct “an all-star, multi-racial” production of the play in Central Park for Joseph Papp (1921-91).  It was a recurring dream—which never came true.  The play had “always been mixed up in my mind with the love of literature and with idealism,” he explained, but he also admitted that he’d always wanted to direct The Seagull because of the “schmaltz” as well as the “lyricism.” 

[The play had long been a symbol for Shapiro, figuring prominently on a list of influences and inspirations he once wrote out for me.  He even invoked it in a 1965 playlet from his early college days.  When an old New York cabbie morphs into Joe Cino (1931-67), the seminal Off-Off-Broadway café-owner and impresario, the young passenger, a stand-in for Shapiro, asks, “Who are you?” and the cabbie replies, “I am a seagull.  No, that’s not it.”  These are the same words Nina says to Konstantin in Act IV of the play.  Apparently, 19-year-old Shapiro had already cast himself in that role.

[The play “speaks to artists about creativity,” said Shapiro, “and getting caught up in the ‘theater world.’”  He explained that the “basic values” of The Seagull are “love and art,” and that the “theme” was “showing the audience the need for art” in society. 

[(Note that Mokochnikov says above that the message he sees in Seagull is “the value of art, the value of art as air and water for some people, and not only for people who make it, but sometimes for people who watch it.”  The Russian’s statement is, I daresay, the same sentiment as Shapiro expressed.) 

[In the fall of 1992, Shapiro directed Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven, which was Shapiro’s last New York production and centers loosely on a film production of The Seagull involving several of Blue Heaven’s characters.  For the promotional postcard for Blue Heaven, Shapiro posed the cast and crew in a restaging of a photograph of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s first rehearsal of Seagull in 1898, with Malpede sitting in Chekhov’s place and Shapiro in Stanislavsky’s.

[Ironically, Shapiro eventually directed a production of The Seagull, with the Riverside Repertory Theatre Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1996.  It was his last work.  

[In the final year of his life, Shapiro approached Riverside and told the company, “I’m about to die, I want my final show to be The Seagull, and I want you all to be in it.”  Over a five-month period, the company “camped out” three or four days a week near Shapiro’s mountain cabin, spending days on the small, white backyard stage that Shapiro had built against the mountain background—reminiscent of the one for Konstantin’s play.

[Shapiro had initially resisted chemotherapy, but when he started working with Riverside, several company members reported, he began undergoing the treatment.  They figured it was a way to prolong his life in order to finish the play.  Seagull, one cast member felt, helped him decide to take the chemotherapy “so that we wouldn’t have to finish the play without him.” 

[The Riverside Seagull played in Albuquerque from 5 to 14 September 1996 and then in Baltimore, Maryland, from 6 to 17 November.  Shapiro hadn’t been able to travel with his cast, but he lived to see their success in the town—and at the theater—where, 23 years earlier his Shaliko Company débuted.  Leo Shapiro died of cancer on 22 January 1997, 15 days after his 51st birthday (and 18 months after he was diagnosed and given 6 months to live).

[It’s perhaps an interesting sidelight to Shapiro’s special feeling for The Seagull that he had such a proprietary attitude toward the play that he apparently resented when even another artist whom he admired appropriated it.  Tennessee Williams (1911-83), an inspiration and model for Shapiro, wrote his own adaptation of Chekhov’s play, The Notebook of Trigorin, in 1981. 

[Shapiro was aware of Williams’s adaptation, and on 14 December 1992, shortly after the downtown opening of the Shaliko production of Blue Heaven with The Seagull at its center, a staged reading of Williams’s play was performed uptown at Lincoln Center.  Shapiro refused to go despite his special interest in the writer and the source. 

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey BrownJeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Zeba Warsi is a foreign affairs producer, based in Washington DC.  She’s a Columbia Journalism School graduate with an M.A. in Political journalism.  She was one of the leading members of the News Hour team that won the 2024 Peabody award for News for our coverage of the war in Gaza and Israel.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS News Hour.]

'The Orchard'

 by Kirk Woodward 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will be familiar with my friend Kirk Woodward.  He’s the most prolific of the guest-bloggers I’ve published on ROT, with something over 100 contributions.  His territory ranges from directing and playwriting to acting, to songwriting and music performance (especially The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and jazz), to biographies of cultural figures (particularly in theater and music), to theatrical performance, notably reviews and reports. 

[This time, Kirk’s writing about a performance he saw on Wednesday, 29 June, of The Orchard, the adaptation of The Cherry Orchard conceived for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s theater center in Hell’s Kitchen.  The two-hour, high-tech production opened on Tuesday, 7 June, and closed on Sunday, 3 July. 

[I won’t spoil Kirk’s effort by previewing what he says; he and I both want you all to read it for yourself.  Suffice it to say that he applies his rather deep understanding and experience of theater to his observations.  Besides, as he points out, he got to see Baryshnikov.]

I have not seen the production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Alex Lawther and directed by Robert Icke that opened on June 28, 2022, at the Park Avenue Armory. I begin by mentioning it only because a section of a review of the show by Maya Phillips in The New York Times on July 1, 2022, caught my eye. Phillips writes in part:

What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.

The screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective: soft overhead light haloes Lawther as he seems to address theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.

I quote this review, written by someone who sees a great deal more of theater than I do, because earlier that same week I had seen The Orchard, a version of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (translated by Carol Rocamora, with “new material” by Igor Golyak, who “conceived” and directed the show) at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street in Manhattan. I will explain.

I wanted to see The Orchard for two reasons. The first was that I had never seen Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) in person, and I wanted to. For years he and Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993) were shining stars in the world of dance. I saw Nureyev at least twice, but never saw Baryshnikov.

