Uncle Vanya Goes to College:

The Moscow Art Theater And Interpretive Research

Dee Russell

Georgia College and State University

ABSTRACT: In sociology's dramaturgical tradition, theatrical drama is used as a vehicle to illuminate social interaction. Looking more closely at how actors study a script to prepare for a role reveals ways an interpretive researcher may understand the text of social action. Just as the actor who follows Stanislavski's method, makes use of the imaginative evocation given circumstances and the question what if? in order to connect empathetically with a role so might an interpretive researcher, wanting to make sense of another person's experience, follow a similar method.

The adequacy of any metaphor depends on the parallels that can be mapped from vehicle to tenor, in this case, from drama to human interaction. To what degree does an actor's preparation relate to a researcher's task?

Uncle Vanya Goes to College

I resemble Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky, the Uncle Vanya of Chekhov's play. We are both in our middle forties; we have both worked for all our adult lives at work which we thought connected to a larger purpose, he by managing a family estate for the support of his dead sister's husband, I by teaching young children in day care and preschool settings; we have both seen our lives turned upside down, he by his brother-in-law's visit, I by my visit to the university for graduate work. We both have problematic relationships with academics; we both have a strain of great sadness running through our lives; we both can end up expressing our deepest emotions in awkward and comic outpourings; and we are both fictional: Voynitsky is a character in a play by Anton Chekhov and I am a version of myself constructed for purposes of this paper.

Chekhov's play presents "scenes from country life in four acts." Although the title Uncle Vanya points to Ivan Voynitsky, he is not central in the way that Hamlet or Electra are central to plays named for them. Chekhov challenges his audiences to see the interconnections of a group of people, rather than the story of an individual. He presents the daily life of a group of people as if it were a kind of organic clockwork in which each element affects all others, directly or indirectly, through complex intermeshing.

Vanya claims his "life's gone completely off the track" (p. 5). The old sickly professor Serebryakov and his younger second wife, Yelena, have turned habits on their heads. The times for meals have been shifted; no one sleeps at the usual time. Vanya, captivated by the possibilities of loving Yelena, realizes the emptiness of discussing academic ideas; he says to his mother:

Vanya has worked the estate to help support his brother-in-law, who has built his academic career elsewhere. Now Vanya senses the emptiness of his efforts; the man whose work he had admired he now sees is a sham:

The tension between Vanya and the professor expresses a tension I feel within myself. For more than 20 years I have enjoyed the daily challenges of teaching young children. At times during those years, I have stood in libraries and thumbed through academic journals, questioning the sense of research into what seemed narrow, obvious, or irrelevant. I could have repeated Vanya's words: Educational research is "specious nonsense which the clever have long known, and which the stupid do not care about."

And yet, here I am, having just completed a doctoral dissertation which focused on John Dewey's Laboratory School. Along with my new responsibilities teaching at a small public liberal arts university, I am helping design and conduct research on relationships between mentor and novice teachers and on how preservice teachers construct their own understanding of the relationship between teaching and research. How am I, with my silly and bitter Vanya self, to make sense of my own nascent life as an educational researcher?

The Dramaturgical Metaphor for Social Interaction

First I acknowledge my empathy for Vanya; this connection indicates a relationship that is at the heart of research concerned with conveying the meanings people make of their lived worlds. This "ability to feel with, to see things from the standpoint or perspective of the individual being studied" (Douglas, cited in Emerson, 1983, p. 179) is empathy. Empathy is one of the means by which a researcher can begin to understand the world of another person. It is easy for me, from the words and actions Chekhov has noted, to see things through Vanya's eyes.

The ability to see things from another person's standpoint is the foundation of George Herbert Mead theory of social interaction. Central to Mead's understanding of the self (Mead, 1934/1967) is the notion of reflexivity, the process by which I see myself from another's viewpoint. My self developed through my interaction with my parents; I began to see myself through my parent's eyes as an object. Notions of self and other are interdependent; as I was able to take an other's attitude, I developed the sense of self toward which this attitude was taken. In replaying the behavior and language to this objectified me, I took on other people's attitudes toward my self, learning to feel affection, dislike, apprehension, and the other feelings and attitudes that they expressed toward me.

Erving Goffman (1959), in his work on the presentation of self in everyday life, developed Mead's insights about reflexivity. He drew on many metaphors from the theater: actor, role, performance, rehearsal, audience, on and off stage, etc. Perhaps too cynically, Goffman suggested that we manipulate our self-presentation in order to impress others. As we shall see, actors are not only conscious manipulators of their deceptive effects, but may be channels for truth.

