We were once so loved. There was a time when this strange family wasn't so strange after all. The roles were well distributed, with credibility and without excesses, and each character could consider themselves useful to the spectacle of everyday life. Everyone in their place, with order and naturalness. Those who wore the costume of the intellectual, for example, were to be considered as a metaphor for future hope and it was appropriate to reserve for them love and gratitude as for a heroic and charming knight. It was permissible for a beautiful and kind girl to fall in love with her teacher and it was equally plausible for the young woman's family to protect the wise man like an endangered animal. And so Vera marries Aleksandr, brings him home, and the story begins. The inhabitants of planet Čechov come to life, find a dimension adequate to their formation, all rowing in the same direction and the possibility of an effective and winning Russia ceases to be a mirage and turns into a concrete and real tomorrow. In a dimension where man is the architect of his own fate, happiness could find its rightful place. But Vera dies and everything changes. Hope fades and those who try to start over sound ridiculous in their attempts. The heart is dyed black and this possible colorful comedy turns into a desecrating and continuous hysterical laughter at a funeral. The idea of a country led by its thinkers is buried and we can only reckon with this inexorable fact. This house is culturally dead, my friends. It is governed by the ignorant and by sterile ideologies. Uncle reminds us, that poorly dressed buffoon who ogles our girlfriends and waits for family meetings to get drunk and throw our perpetually humiliating condition in our faces. No point in working, no point in striving, no point in studying. Says, the uncle. Better to wait for an income without sweating, better to complain about those who have destroyed talent.
The second stage of the Čechov Project abandons the game and becomes ugly over time. It sweeps away the peasants who quote Dante by heart to allow for an ambitious and muscular building abuse. There was a great green meadow where hopes were born and we built on it a suffocating house with too many useless rooms occupying every vital space. We had nuances and now there is a surgical black and white that winks at the intelligent spectator. We had women and men who sought life through love but we preferred to distance ourselves from it. When?
When did it become "too little" to talk about love? As if there was anything else interesting. If in The Seagull we wasted paper and time reasoning about the most correct form with which to pass emotions to the audience, divided between realism and symbolism, between poetry and prose, between directors, writers, and actresses, and a bench was enough to torment us with heartaches (So much love, enchanting lake!) in Uncle Vanya art is relegated to a museum concept, stuff for aristocratic brochures, a sterile intellectualism that no longer thinks of its people, that bores passion and allows the incapable to live off theater.
And so let this strange family sung by Čechov have the face of Gaber. His irreverent mask. Or even better of Freak Antoni. That is out of tune and ungrammatical. Defeated by its own ghosts. Repugnant and annoying. With bad breath. Taller than the clucking of a hen at a rally, deeper than the braying of a donkey put to pilot a plane that is about to crash. That mocks those who hide behind projects because they are scared and that gives many and many heartfelt applause to those who believe that Uncle Vanya is a current text because it talks about trees. You have built such a stupid hearth that I prefer to freeze in the sincere cold of my loneliness, leave me out, excluded like Rino Gaetano's dog! Take the acorns and leave me the wings.
In this thing/house I don't even want to enter - but be patient, next year we will really sell it! "It's nothing, my child, the geese squawk for a bit and then they calm down... They squawk for a bit and then they calm down"
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