Failure… it’s the only fucking meal worth eating when you’re stupid enough to think you can improve Anton Chekhov. My Head is Burning. Christ, of course it is. Your head, their heads, Chekhov’s rotting tubercular head somewhere in a Russian cemetery still burning with the knowledge that a hundred years later, some ambitious assholes with a sketch of a steamer trunk and a dream would try to cram all that gorgeous, suffocating yearning into a box that literally comes apart to become the set.
Anton Chekhov’s a beautiful, devastating trap for anyone under forty who thinks they understand disappointment. You don’t. Not yet. Not the way those three sisters don’t understand they’re never getting to Moscow. Not the way Chekhov understood it while coughing blood into handkerchiefs and writing love letters to actresses who would leave him.
My Head is Burning, someone in this group picked that title because they felt it. Because, in that moment, with Michael and Niki and Kathryn and whoever else was stupid enough to believe this could be pulled off, our heads WERE burning. With ideas. With the certainty that if we just got it right, if the trunk I was imagining designing opened just so and became the set, if the costumes packed just perfectly, if everyone would just shut up and listen, or maybe Kathryn’s, or maybe Michael’s, or maybe that’s why it fell apart, then we’d crack the code. Wed take this Russian aristocratic ennui and make it speak to… who? Audiences in someones living room, or whatever black box theater would have us? Ourselves?
But seriously, here’s what was beautiful: my trunk.
Everything contained. Everything necessary. Nothing extra. Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters are trapped in a provincial town with all the detritus of their father’s military life, surrounded by officers and samovar and yesterday’s newspapers and the weight of “we used to be in Moscow, we used to matter.” And I wanted to put that in a trunk. Ideally a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk… vintage of course… it turns out these are very expensive.
That’s not just clever stagecraft, that’s understanding something essential about Chekhov. It’s all RIGHT THERE. The whole world, the whole tragedy, everything you need is in the room. There’s no missing ingredient. There’s no magical elsewhere. Moscow isn’t going to save them because Moscow is just another room with different furniture and the same burning heads.
My trunk was going to prove that. Open it up: here’s your world. Here’s your prison. Here’s your stage. Now go suffer beautifully.
Two or three rehearsals. I remember them as “interesting.” That’s the word people use when they can’t quite access the feeling anymore but know it was something. Interesting means: someone said something that made me see the text differently. Interesting means: for maybe twenty minutes during Niki’s puppet play, it actually worked, whatever “it” was. Interesting means: I saw the ghost of what it could have been before the egos started calcifying and the inexperience revealed itself not as charming naivety but as actual incompetence.
Too many egos, too little execution.
Let’s talk about that. Because that’s not just this production, that’s EVERY collaboration that falls apart, from garage bands to marriages to tech startups to the Russian Revolution. People who cared TOO MUCH and knew TOO LITTLE. Or vice versa. That’s the most dangerous combination in art. If you don’t care, you just phone it in and move on. If you know what you’re doing, you can weather the ego storms because you’ve got craft to fall back on. But when you care intensely AND you’re making it up as you go? That’s when the knives come out.
Michael had his vision. Kathryn had hers. Niki and I had ours. And Chekhov’s ghost sat there smoking and laughing because he KNEW. He wrote a play about people who can’t act, can’t decide, can’t execute, who just sit around talking about what they’re going to do someday while life happens TO them. And here we are, re-enacting it in rehearsal.
The play was directing itself. That’s the horrible joke.
Those napkins though. Those scraps of paper. With sketches of steamer trunks.
You know why I wish I had them? Not because the designs were revolutionary, they definitely weren’t. I wish I had them because they represent the moment BEFORE disappointment. Before things collapsed. Before I learned that good ideas aren’t enough. Before I understood that theater, like love, like everything worth doing, requires the brutal grinding work of compromise and craft and showing up even when everyone’s being an asshole.
Those napkins are from the Garden of Eden. They’re from when I still believed.
I’ve seen schmucks with whole filing cabinets full of “brilliant ideas” that never happened. Screenplays. Business plans. That novel they’ve been working on for fifteen years. You know what makes my napkins different? I actually DID it. I TRIED. It died, sure, but it lived first. For two, maybe three rehearsals, My Head is Burning existed in the world as something more than a concept.
Most people don’t even get that far.
Here’s what Chekhov understood that I was learning: the yearning IS the point. Not the arrival. Not Moscow. Not the successfully executed touring production in a steamer trunk. The burning head. The passionate inner life smashing against the dull external reality. Olga teaching school forever. Masha trapped in a loveless marriage. Irina’s naive optimism curdling into acceptance. And all of them talking, talking, talking about how it’s going to be different.
This production didn’t go anywhere. It never was. The trunk never got built. The napkins are gone. Michael and Niki and Kathryn scattered to whatever lives they’re living now. And somehow, accidentally, we created a perfect Chekhovian experience. We yearned. We burned. We failed. And here I am, a decade later probably, thinking about those two or three rehearsals that were “interesting.”
That’s not tragedy. That’s not even failure, really. That’s just life, doing what life does. Which is exactly what Chekhov was writing about. My head is burning because I’m alive. Because I tried something. Because it mattered, even though it didn’t work. Especially because it didn’t work.
The trunk idea? Still brilliant, by the way. Someone should steal that. Someone probably has. Fucking internet trolls. And maybe their production failed too. I hope so. And maybe their head is burning right now, thinking about the napkins they lost, the collaborators who couldn’t execute, the beautiful doomed thing that almost was.
It goes without saying that you could not vanquish the ignorant masses around you; little by little, as you advance in life, you will be obliged to yield and to be swallowed up in the crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; life will stifle you, but you will all the same not have disappeared without having exerted an influence; of women like you, there will be after you perhaps only six, then twelve, and so on, until finally you will become the majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing. Man has need of that life and if it doesn’t yet exist, he must sense it, wait for it and dream of it, prepare to receive it, and to achieve that he must see and know more than our grandfathers and fathers saw or knew.
Three Sisters