Those unfamiliar with his work in ballet might check out the film The Turning Point (1977), selected dance highlights of which are available in a YouTube video (Mikhail Baryshnikov - The Turning Point (Ballet) - YouTube). Far from being satisfied with his career in ballet, Baryshnikov continued to expand his range and interests, working with numerous choreographers, leading the American Ballet Theatre, performing with and founding modern dance companies, and acting (including both plays by Samuel Beckett and the 2003-04 season of Sex and the City).

So I had always wanted to see him in person (and why hadn’t I?). I was also curious about the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), opened in 2005 and home to a variety of arts and artists. It’s a modern, industrial-style building, rather severe, but efficiently designed.

The Orchard played in the BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; it seats 238, so it’s relatively intimate, and it has a floor-level stage (with minimum offstage space). The seating is steep, so visibility is good, although from the back of the balcony, where I sat, one sees a lot of tops of heads.

One feature in the Robbins Theater is new to me: instead of each seat being a single unit, there are many seats for two and even three, kind of like sitting on a small couch, and often two people have to stand up to let one pass.

In The Cherry Orchard (first performed in 1904), an extended Russian family unit faces the likely sale of its estate, including the orchard of the title, as part of the wave of modernization moving through the country. The family offers little resistance to change, and at the end of the play the house and the orchard are being torn down and the family is dispersed.

In The Orchard Baryshnikov plays the aging servant Firs, representative of the oldest Russian traditions (he was originally a serf, and considers himself attached to the family). Among others in the cast, Jessica Hecht plays Ranevskaya, an impulsive actress who has returned from Paris to see the estate again. I was particularly taken with the performances of Nael Nacer, who plays Lopakhin, a businessman, and Mark Nelson as Gayev, a billiards-obsessed eccentric who simply can’t focus on the danger the estate is in.

Baryshnikov brings to his acting a quality he also brought to his dancing: he is always present in the moment, giving it exactly what it requires, and it often requires a lot. His performance in The Orchard is by no means showy, but I find myself thinking a great deal about it as time passes. “Focus in the moment” is a requirement of good acting, and Baryshnikov does it.

(I should add that a friend said to me, “You went to see the greatest dancer of all time, and he spent the evening walking around like an old man?” Well, yes. Better late than never.)

I said above that I had two reasons for wanting to see The Orchard. Baryshnikov was the first. The second is that I saw from advance publicity and from reviews that The Orchard has a high-tech, multimedia aspect to it, and I wanted to see what that was like.

As a director I’m a minimalist; I’m happiest with the fewest possible costumes and properties and the least set. I may be exaggerating to say that for me, stage technology means electric lights (although I did act in a performance once that was lit entirely by candles, a story for another time). But the only multimedia performance tool I’ve ever used is Zoom.

So I wanted to learn what “multimedia” means in terms of theater, and how it can be used. Clearly The Orchard offered a chance to find out.

So, which high-tech, multimedia elements stand out in The Orchard? For starters, when the audience enters the theater it sees benches, a couple of large balls and a rocking horse (the first act takes place in a nursery), and, almost center stage, a huge white three-section machine, with a base for two long interlocked sections that when fully extended must reach at least twelve feet in the air.

The machine in The Orchard. Note the robot dog at the far right

This machine remains center stage for the entire play. It has a camera on the end of the second extension. Sometimes the “arm” reaches down so the camera is in someone’s face. Once it furnishes a tray with cups of tea. It has a personality – it will occasionally seem to favor one character rather than another. Sometimes it just sits there.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure what the machine reminded me of. A dentist’s drill . . . a Storm Trooper in a Star Wars . . . the Pixar Animation Studios lamp . . . a Martian . . . a modern sculpture . . . a dinosaur . . . .

You will not need to be told that Chekhov (1860-1904) did not envision such a machine, nor does the play as he wrote it call for it. He probably also would be startled at the “scrim,” an opaque stage-sized screen that when lit from behind can display elements of a scene. This particular scrim stretches between the stage and the audience, so when projections appear on it, the effect is much like a 3-D movie.

Frequently the scrim shows cherry tree leaves floating down to earth. (At least I think so. I spent nearly the entire performance thinking the leaves represented snow – actually, most of the time, a blizzard. I found this extremely confusing.) The entire stage floor is also covered with paper “blossoms.” This is symbolism; a nursery floor almost certainly would not be covered with cherry blossoms, no matter how big the orchard was.

Usually leaves fill the scrim, but in one scene (the most effective use of the device) the planets and the solar system appear, looking quite beautiful. Sometimes computer messages appear on the screen. Sometimes it shows dialogue from the play, sometimes lines the actors are speaking, occasionally lines from a different translation. Act-change information is also projected.

There is a dog in the play; it is portrayed by a robot. A tiny model of the house has lights in its windows; later they go out, showing that the house will be emptied. The model is passed around among the characters. Cameras (both on the machine and somewhere in front) capture a live simulcast of the performance, and sometimes show the in-house audience what the remote audience is seeing.

How does Chekhov’s play fare with all these distractions? – because they are distractions, if the play is what interests you, or that’s how they struck me. I have the impression of a tiny, mostly decent production of the play, surrounded by a battery of relentless technical effects. What is the production trying to achieve with this approach?

In attempting to answer this question, I don’t want to simply reject the production, make fun of it, or use it for a series of comic riffs (although the temptation is strong). A lot of gifted people worked on The Orchard, and they must have believed their approach was worthwhile. Was it?

Some things worked well. A deaf actor, John McGinty, was cast as Trofimov, the dreamer of a new and better world, and he signs his impassioned speech about the destruction of the present world and the coming of a future one to Juliet Brett’s Anya, who completely misunderstands what he’s saying and believes he’s talking about his love for her.

The most effective scene of all, when Lopakhin tries to find words to propose, is simple and straightforward, with no technical effects at all.

