Meanwhile, during the unraveling...

What did we do? What are we doing? What are we creating?

Because create we must.

Yesterday I saw an intimate version of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" at an invitation-only performance at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. The great Estelle Parsons directed, welcomed us, spoke after and invited her actors' input in a post-performance talk-back. I mean, if you love theater...

I had read the play during a semester course on 19th century Russian literature back in my university days in Boulder CO, but had never seen it performed. I have long been attracted to the darkness and despair in a lot of Russian lit, though I cannot tell you why. I'm neither dark nor despairing. But I think I always picked up something that feels a deeply rooted part of the human angst - the struggle with meaninglessness, the psycho-spiritual version of entropy, the darkness that lies at the heart of Christianity with its body-loathing, belief in the power of some outside Devil always ready to draw us into the filth of the world, judgment and a wrathful God.


And in the vast Russian steppes, the bitter cold of the Urals and Siberia, the tragic history of that part of the world, the Czars, the Russian orthodox leaders in league with the Czars, the anti-Semitism that expressed itself in outbreaks of brutality, forced displacement and exclusion, and a vast diaspora of Jews who fled the pogroms - in all of that is some dark part of us, a darkness that lies deep within the human that we do our best to avoid at all costs, but repressed, not addressed as it needs to be.

Okay, all that. But what really impressed me in seeing the play, and in this particular version of it, was how contemporary it all feels - that malaise of despair, the inter-family betrayals (I mean, talk about dysfunctional nuclear family!), the internal oppression so fierce and painful that it made me want to scream, "for God's sake, break free!!", and Chekhovs remarkably relevant reflections on environmental degradation by way of the character of the doctor.

But also this - how even in the face of the desperate need to break out of these claustrophobic social relations, obligations, and repressive religiosity, the play ends in resignation and despair, in the inability of the characters to break from the repressive dynamics, to make those other choices that would set them free to have the lives they really wanted. And so we go through this whole exercise only to find in the end a resignation to this horrible psycho-spiritual status quo that makes you want to blow your brains out.

And I wanted this play not to feel so relevant to a culture that is stifling itself with the inability to break out of an oppressive economic culture that is killing the human spirit, disempowering us, and creating what some Buddhist writers (like Tara Brach) call "the trance," the trance of a world view that has tricked most of us in one way or another. We are headed toward 3-4C degrees of global warming this century, and the resulting climate disasters which will be at scales we can hardly imagine except in fantasy dystopic movies. We are slaves of the consumer "tools" of this economy, harnessed to ways of life and consumerism that are destroying the very interlocking systems and webs of life that made our evolution possible.

There is a malaise and despair in our times that are having real repercussions for us in terms of our ability to rise to the challenges before us.

I believe the role of the arts is crucial here, because we need to find ways to break through that malaise, to kick the chairs out from under us, to throw some of these screens in the trash - especially the ones we take with us everywhere, play with constantly, stare into mesmerized while all around us our world is actually falling apart.

I don't know if Chekhov had all this in mind, but I think he would be pleased to find this play still so relevant in a time and place and culture so far from his own. And it reminds me why we need theater and stories and poems and songs and essays and film and all the rest as a mission to help us perceive ourselves with some searing truth - searing enough to break the malaise, allow ourselves to be astonished by what we have missed occurring in our world and within us and, for god's sake, after the awakening, to get out into this world and do some serious shaking up, to add our part to crashing the illusions and delusions in which most of this world lives.