Friday, March 18, 2011

"I run on whiskey and risk, and ennui and impatience"

Method Suicide | Jacob Scheier
Method Suicide

When Konstantin kills himself,
the actor is off-stage not even pretending to kill himself.
This is why Chekhov is so brilliant and died
only three years after falling in love for the first time. Of course,
Chekhov was saying something about plot
having little to do with events. If The Seagull were fiction,
Constantine’s brain splatter
would fall neatly between a set of brackets.

The phone rang like a gunshot
in the other room. I nearly believed you that time,
though you were playing too many characters
for a realistic comedy. You cannot be Konstantin
and at the same time tell Trigorin/the audience,
“You have just killed yourself!”
The whole thing felt a little Brechtian:
your near death stimulating
only on an intellectual level -
suicide as social gest.

This is why you will never be a great actress.
You can’t just want to die.
You have to live it.
This is what separates the great performances from the mediocre
(I think my mother trained in Stanislavsky).

Chekhov frequented brothels.
He was incapable of trusting or loving a woman,
which might not be different things.

I didn’t leave you after the first attempt,
only because I was reading Lady with Lapdog at the time
and I thought Chekhov was saying that suffering was a requisite
for authentic love.
I didn’t know he was just telling a story,
that suffering is just a description of the landscape,
that love is the only requisite for love.

No comments:

Post a Comment