To my mind, a great deal of what went on did not serve the play at all, and it seems to me that serving the play is what a production of a play should do. But I’ve tried to think of justifications. The most obvious is that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.

But either this supposition is incorrect, or it was poorly carried out, because for me at least it was difficult to find the play that’s hiding behind the tech, and, besides, The Cherry Orchard is not a play that needs a lot of illuminating. It’s clear in theme and in characterization, there’s nothing difficult to understand in the story, and it’s hard to imagine an audience that needed a vast array of technical tools to make sense of it.

Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand. For that matter, is there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit? For some reason directors seem terrified that their plays will seem obscure.

I have already mentioned that Chekhov’s first scene takes place in a nursery. That’s not an accident – Chekhov is underlining from the beginning the family’s infantile nature when it comes to understanding business, and in many cases themselves as well. Nothing much of that carries over into The Orchard except a moment when a character is riding the hobbyhorse. Perhaps Chekhov should be allowed to do his work?

If all the special effects were meant to illuminate the play, they skipped important plot points. For example, the family has opportunities to save its house, but lets those opportunities fly away; it can’t concentrate on them. Why not? The director must make sure the answer to that question gets through to the audience. The Orchard doesn’t try.

But perhaps the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were “something special.” Perhaps, but I doubt that that’s a general feeling. How many people (besides me) want to see a play because of its technical effects, rather than because of the play itself? (Do tech-heads make up a large segment of any theater audience?)

Might we suppose, then, that the purpose of all the tech is to get audiences to use their imaginations? If so, I believe the result is actually the opposite. I felt no opportunity to use my imagination during The Orchard, because I was so busy looking everywhere, trying to see what else there was to see, feeling certain I’d missed something (as I frequently found I had), and being battered by one “effect” after another.

Surely there’s a difference between telling a story, and hitting the audience over the head with it.

Will the play draw more people because seeing it is like being inside a computer? The answer ought to be “no,” but I’m not sure, or rather, I’m not sure the show’s creative team didn’t think so. There’s a general assumption right now that “everybody” loves computers, that “everybody” has smartphones, that “everyone” knows all the features of their devices and wants to be up to date.

Then, perhaps, does The Orchard want to alert us that high tech is the future? Is it saying, “Get used to it – this is what theater will be like from now on”? Maybe – but I have a feeling that this blitz of technology is already a cliché. Maya Phillips’ review of Hamlet certainly suggests that’s the case, referring, in the passage quoted above, to “the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech.”

Surely there’s no question that high-tech multimedia effects can enhance a play, particularly when used to define and depict a space. We’ve known that at least since the efforts of James Hull Miller (1916-2007) to get theaters to use projections that there’s really no limit to what a stage setting can be. Beyond that, though, what are we accomplishing by piling technology on top of a play?

Reviews of The Orchard made many of these points. Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times (16 June 2022) wrote that “the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly.” Examples of this when I saw the show were occasional tiny stutters in the projections, which called even more undesired attention to them.

Jonathan Mandell, in New York Theater (16 June 2022), says that “Considered individually, Golyak’s directorial choices struck me as fresh, if not always straightforward, but taken together they felt at odds with one another — a series of touches that become distractions.  I was impressed by the stage production, but I wasn’t always engaged with it. “

Mandell greatly preferred the online version of the show, which includes a quick look at the theater, Baryshnikov appearing as Chekhov, and a question-and-answer period in which some production choices apparently are explained (justified?).

I didn’t watch the online version, although it sounds worthwhile, because as long as live theater is an option, I prefer it. I began the COVID shutdown watching a great deal of theater online (and producing some), and eventually became seriously tired of it.

Zachary Stewart, in TheaterMania (16 June 2022), is excited about the show’s technology, but he reviews the online, not the in-person, version of the production. Stewart says the production offers “the next step in live theater,” an idea about which people, I would say, will have to make up their own minds. Is a barrage of technology (I’m putting it unfairly, of course) the “next step” in theater, and if so, is that a good thing?

The director Igor Golyak’s biography on The Orchard’s website says he is “a global leader in the virtual theater movement.” Is it possible then that the live performance I saw was for those who are left behind in the “movement” – those of us too primitive to take advantage of online technologies?

Were we in the theater in fact basically seeing a studio production, meant to be viewed remotely? (In that case, why were we sold tickets?)

One more possibility occurs to me as a justification for The Orchard’s approach. In one short but powerful scene, Ilia Volok  portrays a Passerby as a belligerent and frightening soldier or ex-soldier, in a convincing demonstration of the old saying that “There are no small roles, only small actors.” Volok is large – at least in my recollection – and downright terrifying in the scene, bellowing at the actors frozen with terror around the base of the machine.

Both Volok and Igor Golyak, the director, are from Ukraine, now deep in a grisly war with Russia. Is it possible that The Orchard demonstrates that a production can be essentially an embodiment of a director’s personal feelings, applied to a more or less appropriate script? Is the wild world of The Orchard a theatrical image of the horrors that many in the Ukraine – or elsewhere – are facing right now?

My own basic assumption is that everything in a performance should serve the play. Perhaps Golyak would say that in The Orchard, everything does – because the lives of both the characters in the play, and our own lives, are lives of chaos, brutality, and danger. If we say, “My life’s not like that,” perhaps Golyak challenges us to look deeper.

Does this rationale satisfy? It only occurred to me days after seeing the play. Would it be possible for a production to express the same feelings without all the technology . . . is it appropriate, does it “work,” to represent chaos in a chaotic way? Or do the rest of us have to adjust because that’s the way things are going to be?

And I did get to see Baryshnikov.

[In my afterword, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Kirk’s analysis.  My guest-blogger asserts, “Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand.”  He follows this statement by suggesting that “the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were ‘something special.’”

