When I walked into my audition for Vanya all those months ago, I was gunning for Sonya. I hadn’t even considered Yelena as an option. I had read the play, and had come to several conclusions, including, but not exclusively so:
- I want a Marina in my life almost as much as I want a Madea.
- Uncle Vanya reminds me of a bull in a small space
- Astrov has some growing up to do
- I hate Yelena.
I hated her. I hated her laziness. I hated the fact that she gave up her one and only talent in order to marry someone she thought was “famous”. I hated that she doesn’t smack Vanya in the face and tell him where to shove his “deepest, truest feelings”. I hated that she stays with the unbearable Professor when she could be frolicking in the fall leaves with the doctor. But most of all, I hated that the first thing we know about her is that she’s “good-looking.” To me, that was the final nail in the coffin. I did not want to play Yelena.
A more accurate observation would have been: I did not want to be Yelena.
So for this final blog post I would like to say a couple of words. Those words are duende and fard.
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DUENDE (doo-EN-DAY): n. from Spanish dialectal (charm), from Spanish (ghost): the ability to attract others through personal magnetism and charm.
When I was twelve, I did my first professional production in the Repertory Players Theatre in my city. I was Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, and I loved her – tough, brave, runs away from her family and her home to be with the man she loves but has only known for a month or two, ending up in a Russian jail somewhere. Wait, what? Then came Juliet – young, naive, runs away from her family and her home to be with the man she loves but has only known for a month or two, ending up – oh yes, dead. That same year I was to play Barbara-Ann, a “Texan bimbo” whose costume was a tiny waitress dress made for a nine-year old, and Mary – the sexy main character of a murder mystery whose only three seconds on stage involve falling out of a cupboard with her throat slit open (the blood covered more than the lacy nightgown I was wearing.) It was the beginning of a seemingly endless string of beautiful women who ended up in horrible situations because all they had going for them was the way they looked or their horribly misguided love affairs. This was a trend that I was determined to put an end to. In high school I auditioned for the ugly roles, the old roles, the depraved roles, the male roles – anything but the Pretty Girl. By the time I got to play La Ruffiana – a 73 year-old prostitute whose language was almost as foul as her smell – I finally felt I’d made it. From then on, I played the oddballs and steered clear of the pretty women.
So when it was decided that I would play Yelena, I struggled to come round to the idea of reacquainting myself with the beautiful. But how could I when I had spent so many years stomping Duende out, eradicating it from my physical vocabulary? How could I access the calculated magnetism, the purposeful lure of Yelena when the “sexy” had all but withered away from my box of acting tools? It became even harder upon re-reading the text. Assuming I found my Duende again, where was I supposed to insert it when Yelena’s words speak so much of melancholy and emptiness? Then along came Ashley with her beautiful, easy smile and natural grace.
“Damn it. I can’t do that.”
When one of my professors asked how Vanya was going, I said “It’s great, but I hate my character.” That was when I received a short piece of invaluable advice that will seem intuitive to some. It went something like this: “It’s no good trying to be a character you hate – you won’t last a second in their skin if you despise being there. You have to like Yelena, or she’ll evade you forever.” That got me thinking – how is it that I can like La Ruffiana and hate Yelena? And then it hit me – a formula that I had constructed in my brain:
Beauty = shallow = boring
So I did some rearranging:
Beauty = usually self-defining = perceived as shallow = potentially quite interesting.
This same professor told me a story about a group of monks whose leaders must be killed by their eventual successor who then takes up the role in the knowledge that with his power comes his inevitable murder. So it is with beauty, I think. As the Duke Orsino so aptly puts it:
“For women are as roses, whose fair flow’r,
Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour.”
Twelfth Night II.iv.
And so, the coolness arrived. I came to a conclusion about how I felt about Yelena. For me, she is a woman who knows that her beauty is transient, that it will fade, and when it does she will fall to the wayside and join Astrov in the ranks of the “once beautiful,” and another will take her place as the adored. To me, Yelena is not unaware of her good looks. In fact, she is too aware of it. She knows that it marks and defines her in the eyes of the people around her. Which leaves her with the question – “In five or six years, I’ll be old too”. What then? What do I have if I don’t have this face, these eyes? She has given up her musical education for a man who won’t stop bitching about everything he’s had to let go of. She can’t “miraculously heal and teach” people the way Sonya can. “All she does is enchant people with her beauty.” A few people asked me how I feel about Sonya, and I admitted to being thoroughly irritated by her. As Thomas points out in his post – she is good, she is kind, she protects and she nurtures, but she wallows in her plainness. Every time I walked into the window room to hear her lamenting about the fact that she’s “Not Pretty”, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her hard and scream “No, you’re not! You’re not pretty! You are skilled, resourceful, strong, smart, useful. And you are loved. You are not pretty, and you should thank your lucky stars for it.”
Yelena is not loved. Yelena is desired. A fact which she points out to Vanya. Like the forest that is so beautiful and so temporary, “you don’t actually care about me.” Astrov seems to know it too. He does not love her. “That’s how much I want you,” he says, and proceeds to ask for “just one kiss.” He at least acknowledges the need to take the beauty while it lasts, because one day, no one will give a damn about the gorgeous Yelena Andreyevna. Perhaps this is why she stays with the professor. Because even if there is no love there, he is not likely to leave her once she is old and Not Pretty.
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FARD (FAHRD): v. from Middle English farden, from Middle French farder, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German faro (colored): to paint the face with cosmetics.
For anyone who hasn’t given up on this post yet, I’d like to introduce you to my second word: “fard”. To paint the face with cosmetics.
Once I had understood and even come to like Yelena, I was still faced with a problem: How am I to portray the kind of mesmerising beauty that Chekhov calls for? She has to possess the kind of beauty that stalls a household for a month. She has to be obviously more “beautiful” than Sonya. How to do it? I believe in universal beauty – that everything has it, that it is truly in the eye of the beholder, so the idea of objective beauty was a difficult one for me to grasp. The only way I knew how to achieve that was the way society has always told us: slap on a bit of this here, a brush of that there, a few hundred strokes of this and voila!
You. Are. Beautiful.
A cast member walked in one evening before the show as I was redoing my lipstick for the third time and they told me that I shouldn’t wear make-up, that I was fine without it. This was a compliment, but it grated for some reason. I felt angry. I felt that I had to do everything I could to be as beautiful as I could, because otherwise – what’s the point of Yelena?
Aha.
While watching Act Three, I always wondered what Yelena is about to say when she trails off.
“I mean, someone like me, someone who’s…”
Someone who’s what, exactly?
