PRODUCTION HISTORY
Neva had its English language premiere at The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Patrick Willingham, Executive Director) in New York on March 11, 2013. It was directed by Guillermo Calderón. The costume design was by Susan Hilferty, the original music was by Tomás González; the fight director was Thomas Schall and the production stage manager was Buzz Cohen.
MASHA | Quincy Tyler Bernstine |
ALEKO | Luke Robertson |
OLGA KNIPPER | Bianca Amato |
The original production of Neva was developed for Chile’s Teatro en el Blanco Theater Company (Trinidad González, Paula Zúñiga and Jorge Becker). Original designs were by María Jesús González, Pilar Landerretche and Jorge “Chino” González; the composer was Tomás González. The play premiered in Santiago, Chile, in 2006.
St. Petersburg. One hundred years ago, during the afternoon of January 9, 1905.
In the rehearsal room of a theater.
OLGA
Oh, my dear, my sweet, my beautiful orchard . . . my life, my youth, my happiness. Goodbye! . . . Goodbye!. . . One last look at the walls, the windows . . . Our poor mother loved to walk in this room . . . It’s not coming out right. This damned monologue is not coming out right. Rasputin is more truthful than I am. And now I’m panicking. I already know what will happen. Opening night will come next Saturday and all the Saint-Petersbourgeois women will come to see me. And the other actresses too, to see me. To see me fall, to see Olga Knipper fall. To see me go off-key and say these beautiful words soullessly. They’ll laugh at the wrong parts and crumple their chocolate wrappers. But at the end, when the play is over and they see me smile, grateful and humiliated . . . they’ll applaud, smiling through clenched teeth. And they’ll wait for me in the hallway by the dressing room door to embrace me, and I, shy, flushed from the heat, with a halo of perfume masking the scent of sweat of which every dramatic actress with any self-respect reeks . . . I will give them thanks. And like a wet puppy I’ll ask them, Did you like it? Do you really mean it? You can’t imagine how nervous I was. Thank you for being here for such an intimate moment. But you really liked it? If you didn’t like it, you would tell me, yes? Won-der-ful Olga! Such depth when you picked up the glass . . . When you looked out the window my heart stopped. Today you acted with your back, Olga Knipper, your back expressed more dramatic subtlety than your very face. And like that, surrounded by false flattery, carrying the weight of my flowers, I will leave the theater through the stage door. And there on the street there will be other, cheaper flowers, frozen, left by other admirers who couldn’t withstand the forty degrees below zero of this royal city of St. Petersburg. And I’ll get into my carriage, and while their carriages drive away along the Nevsky Prospekt until they can no longer see the Neva River, they’ll say: Oh! Pa-the-tic Olga Knip-per. Un-fash-ion-able Ger-man Ol-ga Knip-per. We only came to see her because she is the widow of the genius, of him, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. The writer. The greatest Russian writer since Count Tolstoy. The beloved writer who was born in the village of Taganrog, on the Azov Sea, in Southern Russia, one seventeenth of January of 1860, the third of six children, five boys and one girl, who came from a family of serfs who bought their freedom and who thanks to his own intelligence and effort came to study medicine in Moscow. The writer who bequeathed us countless plays and stories that express our patriotic soul. Anton Pavlovich, who died tragically only six month...