[This rumination put me in mind of an essay by theater critic, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (b. 1927), “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times of 6 November 1988 (republished on ROT on 10 March 2011 (Rick On Theater: “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”). 

[I wrote on that article before I republished it on my blog; my interpretive post was “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage (18 September 2009; Rick On Theater: Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage; originally written on 11 and 19 November 1988), and I’ve invoked Brustein’s essay numerous times in discussing various performances.

[I won’t recap Brustein’s essay or my examination of it, but I want to point out that both he and I talk about the very phenomenon that Kirk addresses in “The Orchard”: In Brustein’s words, “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays.”  For ROTters who wish to see what Brustein and I actually wrote, I’ve provided the links to both posts.  The Times article is also posted on the paper’s website at STAGE VIEW; Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip? - The New York Times (nytimes.com), as well as through many libraries if they subscribe to ProQuest newspaper databases.)

[What Kirk means by “something special” in connection with stage productions is what he described in an earlier post, “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019), as “radical notions about how to stage a play—sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors.” In that article, Kirk called this the “Bright Idea,” a term he attributed to theater critic, scholar, and editor Eric Bentley (1916-2020).

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what the department tech director at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  Bentley introduced the term “Bright Idea” in a 1952 essay from the New Republic, “I Have a Bright Idea” (reprinted in What Is Theatre?), and defined it thus:

A Bright Idea is an invalid idea which has more appeal to the semi-literate mind than a valid one . . . .  It is a thought which can’t bear thinking about; but which is all the more influential on that  account; it surprises or reassures, it flatters or inflames; if it cannot earn the simple epithet “true” it frequently receives the more characteristically modern eulogy “intriguing” or at least “interesting.”  At the very worst it is praised as “cute.”

[Neither Brustein nor I was writing specifically about adding technology to a performance text, but the implication is the same.  The justification for doing it, in Kirk’s view, is “that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.”  I said “that some directors of classic plays distrust modern audiences so much that they feel they have to [enhance the play] to make it comprehensible to us.”

[In another post, a report on a production of Amadeus I’d seen, I applauded the director for a statement he made in the program: “The older I get, the less interested I am in saying something than I am in letting the play speak for itself and in letting the audience take what it will from the experience.”  I congratulated and thanked him because he “showed me that he trusts his audience to see what is going on.”

[Should a play present something that’s a little “difficult to understand,” Kirk asks “[I]s there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit?”  In an Off-Off-Broadway staging of Macbeth I saw, the director had a point to make, and he carried it off with cleverness, a modicum of subtlety, and no glaring spotlights.  I’d had to figure it out myself.  I reported: “The director had a message for me, and I got it.  And he never needed to explain it to me.”

[For me, then, the answer to Kirk’s query is ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with the audience stretching itself a little.’  Indeed, I summed up my Macbeth experience by asserting, “This may have required a little astuteness, but it wasn’t really all that hard.  It was also fun, and gave me a sense of accomplishment.”

[As Kirk states, “everything in a performance should serve the play.”  A Bright Idea, as Bentley and Kirk use the phrase—and Brustein implies in his discussion of directors who needlessly “enhance” their productions of classic plays—doesn’t do that.  It serves the director’s ego and sense of superiority (because he can understand the play while we spectators can’t).

[Perhaps these sentiments are why Bentley, who’d turned down an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a symposium on directing, wrote in a couple of letters to the organizer’s president in 1986 that “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre,” and threatened to “remove” directors from the theater.

[He ended his correspondence by asserting:

A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.

[If you replace ‘resetting the play’ with ‘inserting elaborate technology,’ you have the same issue with which Kirk takes exception in “The Orchard.”  QED.]

"For Paul Newman's 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," Part 3

by Allan M. Jalon

[This is the concluding section of Allan M. Jalon’s article on Paul Newman’s never-released film version of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.  If you’ve been reading Parts 1 and 2, you know what a remarkable tale this is.  (If you haven’t read the beginning installments—posted respectively on 5 and 8 February—I strongly suggest going back and picking up the start of this endeavor.]

The play’s full title is “The Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds” [in which Michael Strong appeared in 1975 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum; see Part 2]. It presents the troubled divide between the religion-steeped past and secular assimilation, the same transition that members of the Natapoff family (and many families) had experienced in Russia, and then in America. The play’s history runs like a thread through Jewish progress from the Old World to the new. It was written in Russia — originally for Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre, though it never had a production there — and got staged in Yiddish in New York in the 1920s. Now it was playing at the main theater complex in L.A.

Still, when Strong was onstage in “The Dybbuk,” in costume as a Polish Jew, did he feel connected to his Jewish identity? Strong’s childhood home felt “more Russian than Jewish,” his son told me, adding that the Natapoff family had no custom of Jewish practice or even celebrating holidays. Garfein said he’d had Strong and Shalet to his apartment for a few Seders [the ceremonial meal for Passover].

I’ll let Ellen Strong have the next-to last word: “Acting was his religion.”

My final words on this question offer a reminder that these were decades of a specific evolution — the merging of Jewish and American identities. Mike Strong was an American Jewish actor, while other people of his generation, with widely varying interest in the specificities of Jewishness, were American Jewish poets, American Jewish teachers and American Jewish politicians. It seems so obvious a statement, until one considers the decades of change it had taken until immigrants and their children could feel less like strangers here.

Garfein had moved to L.A. in 1964, joining Newman to establish the Actors Studio-West, an outpost of the New York group. He also got together with Strong and Shalet, growing closer to Strong than they’d been in New York. Ellen Strong recalls his “very social” presence at parties of about 10 people, mostly actors, in the backyard of their house. “Everyone would be telling stories and laughing about scenes going wrong, actors getting injured while doing stunts,” she recalled.

