That Hartford Winter : Soviet director tackles a Russian play with American actors

“Now we’ll go outside,” says the director. The actors at the table look at each other. It’s about 10 degrees in the sun today--and there’s no sun. Is this how they rehearse in Russia?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The director is Yuri Yeremin, artistic director of Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre. Last winter Yeremin invited the Hartford Stage Company’s artistic director, Mark Lamos, to Moscow to direct his company in an American play, O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms.” Now Lamos has brought Yeremin to Hartford to stage a Russian play--Alexander Chervinsky’s “The Paper Gramophone”--using American actors.

A reporter who had watched Lamos rehearse in Moscow in March thought it would be interesting to watch Yeremin at work in Hartford. Each man faced the same problem: How do you direct actors when you don’t speak their language?

A good translator is obviously crucial. Lamos had a fairly good one in Moscow, but her translation was a bit slow and Lamos wasn’t always certain that it was sinking in. There were times when he felt out of the loop.

So Lamos found Yeremin a great translator, Alexander Gelman. The visitor can see that Gelman isn’t just quick--he’s got panache. The words come only half a beat behind Yeremin’s and come out with equal passion. The visitor reflects that it must be a bit daunting for an actor to bear the brunt of this double-stream of energy, rather like taking a fire hose in the face.

But Yeremin isn’t mad at anybody. He just likes to throw himself into his work--and challenges his actors to dive in after him. “I want you to be extremely cruel in this scene,” says Yeremin to actress Ann Dowd. “ Da! Da! Da! “ she says, nodding. “Got it.”

For all the emotion flying around the room, she knows that he means quietly cruel. For it turns out that Yeremin and his American actors do speak the same language. It is the language of Stanislavsky.

Today’s rehearsal is at the table, a process of breaking down a scene into “beats” or units of action--a highly specific process that Dowd and her partner in the scene, Ray Virta, have followed with American directors as well.

Not this meticulously, however. Yeremin is making them take apart the text as carefully as a watchmaker. He encourages them to improvise when this will bring a character’s intention to the surface. But he will step in to correct the improvisation when it strays beyond the grim world of the play--Stalin’s Russia just after World War II. Here you don’t talk about visiting somebody in her “house.” You go to see her in her “apartment.” Which is, in fact, a room in a common apartment.

A Soviet audience would automatically understand this. Yeremin must get actors to communicate such matters to an American audience without spelling everything out.

Similarly, Lamos had to get his Soviet cast to communicate the sullen eroticism of O’Neill’s New England family. He eventually realized that it was best done by tamping down the actors’ body language-- by making sure that they didn’t get too expressive physically.

Yeremin likewise doesn’t want any hammy “indicating” of how cold it got in Moscow that first winter after the war. So out into Church Street he and his actors now go, to observe how a young man actually does walk a girl home in 10 degrees above zero.

Yeremin tells Dowd and Virta to walk five blocks up the street, cross over, and then come back again, pausing at her “doorstep” (the stage door) before saying good night. They should say the lines in the play, but the dialogue isn’t the important thing. He wants them to get the winter into their bones.

Virta decides to go for broke and takes off his ski jacket. Away the actors go, with Yeremin and Gelman shadowing them like a camera crew. A camera would pick up Dowd’s red nose and Virta’s hunched shoulders, but the actors attract no attention at all on Church Street, and Yeremin points this out to them when the party has returned to the stage door. When you are cold, you don’t have to play being cold.

Virta nods gravely, blows on his bare hands and suddenly howls: “Hand me my damned coat!” Everybody breaks up. They are becoming a company.

In Russia, Lamos--who is watching none of this; he is off in New York rehearsing “Measure for Measure” for Joe Papp’s Public Theatre--had a company at his disposal from the start. That had its good and its bad sides. They were used to rehearsing together, but they were also used to rehearsing more slowly than Lamos had time for.

Rather than letting their characterizations mature over three or four months, they had to find them in a few weeks. Eventually Lamos realized that they wanted to be shown, quite literally, what he had in mind for them.

Yeremin’s cast of four--Dowd, Virta, Jack Bittner and Kathleen Chalfant (the latter two are off today)--are free-lance actors from the New York talent pool. Yeremin auditioned them for their roles, a process that reminded him a little too much of a capitalistic factory boss hiring his workers from the shape-up line.

Still, he could see the theatrical advantage. This way, you got the actors who would be perfect for these parts without worrying about what else you would cast them in over the season. “I can’t imagine anyone else playing these characters,” he says of his American company after the rehearsal.

Yeremin could also see the advantage of working at a fast clip. (“The Paper Gramophone” opened this weekend, after three weeks of rehearsal and one of previews.) The rehearsal period might be rushed, but it could also be more intense than in a repertory theater like the Pushkin, where the actors have to perform in another play at night.

“I like to work more slowly, but it’s also possible to overbake a cake,” he said. “I’m learning something by working at this speed.” Maybe that’s why Yeremin didn’t feel lonely in Hartford, as Lamos had in Moscow. “I haven’t had time.”

Actress Dowd was taking the rehearsal process very intensely indeed and wasn’t too crazy about having a reporter around to watch it. You don’t bring strangers into the delivery room.

But she and Virta were agreeable to a phone interview a few days later. “It’s true,” she said, explaining her guardedness. “There isn’t a moment I’m not thinking about the play. Usually when you’ve only got three weeks to do a show, something that knows it can’t be done in three weeks shuts down. Which is not a good thing.

“Yuri makes us feel that it’s important to do it all . Which means that by 11 o’clock at night, we have to be walked home from the theater. But it’s not frightening, if you come to rehearsals with an open heart.”

“The energy you see coming at us--that’s an actor’s energy,” Virta said. “Yuri’s spinning the tale for us. And he expects us to be as direct and concentrated as he is. I feel like I’m being forced to be clear.”

How so?

“When the director and the actor speak the same language, it’s easy to get away with things. Here, the subtext has got to be right. Yuri’s like a farmer sowing these thousands of seeds in us. . . .”

“Make it clear that that’s Ray talking,” Dowd says over the speaker-phone. “But he’s right. Acting is energy. There’s nothing worse than sitting around at rehearsals, not being able to release it. Yuri knows what he’s doing, and that leaves us free to do our work.

“For example, I’ve never had to be really cold. I’ve never starved. I’ve never lost both my parents. I’ve never gone through a war. But that’s my character’s life. Survival. Survival. Survival. All those things are foreign to me, and the task is to make them personal.

“So Yuri sends us out into the cold. Being out in that temperature and having no choice about it, what came to me was the notion--’Let’s get the hell inside.’ It speeded up the scene considerably.”