A metaphor throws light on an unknown object, or tenor, by applying what is known about a particular vehicle. Human social interaction is the object which is examined in light of the light of the drama. My own background in community theater pushes me to stretch this vehicle. I want to look at how an actor's research and preparation for a role relates to a sociologist's research and preparation for an ethnography. I wonder what we can discover about social research by examining more closely the ways actors prepare for a theatrical role. Just as the researcher observes, records, recalls, organizes, and conveys social interaction in an ethnography, so an actor observes, recalls and conveys the actions of a role in a performance. What techniques does the actor use to prepare? How might these techniques inform our understanding of the social researcher's role?

The Craft of the Actor as Described by Stanislavski

Chekhov's plays, written at the turn of the last century, are intimately connected with the Moscow Art Theatre. The plays were written from a new point of view about what a play could present. In presenting the interactions of a group of people, Chekhov's scripts demanded attention to a wider stage picture as characters responded to a rich array of stimuli. The Moscow Art Theatre, by facing the new challenges presented by Chekhov, founded a new tradition of acting. This tradition was expressed most clearly in the writings of Constantin Stanislavski, one of the co-founders and the director of the Moscow Art Theatre. By looking at the ideas of how An Actor Prepares (Stanislavski, 1936), we find methods that are adapted to interpretive social research.

Stanislavski outlined five schools of acting, which he was able to see in the initial performances of his students. The first sort of actor relies purely on intuition, allowing the subconscious to bubble up in moments of power. The problem is that this bubbling up is unpredictable and unreliable; one cannot shape a dependable performance. The second sort of actor allows the intuition to bubble up in a moment of inspiration and then proceeds to represent that one real moment over and over again, thereby freezing the heat of a lively emotional moment in cool, repetitive actions. The third sort relies only on mechanical repetition of cliche, never allowing the vitality of feeling to be sensed. The fourth grabs generalized expressions of emotion; the fifth exploits acting for their own sake, uncommitted to the truth of the theatrical art. Stanislavski hoped to develop in his students a new method of acting which would enable the conscious to enter into relationship with the subconscious, creating a dependable performance charged with the emotional heat of life in the moment.

For Stanislavski, the actor's art depends on the continuing interaction between attention to the given circumstances and active response to the question "what if this were true?" Suppose we were to play the third act of Uncle Vanya in which Vanya, after hearing that the family estate is to be sold, takes a revolver and shoots at the professor, repeatedly missing his target. "This imaginary happening will sink into the consciousness of some, but for some people it will remain a 'funny story.' They will never even glimpse the tragedy of the legal and social conditions hidden behind the laughter. But the artist who is to act one of the parts in this scene cannot laugh. He must think through for himself and, most importantly, he must live through whatever it was that caused the author to write the story. How would you go about it? . . . In moments of doubt, when your thoughts, feelings, and imagination are silent, remember if." (Stanislavski, 1936, p. 45). By focusing on what goes on before and by asking him or herself what if this were true?, the actor can find the specific purpose to the action. The actions generated in this way will ring true to the spectators.

Along with if, Stanislavski points the actor toward the given circumstances of the play. "Given circumstances" means "the story of the play, its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors' and regisseur's interpretation, the mise-en-scene, the production, the sets, costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects,--all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role" (p. 48).

In this definition of given circumstances, which recognizes the complexity of a whole situation, Stanislavski prepared actors to deal with the interrelationships of Chekhov's scenes from country life. The moment on the stage, as Vanya fires his revolver at the professor, is a rich assemblage of furnishings, people, actions, and gestures, all flowing from months of interpretative preparation and rehearsal. In any single performance, the actor playing Vanya attends to this complex situation, these given circumstances, and, asking himself "what if this were true?", generates an inner activity which moves him to behave a particular way.

This notion of attention to the whole situation of given circumstances distinguishes Stanislavski's approach to a play from a literary critic's approach. The literary critic conceptualizes the play as a bounded text of interwoven themes, each of which can be traced and unravelled from the whole fabric. Stanislavski suggests that we approach the play moment by moment, attending to the full complexity of human interaction as it develops over time. The actor who plays Yelena, for instance, cannot begin the play acting as if Dr. Astrov loves her; that does not become part of the circumstances given to Yelena until the middle of the third act. After this revelation, her actions will be informed with this knowledge.