Garfein and Strong went to star-studded Hollywood parties. “We didn’t go to stupid parties,” he said. “It was always Kazan or Strasberg’s parties.”

They spent frequent Sunday mornings together at Garfein’s apartment, in a high-rise along Sunset Boulevard, “talking mostly about what we were doing — theater, movies.”

Strong and Garfein were two Actors Studio friends whose relationship was rooted in Chekhov-like indirection, the fissures between what was and wasn’t stated, remembered and left behind. Garfein said he and Strong got as close “as brothers — I was the younger brother,” but the two never spoke about the deep shadows surrounding them.

Garfein told me he never spoke to Strong about his youth in the Slovakian town of Bardejov [then part of Czechoslovakia]. In 1942, the family moved from Slovakia — a brutal Nazi ally that had begun deportations by then — to the relative safety of the Hungarian town where the Garfeins lived for two years. The family was swept up and placed on trains to Auschwitz in the massive Hungarian deportations of 1944.

In Auschwitz, Garfein told me, he lost 19 members of his family, including his mother and sister, on a single day, May 23, 1944; he was 13. His name was then Jacob Garfein, and his hair was red, not today’s airy white. (Iraj Abde, our mutual friend at Barzini’s Market, told me he buys 19 yahrzeit candles for Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.) [Yahrzeit is Yiddish for ‘anniversary’; the candles are memorials that Jews light in memory of loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths.  They are also lit at Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah).]

It’s hard to reconcile his carefully modulated voice, his hints of infinite grief, with the man I’ve watched stroll buoyantly down Broadway. He details labor camps and death marches across Europe largely to lay German rail lines. He names nine camps across Poland and Central Europe where he stopped before English forces set him free at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He was sent to a Swedish recovery center and from there, in 1946, to New York.

On his iPhone, he carries photographs from a Swedish newspaper, showing him as a flesh-and-bones teenager in Sweden.

Michael Strong, meanwhile, never spoke of being Cecil Natapoff, the son of an immigrant mail carrier in the Bronx who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. By hiding in a cemetery, Strong’s father had survived a pogrom in 1903 that killed hundreds of Jews in a Belorussian town called Gomel; I learned this from Susan Strong, the family historian. Strong never spoke of his brother. Gus Natapoff was seven years older than he, a prodigy who gained admission to Harvard for graduate work in advancing areas of science and engineering at a time when admission quotas limited the number of Jews.

He drowned in a swimming accident at a Harvard pool in 1938, just as Cecil Natapoff was starting his acting career, three years before he changed his name to Strong.

Alan Natapoff, a Strong cousin, is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the impact of space travel on the human body. He grew up taking pleasure in Michael Strong’s work, and believes that Strong’s relationship with his elder brother —“the family never recovered from his death” — at least partly drove his acting ambitions.

“I didn’t know he had a brother. I never heard the name Natapoff,” Garfein said. “To me, he was Michael Strong. I knew he was Jewish, but we didn’t talk about the past.”

Grant, who wrote about her Jewish family (and how she endured the Hollywood blacklist) in a memoir called “I Said Yes to Everything” [2014], saw Strong and Shalet in L.A. She echoed Garfein, saying: “We didn’t talk about who we were like that. We were part of the tribe of actors. I never knew he was Cecil Natapoff. He never knew I was Lyova Rosenthal. Mike Strong. Lee Grant. How American can you get?”

[This is from Wikipedia: “The Hollywood blacklist (1946-1960s) was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, from the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit or easily verifiable, as it was the result of numerous individual decisions by the studios and was not the result of official legal action. Nevertheless, it quickly and directly damaged or ended the careers and income of scores of individuals working in the film industry.”]

But Garfein and Strong shared a delight in Yiddish theater stories. The Yiddish theater was in Strong’s blood. He sat in the 55-cent balcony seats of such theaters when he was a boy. Maybe when he stood on the stage of the Orpheum for Newman’s film, he was looking into a theater where he sat with his parents as a boy and felt the first stirrings of actor inspiration.

We know Strong worked on Broadway with Joseph Buloff [1899-1985], the Yiddish acting star who’d been brought from Europe by Maurice Schwartz [1890-1960], impresario-star of New York’s Yiddish Art Theater. It’s a good guess that Buloff gave him the following Schwartz story.

It seems Schwartz had a bad-great night playing Hamlet — in Yiddish, of course. He gave the gravedigger scene’s famous line — “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. . .” — and blanked out. He looked to the prompter’s box, but it was empty, nature having called. Recovering his composure, Schwartz improvised: “Poor New Yorick, I know it. . . .”

His New York immigrant audience went crazy, it seems, as he went on: “Oh, poor New Yorick, I know it. It is our city, New Yorick, the city of our struggles, but it also holds promise for better times. . . .”

In 1968, Garfein directed Shalet and Strong in a short play about a honeymooning couple’s post-coital fight about the height of a great conductor. It was called “How Tall Is Toscanini?” [written by Calder Willingham, 1922-95; performed at UCLA’s Actors Studio West Workshop.] Strong and Garfein met, and Garfein showed him his “big directing book” filled with analytical notes for his actors.

Strong didn’t want to see it, saying he’d find his part on his own.

Garfein asked him, “Well, what do you do?’

“He said: ‘I put the character on the ceiling. Then, I lay on my bed and talk to the ceiling. That’s where the character lives. I ask questions: What job do you have? Introduce me to your mother and father. What are you doing right now? And the character talks back from the ceiling, and I listen to what he says. So, use your big book after you see what I get from the ceiling.’”

From 1969 to 1970, Strong enjoyed an unusually visible career moment. Working in “Patton,” he wove through the film as the title character’s ever-helpful chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Hobart Carver, and flinched in pain when his boss declared his willingness to work with ex-Nazis.

