This is crash Course Theater, and those of you of legal drinking age should get your pickles and bites of brown bread ready.

Because today we're exploring Anton Chekhov, the Moscow art Theater.

In the early years of Russian modernism, That means laughter and tears and vodka, lots of vodka.

Also, who is gonna pay the mortgage lights up Early Russian drama looked a lot like the early years of theater in France, Germany or Italy.

There were mystery plays and folk comedies that eventually gave way to neoclassical scholastic plays, although in Russia ah, bunch of the neo classical plays were specifically anti Napoleon dramas.

So that's a new twist, I guess.

Empress Catherine the Great allowed the first professional theater to open in ST Petersburg in the mid 17 hundreds.

She even wrote a bunch of not so great comedies and her own version of The Merry Wives of Windsor, where all the characters got Russian names.

She described her own work as a free but feeble adaptation.

Russia's dramatic literary tradition didn't really start until Romanticism took over, led by Alexander Pushkin in Mikhail Lermontov, though their works went unproduced for years because of censorship.

And then Alexey Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev, a k a.

Leo Tolstoy, wrote a trilogy of plays about Ivan the Terrible that pretty much closed the not very thick book on Russian romantic theater.

It's the only not very thick Russian book that has ever existed, but fun fact for a country so state controlled and censorship heavy realism came to Russia.

Pretty early examples include Ivan Turgenev is melancholy 18 fifties comedy A Month in the Country, about affairs on a rural estate, and Alexander Ostrovsky is middle class comedies and dramas.

F.

Pierzynski's A Bitter Fate even followed Zola's naturalistic precepts.

A decade before Zola wrote them, Nikolai Gogol and Leo Tolstoy wrote more controversial plays.

Goebbels was a farcical look at provincial corruption, the government inspector and Tolstoy's a baby murdering classic, The Power of Darkness, which we looked at in our episode on French naturalism.

But censorship meant that these plays sometimes waited decades before being produced into this world arrived.

Anton Chekhov, Russia's greatest playwright and a man who really knew his way around a sample of our check off was born in 18 60.

His paternal grandfather had been a surf.

Chekov trained as a doctor, and though he continued to practice medicine, he devoted himself to literature, mostly as a short story writer.

At first, just as he finished medical school, he developed tuberculosis.

But he was financially responsible for his family, so he ignored it.

A few years later, he wrote his first produced play, Ivan Off.

But even though it was a hit, Chekov considered it a disappointment.

In 18 95 he wrote his first major dramatic work, The Seagull.

It was produced the next year, and it flopped hard.

The actors didn't know their lines.

The audience booed like Crazy.

Checkoff, ran out of the theater in the middle of the second act and said that he would never write another play.

But a writer and theater director named Vladimir No Maravich.

Dyachenko loved the play and re mounted it at the newly founded Moscow Art Theater.

Check off, then wrote three more major works, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and the Cherry Orchard.

So what makes these plays so indelible?

Well, even though Chekhov's plays are full of incidents like murders and attempted murders and suicides and attempted suicides, and who is gonna pay the mortgage.

There's some of the first place to feel like life because here's the thing.

Checkoff knew that life doesn't include a lot of climaxes or cliffhangers or neat speeches that explain everything.

Most of the time, it's just about playing.

Cards are going for a walk, er, having a late night vodka sesh, he wrote.

In life, people do not shoot themselves or hang themselves or fall in love or deliver themselves of clever sayings.

Every minute they spend most of their time eating, drinking, running after women or men or talking nonsense.

It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on stage.

Life on the stage should be as it really is, and the people, too, should be as they are.

This doesn't mean that nothing happens in Chekhov's plays or that what happens doesn't matter.

Plenty happens, and it does matter.

But Chekov was also comfortable writing scenes that are just less eventful, and it's those scenes that have the texture of life.

He also meant many of these scenes to be funny and often fought with his serious minded directors to make them funnier.

He was a master of subtext, a kind of misdirection in which characters can't or won't say what they really mean.

But the meaning emerges anyway.

Around and under and between the lines.

Let's take a closer look at Jack O.

V in realism through his last play, The Cherry Orchard.

Help Us Out.

Probable You Berenice Kaya has returned home from some years in Paris with a lover she learns for home, where her son drowned will be sold at auction.

Her neighbor Lopakhin, a former surf, encourages her to chop down the orchard and divide the estate into parcels for middle class people to build summer homes.

Lyuba won't listen.

She sees Trofimoff, her son's former tutor, who is now a scruffy student.

She weeps.

Luba is out for a walk with her brother, got a F, her daughter Anya, and her adopted daughter, Varia, as well as Lopakhin and Trofimoff.

Ah, homeless man stumbles in and leave.

A gives him all her money, even though Varia says there's barely enough to feed the servants.

Anya is impressed by Trofimov, revolutionary talk of a new world and a new life.

She sneaks down to the river.

Lyuba is giving a ball.

It is auction day for the orchard, and the family hopes that a rich aunt will rescue them.

The guests drink, dance and squabble until Lopakhin comes in and announces the orchard is hiss.

