It was 90°, but the sun was setting and there was a breeze. There were also about 100 women waving fans for the entire 3 hours, even after it got dark and cooled down. Just the idea of the heat is hard to take if that's what's stuck in your head.
We got to our seats a half hour early, and I used my time well by reading the beginning of the play, in the translation I blogged about yesterday. It was $16 in the (air conditioned) gift shop.
The play has 8 characters — 4 male, 4 female — and it's good to know in advance how they all relate to each other. It's hard to put the pieces together on the fly, listening in real time to the actors, who, by the way, did a great job even as they were bundled in heavy costumes, often huddling inside blankets.
Uncle Vanya is only the uncle to one person, Sonya, and she's the daughter of The Professor's dead first wife, whose mother, a feminist, loves The Professor and scarcely recognizes her own son, Uncle Vanya. There's also Yelena, the Professor's second wife, and everyone seems to agree she's too young and beautiful to be married to the old man.
Uncle Vanya tells Yelena she should "be a mermaid." Here's that bit in the well-known translation by Constance Garnett, from 1923:
Come, my precious, my splendid one, be sensible! You have mermaid blood in your veins—be a mermaid! Let yourself go for once in your life! Make haste and fall head over ears in love with some water-sprite—and plunge headlong into the abyss so that the Herr Professor and all of us may throw up our hands in amazement!
And in the translation, by Nate Burger, used in the APT production:
My darling, use that brilliant mind of yours! You have mermaid's blood, so be a mermaid: let loose and give in to your nature for once in your life! Find some merman and pickle yourselves together in the lusty brine. Dive deep! Swim away! Leave us all behind, waving in vain from the shore!
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37 comments:
…the pickling makes me want not seafood but a brined pork chop…
"... fall head over ears in love with some water-sprite..."
Nixies!
Everyone in that play is clamoring to break free but — spoiler alert — no one ever does, unless you count the times Uncle Vanya aims a gun at the Professor and shoots.
A Wisconsinite posted about discovering the joys of air conditioning at a local gift shop in the US. May it go viral on social media.
Todays' theme: 'Conserve ye not, your precious bodily fluids'.
Hold tight, hold tight.
Fododo-de-yacka saki
Want some sea food mama
The second translation goes too far in praising Yelena -- the play describes her as smart but shallow, so "brilliant" is a bit much. But it's also less mean than the first translation, in which the speaker is outright telling Yelena that she should cuck her older husband.
Rich old men in Russian literature were always getting cheated on by their hot young wives -- maybe they should have gone the Elon Musk route of just impregnating everyone in sight and throwing money at them for 18 years.
Good stuff. We have plans to see As You Like It in a few weeks for our annual trek for culture in the woods.
Maybe the Berger translation is more accurate, but the 1923 version sounds better. "Merman"? Clunky.
Berman or Beer man.
Merman or Mere man.
It is neither hot nor cold, only thinking makes it so.
Ethel Merman
The nuns always told us that fanning just made you hotter.
That sounds like fun, Althouse.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
Dave Begley: My dad and his father (born in 1901 in England) always said the same thing. They also were strong believers in drinking hot tea, not iced tea, in summer.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
Maybe the Berger translation is more accurate, but the 1923 version sounds better. "Merman"? Clunky.
Did you read the preceding post? Maybe they should have used "Nixie".
Fact check: True
https://gifdb.com/gif/hot-fanning-kate-upton-6ggej4vq61lgynv2.html
I don't know the Constance Garnett translation, but the 1994 Louis Malle film "Vanya on 42nd Street," with a translation for which David Mamet is partly responsible (I assume he Mametized one of the classic translations), is one of my all time favorites. It consists of a performance of the entire play, plus commentary by the actors and the director. Absolutely wonderful.
"A Wisconsinite posted about discovering the joys of air conditioning at a local gift shop in the US."
Not only is the theater outdoors, but you have to walk up a hill to get to it. It's a very pretty walk, but on a 90° day, it was great to have a place to cool down. At intermission, the gift shop was packed.
"I don't know the Constance Garnett translation, but the 1994 Louis Malle film "Vanya on 42nd Street," with a translation for which David Mamet is partly responsible (I assume he Mametized one of the classic translations), is one of my all time favorites. It consists of a performance of the entire play, plus commentary by the actors and the director. Absolutely wonderful."
It's great. Wallace Shawn plays Uncle Vanya. Julianne Moore is Yelena.
There's also a Laurence Olivier filmed-play version that's on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drGyx0O7Nx8
Olivier plays the doctor, which might be the best role in the play.
The Laurence Olivier version uses the Constance Garnett translation.
"But it's also less mean than the first translation, in which the speaker is outright telling Yelena that she should cuck her older husband."