With the film on screens nationwide, Strong toured the country in a key role in Miller’s play “The Price” [1967], directed by Miller. He played the troubled middle-aged policeman Victor Franz, one of two brothers at war over an inheritance. Critics loved him. “Strong hovers between goodness and weakness” [“Arthur Miller Directs 'Price' at Hartford,” 4 Mar. 1970], wrote Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s Richard Coe [1914-95] judged Strong to be “strangely more perceptive than Pat Hingle’s original” [“‘The Price,’” 28 Oct. 1969; Hingle, 1924-2009, played Victor Franz in the Broadway première, 7 Feb. 1968-15 Feb. 1969].

On February 17, 1970, Kazan wrote him a letter that shows how acutely Strong’s admirers felt his unachieved potential. After seeing Strong’s glowing reviews from the road, the director wrote, “See, if you keep working, and you can stand the waiting, you finally get what you deserve.”

In Chicago, where “The Price” was onstage at the gorgeous old Studebaker Theater while “Patton” played on local screens, a Chicago Daily News reporter saw a good story in Strong as a veteran actor in the limelight. He interviewed him for a rare feature focusing on just him. Midway through it, Strong pulled out his wallet, removing a “fading, well-creased” clipping of The New York Times’s tiny rave of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” He told the reporter that he wished this “teething ring” of Newman’s directorial skills “might be shown as part of a Paul Newman retrospective.”

It seems the star of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” [1969] never forgot his directing debut, either. Amram visited the actor in his dressing room one night a few years before his 2008 death. “All Paul wanted to talk about was that film with Michael Strong,” the composer told me. “He asked, ‘Do you have or do you know anybody who has a copy of our film, ‘On the Harmfulness of Tobacco’? I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘I want to see it again.’ And he looked melancholy.”

THE GRAVE

In Diane Shalet’s book, “Grief in a Sunny Climate,” Michael is already dying of stomach cancer. He’s still well enough to join the narrator-wife at a cemetery somewhere near L.A. to pick out his grave site. They find one and lie down on it, under a tree with a “cluster of dark green needles.” He tells her a Chekhov short story about a young actor who visits the grave of a dead stage star who has been forgotten.

Shalet’s fictional alter ego recalls how, referring to a once popular police series, her husband had once told her, “I wasn’t put on earth to do ‘Baretta’” [ABC, 1975-78]

And the narrator created by Shalet (who would die in 2006) explains: “Passionate about the theater, uncanny in his sense of truth; and chameleon, he could create the psychological and physical reality of another human being.” She recalls exercises that they’d used to enter a role: “Wrap yourself in the circumstances. . . .Talk and listen with the illusion of the first time. . . . Acting is life chosen.”

Then there were the trials of the barely famous: “When we walked down the street he had the finger-snapping recognition of the public: “Aren’t you. . .? Click, click. . . . ”Aren’t you. . . Glenn Ford [1916-2006]?’ Michael would mumble and ask me, ‘Are you disappointed I’m not as famous as Burt Lancaster [1913-94]?’”

Finishing that passage, I asked myself: Why, without the Newman film’s second life, would Michael Strong remain so buried by time? With all his talent and commitment, why didn’t he get another truly visible break in films? True, he was more of a character actor, but why didn’t he find the notice earned by others of that broad type, like Karl Malden, his closest actor friend, or Eli Wallach, with whom Strong’s daughter says he socialized?

Was he too versatile? Not sufficiently distinctive? Too much the good soldier, not assertive enough in some back-lot sense? And is it fair to raise a question about whether a fine actor might have won more success than the substantial degree he found? Isn’t the risk of going under-recognized in the big world’s eyes so rooted in the acting life that it’s misguided to second guess such a career?

The more often I watched “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” the more resonant the scene in which Chekhov’s character peers into that empty theater with baffled eyes became for me. I sensed the meaning it might have for many artists working in different fields who hold somewhere in their minds the question: “Will this work of mine be seen? Will it be heard?” The sight of Ivan Nyukhin — staring as his belief in his connection to others drains away — became a kind of symbolic moment that guided how I understood the film and the filmmakers. It’s only a reporter’s guess about the past, but I’ve become sure that both Strong and Newman constructed that scene of the unwatched actor on the Orpheum’s stage in 1959 to dramatize the possibility they lived with of making art and being answered with silence.

Still, while Paul Strong is convinced his father did what he did for mostly the sake of doing it, that he “cared more about art than stardom,” he wonders if he may have hidden frustration about his career. He asked me, “If Kazan admired him so much, why didn’t he give him a small part in ‘On the Waterfront’ [1954], or another of his classic films?”

He wanted to know if I’d found any answers to the mystery.

I told him my reporting had only deepened it.

In fact, if there’s one person I’d like to trouble from the grave for this story — besides Newman and Strong — it’s Kazan. I’ve realized how closely the lives its major figures wove through his career. He directed Newman in the [Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), 1959-60]. Garfein considered him a mentor. Amram composed for him repeatedly [Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Arrangement (1969)]. He directed Strong [After The Fall (1964-65), Marco Millions (1964), The Changeling (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964-65); all stage] and worked with him at the Actors Studio.

None of those four men was blacklisted, but I can’t conjure Kazan’s memory without thinking of his having named names in the Hollywood blacklist era. His autobiography, “Elia Kazan: A Life” [1997], is one of the most complex books of self-narration I have read: a thick, confounding knot of history-making talent and betrayal. Still, his affection for actors ran deep, as the Strong papers show.