I've bought the estate where my grandfather and my father were slaves, he says, where they weren't even allowed into the kitchen.

I'm asleep.

It's only a dream, an illusion.

Finally, it's time for the family to leave.

Lyuba urges Lopakhin to propose to Varia.

Lopakhin promises he will, but he can't bring himself to do it.

Instead, he moves at her and she throws some shoes.

The family departs for the train station, not realizing they've left behind the old servant.

Fierce, forgotten, fierce lays down to die, and offstage, the axes bite into the orchards.

Trees, timber, thought bubble waken see checkouts, prevalent themes and style, particularly his idea that people are sitting at a table having dinner, that's all.

But at the same time, their happiness is being created or their lives are being Tauron apart.

So I guess that's not all.

That's it.

The ball scene is about.

Another playwright would have staged the auction, but check off fills the act with idle conversation instead, and the moving scene with Lopakhin and Varia is a beautiful example of the power of subtext.

If the Cherry Orchard is a realistic drama, it also suggests a move toward symbolism, as do the late plays of Ibsen and Strindberg.

The orchard represents more than just the orchard.

It's a symbol of an old order, and it several points in the play.

A mysterious sound is heard.

The sound of a breaking string dying away sad.

Maybe check off would have moved in a more Symbolist or Expressionist direction if he'd lived longer.

But he didn't.

In 19 0 for a few months after the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, he traveled with his new wife, the actress Old Juniper, to recuperate at a spa town.

He became very ill, and after drinking a glass of champagne as ordered by a Dr, he laid down and died.

His body was returned to Moscow in a refrigerated car used to transport oysters.

Checkoff will always be associated with the theatre that made him famous.

The Moscow Art Theater Theater monopolies had dissolved in 18 82 and a lot of new theaters had sprung up to serve a growing urban population, But they staged mostly melodramas, but no Maravich.

Dyachenko, who we've mentioned, and his partner, famed theater director Constantin Stanislavsky, wanted a theater devoted to realism and naturalism.

Stanislavsky had been influenced by a visit from the mining and True, but was less interested in period appropriate costumes, props and occasional mumbling realism and more interested in psychological realism, acting and staging that would make the characters look riel, sound riel and feel real.

The two men founded the Moscow Art Theater in 18 98.

The first play was Alexey Tolstoy's Czar Feodor, and later that year they revived Chekhov's Seagull.

The play was such a hit that the theater adopted Aciego as its emblem.

They began with a group of amateur actors aiming to create a troop of colleagues rather than stars and supporting players, and Stanislavsky developed a hugely influential system to train those amateurs.

The theater survived the Russian Revolution, and though it underwent several transformations and a split, it outlasted the Soviet era, too.

If you've studied acting in the West, then you've probably experienced some version of Stanislavski system, but here's the thing.

We don't really know what that system is.

Stanislavsky was always changing.

It in addition to Stanislavski is autobiography.

We have three books.

An actor prepares building a character and creating a roll, all translated into English by Elizabeth Hapgood.

But it turns out that have good mistranslated a lot of stuff.

As for the Russian originals, the Soviets made their own edits and theat aspect of the system that's most famous in America, the part where actors are supposed to rely on their personal memories.

Stanislavsky later discounted.

But there are a few parts that we can pretty much agree on.

An actor's body and voice should be thoroughly trained, and an actor should have a thorough knowledge of other stage techniques like combat dancing.

All that stuff.

Actors should observe how people behave in real life.

Before rehearsals begin, the cast will study the play, investigating its themes and the motivations and the emotional arc of each character and deciding on each character's primary objective and emotional through line.

In order to make characters feel psychologically riel, actors will familiarize themselves with a character's given circumstances and ask how a person would behave within those circumstances.

This is called the Magic.

If, at one point Stanislavski did suggest that actors should work with their own emotion memory to inhabit a role.

But he later moved away from this and encouraged Maur expressive physical explorations and improvisations on stage.

Actors should try to live in the moment, reacting with some emotional spontaneity and giving the illusion of the first time.

And finally, actors must always keep working toward greater proficiency and skill.

The STANISLASKI system, or the less than 100% faithful version of it that we have today dominates Western theater, film and television to every single.

One of my friends who studied acting in college took a STANISLASKI class.

Of course, there are types of plays that don't support a realistic acting approach.

We're gonna look at those starting with one of the weirdest, bloodiest and most niche forms of theater ever produced.

That's right.

It's the Grand Guignol.

Thanks.

Thanks for watching.

Or is that what I really mean?

Some text you work?

Subtext.

Also, curtain crash or theater is produced in association with PBS.

Digital studios head over to their channel to check out some of their shows like Origin of Everything, Origin of Everything, hosted by Danielle Bainbridge, PhD explores the history behind the stuff in our everyday life from the words we use the pop culture we love the technology that gets us through the day or the identities we give ourselves.

Crash Course Theater is filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is produced with the help of all of these very nice people.

Our animation team is thought Cafe crash Course exists, thanks to the generous support of our patrons at Patri on.