Forget Action Movies, This is...Poetry?

Tommy Lee Jones '69 is not a convincing consumptive. Last Monday, at a benefit for the Poets' Theatre, he and Stockard Channing '65 performed a reading of Love Chekhova selection of love letters between Anton Chekhov and his eventual wife, Olga Knipper. The two celebrities were first secured for the performance, and then Love, Chekhov was created for them to perform. Yet it doesn't exactly showcase their talents.

Channing did well enough-as the impatient fiancee she was able to pout, worry, complain and tease her way through a fun, albeit uninspired, batch of letters. Insofar as one can act while sitting in a chair and reading from a book, Channing captured the air of a young Moscow actress, reading with feeling and apathy, as the text required.

Jones, on the other hand, hardly found the voice of Chekhov. Amply filling out his suit, perched on a barstool, Jones sat stumbling over Russian place names, Of course, the reading was rehearsed only once, but surely Jones could have learned his pronunciation. His physical and iconic presence did not actually detract from his performance, and in fact his Texas accent suited the gruff, serious and asexual Chekhov as much as it distracted. His delivery, on the other hand, was just flat. One had the feeling that Jones is an actor for active, visual roles and that sitting on a barstool reading Chekhov is simply not a decent outlet for Jones' talent.

The letters themselves were a surprise. They contained virtually no reflection on (or of ) Chekhov's art and instead sketched a loose plot about marital procrastination. Most exciting in their salutations (such as "my little actress" and "daughter") and in Chekhov's evasive discussions of travel, they also made an occasional gasp at beauty ("One of the cranes has flown away. Still no rain. They're building a shed in the courtyard. The other crane is bored."). Dominick Jones, who adapted the letters, included a subtle subplot in which Chekhov sends misleading and contradictory travel plans to Olga so that he will not have to hear had news about the reception of his new play, but unfortunately that nuance did not come out in Jones' reading. If the audience came expecting the kind of letters one might mark up for a literature seminar, by Keats or by Rilke, it instead received letters that walked the line between insomniac remembrances and housewifish marginalia.

At any rate, the presence of Jones and Channing filled the Loeb and raised a considerable sum for the Poet’s Theatre. The Theatre was started in 1951 and debuted works by Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas and others. It burned down in 1960 (now we buy our Coop books on its ashes) and was revived to a slow start in 1985. With the revenue from last week's performance, hopefully, some really vigorous and through theater will follow in Jones and Channing's generously donated footsteps.