Michael Strong died of stomach cancer on September 17, 1980. He was 62. On October 3, without addressing it to Shalet or anyone, Kazan wrote what looked like a condolence note. He wasn’t at Strong’s funeral — Malden, who called Strong “my dear friend” in his memoir, was there — so it wasn’t a eulogy. He signed its typed sentences, an elegy for one actor and for a world of New York actors who called the theater home: “At one time in my life, for perhaps 15 years, I had a family in the theater, a small family of actors, because I trusted them to understand me and give me everything of which they were capable.

“Mike was one of this family. And he was capable of a great deal. But beyond and above his work there was a unique quality of sweetness, of goodness, so rare today. Of course he was competitive — that’s a necessity as the world spins today; one pays for excessive naiveté — but this career orientation never dimmed the sterling light of his realest self. There was never a day that I went to rehearsal and found Mike waiting that I didn’t feel better for the sight of him.”

THE HARMFULNESS OF AVOIDANCE

Garfein was in Paris when Strong died. Shalet called him from L.A. with the news. She also called him — possibly just before or right after he died — to tell him that Strong had asked her on his deathbed to bring Garfein the Newman film. He’d asked that she fly to France and hand it to him in person.

Ellen Strong, who cared for her father with Shalet till the end, recalls no deathbed request. But she says her father was “very proud” of the film, and that Shalet visited Europe after he died, so “it is very plausible that it happened just as Jack Garfein says.”

In fact, the film box bears a peeling strip of tape on which printed black letters say “For Jack Garfein.”

“Diane told me, ‘Mike wants you to have this movie,’” Garfein told me. “That’s what she said.”

And he fell silent, the Garfein energy giving way to a hard, inward look.

I asked, “What happened next?”

His hand gave the air a lost-looking swipe. Silent, he stared at the space of pale sofa beside him and repeated: “She came to Paris. She said that on his deathbed, Mike said: ‘Give it to Jack. He’ll know what to do with it.’ I’m the one he called after Newman gave it to him. He trusted me. He knew I respected his work immensely. He knew I understood it was the best he could do, his pinnacle as an actor. I put it away somewhere in some closet, and I never looked at it again.”

I asked him what could have stopped him from watching a film that a dying actor-friend had told his wife to carry across the Atlantic to give to him, with a clear sense that his friend dreamed it could finally be seen when he was gone?

“I knew Paul had taken his name off of it,” Garfein answered. “I was afraid that, if Paul found it a disappointment, I’d find it disappointing, too. I respected Paul’s opinion. I wanted to remember the way Mike did it at the Actors Studio. I was there the first time he did it in a class, in front of Strasberg. Strasberg thought it was astonishing. Everyone did. I didn’t want that memory to be wiped out by something mediocre.”

After Shalet handed Garfein the box with the film in it, he stashed it in a closet in his Paris apartment, where it stayed, untouched, for another 34 years.

LOST IS NOT ALWAYS LOST

In 2012, while still living in Paris, the 82-year-old Garfein visited New York and met an articulate 37-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant (“75% percent Jewish,” he said, with a teasing smile) named Natalia Repolovsky [b. 1976; m. Garfein, 2019]. Born in Sochi, the site of Russia’s recent Olympics [winter 2014], she grew up there and trained as a classical pianist in Moscow. She’s tall, with a willowy bearing, and states clear views in her Russian accent.

She met Garfein, far more diminutive, 45 years her senior, at a dinner party that also figures into a tangled tale they gleefully tell me, about a production they were supposed to see together earlier of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”— a story that ends with them seeing it separately and hating it.

[The only New York staging of Uncle Vanya (first produced, 1899) around the time Jalon reports that Garfein and Repolovsky met was an Off-Broadway production of the Pearl Theatre. It was mounted at the company’s home on West 42nd Street (Theatre Row), east of 11th Avenue, known as the Peter Norton Space, in September and October 2014. 

[Of the production, the New York Times’ Laura Collins-Hughes (“On a Russian Farm, Where Frustration Grows,” 24 Sept. 2014) said that “there’s a lopsidedness to the telling” because “performances by” some cast members “are funnier and more fully realized than those by” others. Collins-Hughes added that “with the strong imbalance in the principal roles, . . . poignancy goes missing”; “in place of the sadness that should be there, we feel only emptiness.” 

[The translation, by Paul Schmidt, was apparently contemporary, as the Times reviewer, who liked it, characterized it as “vibrant” and “loose-limbed” and asserted, “There’s no groping through layers of musty language to find our connection to Chekhov’s” characters.  Other notices (Time Out New York, Village Voice) were equally non-committal-to-negative.]

In 2014, Garfein returned to New York to move in with Repolovsky, and brought with him a certain tired-looking brown box with an old film in it.

“We were unpacking,” she recalled. “And I saw it. Just laying there amid his things. I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, ‘Oh, it’s an old film of a play by Chekhov.’ And I asked, ‘What play?’ And he told me, and I had never read this play. I had never seen it performed. I said, ‘We have to see it.’”

Garfein hesitated, but Repolovsky insisted.

“I said, ‘We have to see it. Anything Chekhov, I will go and look,’” she recounted. “Even if it is bad, it is bad Chekhov!”

They faced a problem of time and technology. The film was locked onto the roll that Newman had handed to Strong and Shalet to Garfein, an artifact of the long era when Americans went to a movie theater to see a movie. So, Garfein called Lori Styler [b. 1954], a friend and a connection to his past.

Her father, Herman Styler, was a freelance journalist who wrote about Garfein’s brief talk at a United Jewish Appeal dinner shortly after he arrived in New York in 1946, at the age of 16. One of the first and youngest Holocaust survivors to emigrate here, he’s now one of the last who lives.

He placed the old film box with the print in it into her hands; she took it to be digitized, and brought it back with the film on a DVD disc. That evening, he nervously watched Repolovsky slide the DVD into place, and they watched as some visual static crossed the print. Credits rolled past the spot where Newman’s name might have been.