There's plenty in the second translation to that effect.
And why doesn't "Find some merman and pickle yourselves together in the lusty brine" count?
“It's hard to put the pieces together on the fly, listening in real time to the actors, who, by the way, did a great job even as they were bundled in heavy costumes, often huddling inside blankets.”
Those may have been cooling blankets. (Yes, those exist.)
“Find some merman and pickle yourselves together in the lusty brine.”
“Merman”?! How could a place as woke as APT allow such blatant heteronormativity? They need to get their privilege checked, or something.
Pity about the heat. Arizona has been nice this week. It's cooler at the moment in Phoenix than it is in southern Wisconsin or in Michigan. Desert lows in the 70's and highs around 100, but nice and dry. If you don't have to work out in the open sun, it's quite pleasant. Pool weather.
Up in the high country, we actually had a freeze overnight. Bellemont, west of Flagstaff, had a morning temp of 29 degrees. I've seen freezes in June and August before, but this is the first I can remember in July. If this is "climate change", bring it on.
BarrySanders20 (9:42am):
I take it "in the woods" means you're seeing 'As You Like It' in Wisconsin. Anyone in or near the Shenandoah Valley should come and see it at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. You can see pictures from the production here. (I'm in one of them, and it also features what is surely the tiniest actor ever to play Charles the Wrestler.) They're showing 'Our Town' with the same actors. Both on for another 5 weeks or so.
Thank you for posting. I’m seeing the play in August and will follow the advice to read the play before seeing it.
My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light
He courted a mermaid one fine night
From this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me
Did somebody mention... Merman... Ethel come on down
Speaking of Mamet, he has a fine piece in the Free Press. Mamet on Paul Dresser as a great American poet and songwriter
The problem with Uncle Vanya is that the financial arrangement at the center of the play doesn’t make any sense. Why would Vanya’s father have set things up that way? We are asked to believe that the Professor was such a great catch that he got an incredibly sweetheart deal when he married Vanya’s sister.
“ The problem with Uncle Vanya is that the financial arrangement at the center of the play doesn’t make any sense. Why would Vanya’s father have set things up that way? We are asked to believe that the Professor was such a great catch that he got an incredibly sweetheart deal when he married Vanya’s sister.”
The professor was cheating Sonya, taking the money from the estate as if it were his. But Sonya‘s mother owned that house separately from her husband, and it was inherited by Sonya from her mother when her mother died. It’s explained in the play. Vanya is aggrieved because he had helped purchase the house that was a gift to Sonya’ mother when she married the professor. Vanya also worked to take care of the estate and produce income from it because he believed in the professor’s work, but the professor never owned the house at all and his proposal to sell it and use the income to buy a house in Finland for himself and his new wife was truly enraging to Vanya. I wondered why Sonya didn’t see that she had the right to sell the house and get out of all of that farm work and just take the proceeds herself and go live however she wanted, but she didn’t see beyond her horizons and she was stupidly in love with the doctor and decently loving toward Vanya.
Inasmuch as the language of the translation had been modernized, would a modern-dress production be possible?
Outdoor Summer Theater enchants
"Pickle yourselves together in the lusty brine" would be a great masthead motto. CC, JSM
“ You have mermaid's blood, so be a mermaid: let loose and give in to your nature for once in your life! Find some merman and pickle yourselves together in the lusty brine. Dive deep!”
Man, nothing like Checkov for some good hard driving sex.
Was Chekhov vying with Kirk for Uhuru's attention? That would make for some good hard driving sex.
If anyone was cheated, it was Vanya by his own father, who put all the family wealth into the estate for his daughter, so that she could marry the Professor, who did not bring anything to the marriage but his academic prospects. As a farce, it’s an amusing premise. As a drama, it just doesn’t quite work for me in the context of the play.
Did the Professor cheat his daughter Sonya? Sure, Vanya asserts that the estate rightfully belongs to Sonya, but that doesn’t seem to have been dispositive of the issue. Sonya still has to convince her father not to sell the estate at the end of the play, which she does on the basis of the work she and Vanya have done in managing the estate.
Did the Professor cheat Vanya? I love the scene where Vanya is complaining that he was underpaid all those years and the Professor responds that he didn’t know and in any case Vanya was paying himself as he was managing the estate and so could have taken more for himself if he needed it.
Wonderful play, I don't read Russian so I can't say anything about this or that translation. But that hot muggy summer spent in the dacha seems fitting for the weather in MN. Poor Sonya- she is so plain, if only she would do her nails or something to get the clueless Professor to snap out of it. Vanya, well Vanya is "Love" personified. Just as Sonya is "Hope".
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