The actor uses imagination, the capacity to "create things that can be or can happen" (p. 52). The actor brings to mind details, either of emotional life or of the physical circumstances; by concentrating attention on details the actor generates action which is believable to the observer. For Stanislavski imagination is not a process limited to cognition but is extended into the action of the whole body. Imagination brings about emotional and physical action.

The imaginative activity is fed by gathering all materials that have any bearing on the situation to be enacted. The actor observes carefully all that goes on in his or her daily life; the actor practices recalling situations in great detail; then, through rehearsal, the actor chooses to concentrate on those details which will generate actions which are believable not only to fellow actors on the stage, but to the audience as well.

The intimate relation of the given circumstances and the if relies on the recognition that the objectivity is not disconnected from subjectivity. Ever more concentrated attention on precise details of the whole imagined situation will, through the activating if, bring about a richer response. This response will be analogous to the response of the person from whose standpoint the circumstances are imagined. This cultivation of empathetic imagination is central not only to the actor's art, but, I believe, to the interpretive researcher's as well.

How If and Given Circumstances Relate to Interpretive Research

The researcher of social interaction is, like the actor, an interpreter of behavior. Often, just as the actor works from the written text of a play, the interpretive researcher works from the transcribed text of an interview or a social encounter. Stanislavski's advice to actors seems to suggest an interpretive method for researchers, especially for those who approach interaction from a dramaturgical standpoint based on a desire to understanding and to convey the complexity of human interaction.

The interpretive researcher will begin to make sense of the data just as the actor does. Drawing on the "facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life," the interpreter begins to gather the rich assortment of given circumstances which will give life to the interpretation. By asking the if the interpretive researcher will be able to make sense of the data in a personal way. The interpreter, like the actor, observes carefully; recalls the situation in rich detail; and then, through revision, chooses to concentrate on those details which will evoke the actions which are believable to the reader. The act of imagination extends through the action of presentation, whether it be in writing, film, or drama.

As I attempted to make sense of the interactions between teachers, parents, and children at the University of Chicago Elementary School, the school John Dewey established as a laboratory setting to try out and to refine curriculum, I was struck by an odd coincidence. Just before taking up residence in Chicago, his family travelled in Europe; in Milan 2-year-old Morris Dewey died of diphtheria. Then, 8 years later, just after leaving Chicago, the family again travelled in Europe and little Gordon died of cholera. Eight years of work with schoolchildren was framed by the deaths of Dewey's own children.

From my standpoint, able to see the whole stretch of Dewey's life, I saw the coincidence. Yet, as an interpretive researcher challenged to see the given circumstances of a given moment, I had to narrow my circle of concentration to a specific time, I had to imagine what was given in that past present; I asked: How did mourning for Morris affect the plans for the new school?

I had no way to see directly into Dewey's mind and so, prompted by Stanislavski's urge to recreate the given circumstances, I began to search for details. I looked for accounts of Milan in the 1890s in order to put myself in the streets the professor and father may have walked. I began to read about diphtheria itself; I learned about the long centuries of observation and description of the disease. I read about the years of experimentation, in one laboratory (Robert Koch's) and then another (Louis Pasteur's) until, finally, in the fall of 1894, Emile Roux announced the discovery of an effective antitoxin.

The bittersweet mixture of hope and despair hit home: Morris Dewey died in January, 1895, only a few months after the antitoxin was publicly announced. And Morris's father, believing in the efficacy of scientific experimentation, opened his new school a year later.

The endeavor to capture something of the emotional texture of Dewey's given circumstances led me to give diphtheria an important place in my account of the Chicago school. I combined an account of the disease written by an 18th century American physician (Dickinson, cited in Wood, 1961, pp. 2-4) with my own suppositions:

I made the most of Stanislavski's definition of given circumstances, taking what I could of Dewey's story, "its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action," adding what I could of the "conditions of life" colored by diphtheria, constructing an interpretation which could be conveyed through my assembling bits and pieces of accounts, analogous to the "sets, costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects" (Stanislavski, 1936, p. 48). It is a tentative and fragile reconstruction, yet I hoped that a sense of the living dimensionality of Dewey's life would be rendered through my own act of imagination.

Dewey's Call for Sympathetic Imagination

Dewey himself (1893/1971) wrote of the necessity for the sympathetic imagination. In describing a scientific method of teaching ethics which would prevent both the "conning over and drumming in of ethical precepts" and the "always prying and spying into the state of feelings" (p. 54), Dewey proposed a method that would focus on the intelligent use of ethical principles in the course of action. Such a method of instruction must be based on a right idea of ethics:

And how shall this subjective interest become invested in the objective "complex of action"? (How shall the actor's living emotion flow into the action of the playwright's script? How shall the researcher's concern connect with the transcribed interaction?) We must "construct, from all available data, an image of the case in question. . . . The end of the method, then, is the formation of a sympathetic imagination for human relations in action" (pp. 56, 57).