And Michael Strong came wandering down the street, dressed as Nyukhin. He stopped at the theater door, corrected his name, and starred in his slow storm of words and silences.

When the film ended, Garfein and Repolovsky told me, they sat “in silence,” contemplating the decades that it had been left to the dark. “I knew that I was wrong,” Garfein said. “Paul was wrong to be disappointed, if that’s what happened.”

“It was a revelation to me that an American actor could perform Chekhov in a way so Russian,” Repolovsky told me after I’d returned to watch the film again, this time with both of them. “This combination of misery and humor that is so big a part of Chekhov was so natural for him. It was not an American performance of a Russian play. I’ve seen those, and I have been disappointed a number of times.

“There is such a big difference between the two cultures. American culture is a success culture, always about winning, while Russia has a culture of elegant failures, and that is what this film is about. I watched Michael Strong, thinking that he gets it. He understands, and it comes from a very deep place.”

Repolovsky didn’t know, when we watched the Newman film that evening, that Michael Strong was a Russian Jew, that he’d grown up hearing the language in which Chekhov wrote his play. When I’d done that piece of reporting, I told her. Her eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d handed her a key and she’d unlocked — well, a closet. “See,” she said. “It makes total sense.”

Without Repolovsky’s émigré antennae, Garfein says, the film might have stayed lost. He had no plan to look at it. “I brought it back to New York, thinking I’d donate it to some institution, maybe Lincoln Center, and then I could take a tax write-off,” he said candidly. At one point, I told Garfein I’d found a Chekhov quote to be in order: “One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake” [from The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov, ed. 1948]. He smiled broadly, and asked me to email it to him.

Repolovsky is clear that this ungodly mistake should be corrected, saying the film “must be seen.” Garfein said he’s taken steps to make a film about the Newman film, one that will be “more than a documentary,” though he’s declined to elaborate.

But last April [2016], the director of “Something Wild” visited a studio at TCM and helped the popular Robert Osborne [1932-2017] host a screening of his best-known film. That visit resulted in early exchanges about a possible showing of the Newman film.

Osborne may end up introducing it in just the kind of Newman retrospective that Strong envisioned as a showcase for his Chekhov tour-de-force. “At this point, a Newman evening is what I have in mind,” TCM’s [senior v.p. of programming and production Charles] Tabesh said.

Still, I wonder: Who actually owns this orphanlike film? Such a film isn’t likely to bring a windfall, but who can profit from it? I asked this to Eric Schwartz, a leading attorney on film copyright issues. “Copyright law is often murky for unfinished or abandoned projects,” he told me.

Amram registered for copyright protection for his music; Newman didn’t take that step. Garfein — possession being nine-tenths of the law — owns the physical print, but copyright law governs intangibles, and that could thwart his right to profit from screenings of the imagery.

Amram said that he will “be a mensch, not a gangster kind of guy,” and isn’t looking for money because he wants only to “get this film seen.” Still, if the Newman family claims to own the copyright, it could create a problem, Schwartz said, especially if it has documents that place control in family hands. Tabesh said TCM lawyers have looked into the rights question deeply enough to feel “comfortable” with it, but he added, “We will check with the family.”

For members of the Strong family, watching TCM together is a tradition. They spoke in interviews about stars of the decades between 1930 and 1980 with whom Michael Strong performed, including Frederic March [1897-1975; An Enemy of the People (play), 1950-51], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76; The Emperor's Clothes (play), 1953; The Young Lawyers: The Victims (TV), 1971] and Ethel Merman [1908-84; Gypsy (play; understudy Herbie), 1959-61]. When they watch Cobb, they’re aware he was one of Strong’s two favorite actors. The other was Paul Muni [1895-1967], with whom Strong probably never acted but whose disciplined intensity he emulated, and for whom Paul Strong is named.

Three generations of the Strong family spent the past summer [2016] on the Maine coast, in a house on an inlet that reaches out to the Atlantic and has been in the family for decades. There, Paul and Susan Strong have shared old movies with their two grown children — who call Michael Strong “Grampa Mike” — and two grandchildren. Michael, 9, is named for the actor. He and his sister, Sophia, 11, spent part of the summer at a theater day camp. When I mentioned his name to them, they said they hadn’t heard of Paul Newman. But they knew a lot about Michael Strong, and they’d heard about “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.”

I made a last call to the family to tell Paul Strong about TCM’s plan to show the film. In his deep, quiet voice, he said: “Robert Osborne once mentioned my father’s name. He was about to screen a film with him in it. Then he suddenly said his name, and I’ve remembered that ever since.

“They’ve shown him in ‘Detective Story,” and we’ve watched that,” he added. “But if you ask me what it means that they will show this film after all this time? There really are no words for it.”

[TCM had scheduled On the Harmfulness of Tobacco along with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel and 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for “Newman Directs” on Sunday, 26 March 2017.  In February, however, Garfein pulled out of the arrangement with the network on the argument that airing the movie for a nationwide audience would impede the success of an independent documentary about the Newman film the director planned to make.

[As a result, TCM aired only Rachel, Rachel and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds that Sunday night at 8 and 10 p.m.; On the Harmfulness of Tobacco wasn’t shown as originally announced.  Garfein died on 30 December 2019 and, as far as I could determine, never made the Newman documentary.

[The Film Society of Lincoln Center, however, scheduled the Chekhov movie along with Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for Monday, 20 February 2017, the first time since 1962 that the film would be seen in public; that screening was still planned.]

Allan M. Jalon won two 2015 Simon Rockower Awards [given for “Excellence in Jewish Journalism” sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association] for his Forward feature stories, “My Opa’s Story of World War One’s Other Fight” [7 Sept. 2014; Opa is German for ‘Grandpa’] and “A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins” [27 July 2014].