Day 23...Back at it again...

OK, St. Petersburg has totally thrown me off my schedule…but I will fill you in on that later.  I have a ton of work to do and no time to do it over here.  Between classes, museum trips, and plays, there’re only a couple of hours each day to do any kind of work.  And the work that I have to do not only involves things like writing this blog, but also things like editing photos, drawings and renderings for classes here, and, oh yeah, drafting and drawing for the shows I’m designing for Bay View this summer.  I could use a couple of days to catch up on work…

In fact, I gave up the chance to go on a little excursion this morning with the other designers just so I could have a couple of hours to work on some sketches for Oz.  I got so into that by time I realized that I should probably set my alarm to let me know when I need to leave for our History of Theater class…well, the class had already started.

Then, we were going to have an unofficial painting class to finish our paints from last week…well, the students here are in the middle of their exams (more like a designer jury) and the paint room has been turned into a storage/last minute work room for their projects so that ideas went out the window.  At least I used the time to work on more of my Oz sketches…

The highlight of the day was seeing The Seagull at the MXT!  To put this in a little historical context…you can go here: http://www.mxat.ru/english/history/ for the longer version but I’ll summarize it like this.  When Stanislavsky directed The Seagull in 1898 for the MXT, he changed the history to theatre.  What I’ve been learning over here has led me to understand how he and his team essentially created a whole new way of doing productions form the sets to the acting.  That influence is still going strong today…

This particular show that we saw, hauntingly beautiful.  The run originally open way back in 1980 and will turn 30 next month on the 9^th of July.  Of course, they’ve had to do several recasting changes in that time period.  In fact, Dr. Thomas said that this was almost an entirely new, and younger, cast from just last year, but they don’t do that very often.   Nevertheless, it was a freakin’ awesome show… Oh, and I should probably mention that I got to watch the show FROM THE DIRECTORS BOX!!!  That’s one of the special side seating boxes you see in older theatre buildings…yeah, I got to sit there…

The show opened with the “stage” gazebo that is used in the first act gliding forward while various layers of scrim (a special kind of theatrical fabric that you can see through when things are lit behind it) where lifted out of its way kind of like curtains.  Then there was a long platform that had different furniture on it depending on the scene that would move down stage while the gazebo moved upstage through the long platform…OK, the long platform was really three platforms with gaps between them so the gazebo could travel over in on its own little track system.  Also, when the long platform was all the way down towards the audience, there were two side platforms that would slide in behind the longer one while a scrim drape came down to separate them so you could have people in three different rooms.  This was really nice because Chekhov (the playwright) often has groups of people move off to adjacent rooms for a little bit to isolate a small grouping on stage.  So, in this production when a player would go into the music room, you could see and hear him playing the piano (softly) while the main action of the play continued on stage. 

One cool effect lasted the entire final act.  First, they did the first three acts then took an intermission before the final act as opposed to the usual break after the 2^nd act.  At least it had an intermission, after an hour and fifty minutes I was beginning to think that they weren’t going to have one.  In one sense it logical to put the intermission there because the first three acts happen relative close in time whereas the forth act takes place two years later.  So, as the current opened, it revealed the main character standing on the gazebo with torn and tattered curtains (because they’d been left up for two year outside) that where blowing in the wind.  The gazebo moved upstage and the wind kept blowing on the curtains tossing them around the whole act until the main curtain finally closed to end the show.  It was really eerie but fit the mood of the show perfectly.

The show ended with a cool little bookend as well.  They added a short little scene onto the end of the play where an actress who had a long monologue performance on the Gazebo stage for the other characters in the first act repeat part of that scene.  The book end was that all the other characters (well, almost all) were onstage frozen in the final tableau while this actress was on the gazebo giving her speech as the “stage” slowly moved forward like it did at the beginning.  Brilliant!!!