Vanya

In the borderland of coming slumber, when we are not yet overwhelmed by it’s full power, the steadying contradictions of the external worlds are, in a measure, by degrees cut off, whilst the will still holds a slowly lessening rule… the control of our ideas escapes us, and whatever rises appears, as it were, spontaneous… the borderland of sleep is haunted by hallucinations… voices…. distressingly real visions seen during the prae-dormitium and at no other period. (S. Weir Mitchell, 1890)

I’m working at Mabou Mines, as a resident artist, on a revision of an old project called Scenes from a Waking Dream: Vanya Revisited. I’m not thrilled with the title, so for now Vanya will suffice.

The central conceit of the work is that it takes place years after the end of Chekhov’s play, probably after the revolution. Only 4 characters remain – Vanya, Sonya, Yelena and Astrov. Much older, they live in a state of disarray. Part intervention, part re-enactment, the events of the play unfold as the characters reconstruct the past in a last ditch effort to alter the outcome.

Chekhov’s play is dismantled and reconstructed through an alternate logic that arose out of an investigation into sleeping disorders and Proust, an insomniac himself. The script maintains vestiges of this research in the text itself and begins with a overture taken directly from Proust’s Swann’s Way .

I’m attempting to distill in some sense a kind of anxiety I feel in Chekhov about passage of time and our total inability to deal with it. The disorders that are exacerbated by aging—sleep disturbance, dependence on medication, distortions of memory and forgetting—are key to my inquiry.