Dewey suggested that typical features of any human interaction would become apparent. By imaginatively following up the consequences of various actions, students of ethics would become aware of the need to balance impulse with intelligence and would be led to see the interrelationship of all individuals.

"The statement of human relationships in action" was Dewey's definition of ethics, rightly conceived. Do these words not also indicate what actors do? They, too, state, in the course of their performance, human relationships in action. But the actor allows his imagination to move him to action within the confines of a stage; Dewey has directed our attention to the role of sympathetic imagination in the fullness of life. It is no longer a case of art, of representing human life, but a case of life itself.

This shines a new light onto the role of the social researcher. To what degree is the social researcher analogous to an actor, representing life; and to what degree is the researcher involved ethically in social life itself? To what degree will the researcher be content with an aesthetic response to his work? To what degree does the researcher wish to inform further social action? The knotting of these strands propels me to question the connection between ethics and research--it seems that perhaps they are not separable. Perhaps social research, by its very nature, has an ethical dimension.

The Antipathy of Serebryakov and Vanya

I am immediately pulled back into Vanya's criticism of his brother-in-law, an academic who wrote and lectured "for twenty-five years upon a subject of which he knows less than not-one-thing" (Chekhov, p. 8), a man who, with his demands for attention, derails the habits of an entire household. Serebryakov seems, with his decision to sell the estate for his own comfort, to lack any of Dewey's sympathetic imagination; he seems genuinely surprised by Vanya's outburst at his decision, perhaps because he never mentally constructed Vanya's daily life.

It is, of course, Chekhov's genius to reveal that the derailer is also derailed. In a midnight conversation with his young wife, Serebryakov describes his own painful situation: "Thanks to me, you're all ready to collapse. All of you. Everyone bored . . . wasting their youth . . . I'm the only one content. I see it" (Chekhov, p. 22). He goes on to point out that people listen to Vanya and his mother, but no one listens to him: "I say one word and the world feels utterly depressed" (p. 23). In this midnight moment, we can feel even Serebryakov's agony; his life, too, has been driven off the tracks; his career is over, his intellectual exchanges with colleagues is done, and he is thrust into exile among the mindless.

Egoism is not Serebryakov's alone, but Vanya's, too. We, the audience, through our own acts of sympathetic imagination, are able to mentally construct the interests and concerns of these fictional characters; we, through our own sympathetic imagination, feel their mutual exile. Perhaps we begin to wonder to what degree each is in exile not because others do not sympathize with him but because he is unable to sympathize with the other? Antipathy, feeling directed against someone, is truly opposed to sympathy, feeling directed along with someone.

It is not enough to cultivate "the habit of mentally constructing some actual scene of human interaction" we must also move toward "consulting that for instruction as to what to do" (Dewey, 1893/1971, p. 57). It is that move toward instruction as to what to do that prevents ethics from being merely an endless introspective exercise, a never-ending examination of conscience. Such a move has been implicit from the beginning in Stanislavski's imaginative method--he was, after all, writing about a method for acting, for moving on a stage in such a way that emotions and attitudes are conveyed to an audience. For social researchers, however, this ethical move may not be so apparent; we may be content to stop with our mental constructions of some actual scene of human interaction.

I may rest satisfied with my own reconstruction of the University of Chicago Elementary School; I may find myself going to a dry well with my own broken bucket. And yet, as I wrote about that school, I struck again and again with the bearing it can have today; it can serve as a model for a way that theory and practice interpenetrate in the construction of curriculum; it stimulate new action toward planning interesting and meaningful activities for young children, activities out of which from which new insights and ideas can be drawn. To the degree that I find my own research moving in this direction, I recognize the ethical aspect of the complex interaction of which my work is a part.

Rebecca West's Ethics

As an example of a brilliant piece of social research I offer the work of another 40-something. In 1941, Rebecca West published the two volumes of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia. This work was based on her travel diaries from three trips she made through the Balkans in the late 1930s. I know of no better work to illustrate the empathetic imagination which, by concentrating on given circumstances, embodies just those details that make the situation believable to the reader. She worked to convey reality of what she saw through sensual detail and vivid memory.

