BY KAREN BOSSICK
The story of Anton Chekhov’s love affair with actress Olga Knipper is told in the play “I Take Your Hand in Mine.”
The title is somewhat ironic since the playwright rarely had the opportunity to take his wife’s hand in his given his poor health and her career as an actress, which often took her on the road. But they expressed their love for one another in more than 400 love letters. And The Liberty Theatre Company is sharing those love letters with the Sun Valley audience as its Valentine’s to the community.
The play reading will be staged at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14, and Friday and Saturday, Feb. 17 and 18, at The Mint in Hailey. Cost is Pay What You Feel with tickets available at https://www.LibertyTheatreCompany.org or by calling 208-582-8388.
The Valentine’s Day show will offer the opportunity for a three-course meal at 6 p.m. for $35 a person. A bottle of wine will be available to complement the meal for an additional $30. Drinks will also be available for purchase the other two nights and there will be a love letter writing station.
“I’m really excited about getting to do this at The Mint because you can get dinner beforehand, along with a glass of wines so it’s so much more than a play reading,” said Director Naomi McDougall Jones. “It’s a wraparound experience.”
McDougall Jones, a film director, actor, author and playwright, will direct Joel Vilinsky and Courtney Loving in the play reading. Both are veterans of theater in the Wood River Valley, with Vilinsky having followed Company of Fools to Hailey from Richmond, Va., two decades ago and Loving having performed in plays with St. Thomas Playhouse, Company of Fools, Laughing Stock Theatre and Sawtooth Productions.
“It’s an interesting play because we get to explore their relationship so intimately,” said McDougall Jones. “And it seems to have been a very odd relationship in that they were together six years until Chekhov’s death in 1904 but almost never together in physical space.”
The couple, who were married for three years, drove each other crazy in a lot of ways and caused one another a lot of pain, but they also had an insane passion for one another, McDougall Jones added. And their long-distance relationship may have worked for them far better than a conventional relationship.
“Chekhov once wrote, ‘Give me a wife, who like the moon, does not appear in my sky every night,’ so I think he kind of knew that he wasn’t well suited to a wife,” she said.
The 75-minute piece written by Carol Rocamora is a tender, complex, lovely piece, McDougall Jones said. At the beginning, the letters are sexy and confident. Then, Knipper, who was best known for originating Chekhov’s plays, has a miscarriage. Chekhov does the math and realizes it couldn’t have been his child, but the two write back and forth pretending it was his and that they’re in this together.
McDougall Jones noted that Sigmund Freud once said that he never listened to what his patients were saying but, rather, what was falling out of their pockets as they were saying it.
“To me that is very much the experience of this play. Over the course of an hour, we watch Anton Chekhov and his famous actress wife tell each other over and over about their love. But, as they say that, we see that love morph with time and distance…We see the journey that love takes from head-over-heels early love through the difficulties of being constantly a part of two high-powered careers in support but, also in competition with each other, through real or imagined infidelity and ultimately into rekindled passion before Anton’s death.”
McDougall Jones once played Nina in a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” And she’s appreciated the way that he and other great playwrights write about humanity in a way that feels fresh, just as a Shakespeare play feels as relevant in 2023 as it did when he wrote it centuries ago.
“I’m more of an Ibsen fan. But what’s interesting about Chekov is that the characters say the same things over and over again during the course of a play. It’s lyrical, like variations on a theme in classical music where the words are the same but the meaning shifts. I really respect that about his writing.
“Here, as with many of Chekhov’s plays, we listen to two characters write letters to each other in a near fugue of melodic repetition. And yet what falls out at us is the variation, the undercurrent of change that is the inevitability of life.”
DID YOU KNOW?
Joel Vilinsky, a teacher at The Sun Valley Community School, starred in a another play reading involving letters in 2016.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl’s “Dear Elizabeth: A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again” followed the beautiful, bittersweet friendship between two of poetry’s greatest literary treasures who exchanged more than 400 letters over a 30-year period.