Although the massive work abounds in examples of West's understanding an event through an imaginative evocation of the details of time and place, I will select one from the Prologue. In 1934, while West was recuperating from an operation, King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille. Released from the hospital, West watched a news film of the assassination. The whole passage is a masterful piece of imaginative reconstruction. It is evident that, just as the Stanislavski's actor is trained in certain skills, so West had sharpened her skills as a writer so that inspiration would not be impeded. Working from the images of the film, attending to the details, drawing on the facts and conditions, her empathetic imagination moved her writing to convey the event to the reader's imaginative understanding.

I have presented this text as an example of an imaginative interpretation of filmed data which embodies the values of empathy, observation, and concentrated attention on given circumstances. Yet, this text does not stop with this mental construction built on sympathetic imagination; it also adumbrates several themes that will run throughout West's journey: the different experiences of men and women and the consciousness of death as a part of the incomprehensible mystery of life. It is the thread of these themes which will move the reader to a wider and deeper understanding of general traits of human existence; and which begin to give shape to our own action today.

I am not a writer of West's caliber. I am not capable of conveying with West's spirit either the conversation of fellow train travellers or the sweeping history of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Yet, keeping her work in mind is a challenge to hone my own capacities and to bring my work closer to hers.

Vanya and Sofya Return to Their Accounts

At the end of Uncle Vanya, the professor Serebyakov and his young wife Yelena leave the estate. Meal times will return to normal. Vanya and his niece settle down at a table to go over the estate accounts. Is this the triumph of the humdrum? Or is it the rich world of everyday faithfulness to a task?

I, too, return to tasks at hand, endeavoring to imagine the interconnections between one man's educational philosophy and the lives of parents, teachers, and children who made a school.

I realize that at the root of my research is an understanding of human interaction related to Chekhov's; that we cannot understand the meaning of actions independently of the ongoing group life of which those actions are a part. This capacity to make sense is founded on the empathetic imagination, the ability to take another's perspective and to bring to mind a richly detailed situation whose details enable the interpreter to feel with the other. As I look to my own research projects, I see that the empathetic imagination is necessary. In order to understand the relationship of Dewey to the teachers, parents, and children of the University of Chicago Elementary School, I want to take Dewey's perspective and, when possible, to find indications of other perspectives as well.

Extending the dramaturgical metaphor for social interaction and including insights into the actor's art gives me a new awareness of a method which may guide my own interpretive research. Gather together details of the whole situation, the "facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life," whatever adds to the whole; then, by asking if this were true, I may begin to see a bit more clearly through the other's eyes. By directing attention to the details of the given circumstances, the time and place as understood imaginatively by the actor, inner action will come to life; an emotional connection will be made. I will keep my copy of An Actor Prepares close at hand, for I suspect that it may suggest resolutions to problems.

Dewey (1893/1971) extended this method in his scientific ethics, encouraging us to mentally construct "some actual scene of human interaction" (p. 57) and to let this mental construction instruct us in what to do. Dewey's suggested use of sympathetic imagination points to the importance of imaginative reconstructions in the theater of life itself. Interpretive social research, then, with its representations of human interaction, takes on an ethical aspect as it moves us to take action.

Vanya takes up his account books while his niece dreams of the restful world to come: "We shall rest to the songs of the angels. In a firmament arrayed in jewels. And look down, and we will see evil, all the evil in the world, and all our sufferings, bathed in a perfect mercy, and our life grown sweet as a caress" (Chekhov, p. 81). And we, who see the evil of assassins and the suffering of dying children, who have the sympathetic capacity to enter imaginatively into these other lives, grasping something of their complex interrelationships, we, listening to these words, binding them up into our own experience, take action.

References

Chekhov, A. (1988). Uncle Vanya: Scenes from country life in four acts (D. Mamet and V. Chernomordik, Trans.). New York: Grove Press.

Dewey, J. (1971). Teaching ethics in the high school. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The early works of John Dewey, 1882-1898. Vol. 4: Early Essays and The study of ethics: A syllabus, 1893-1894 (pp. 54-61). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1893)

Emerson, R. M. (1988). Contemporary field research: A collection of readings. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.

Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1934)

Russell, D. M. (1996). The passion that precedes knowledge: The role of imagination in John Dewey's theory of experience and in the activities of the University of Chicago Elementary School, 1896-1904. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Athens, GA: University of Georgia.

Stanislavski, C. (1936). An actor prepares (E. R. Hapgood, Trans.). New York: Theatre Arts Books.

West, R. (1994). Black lamb and grey falcon: A journey through Yugoslavia. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1941)

Wood, W. B. (1961). From miasmas to molecules. New York: Columbia University Press.