With the wrong cast and director, “A Month in the Country” can seem like a year in the Soviet Union. The Classic Stage Company has put together pretty much the right director and actors, and its revival of Ivan Turgenev’s classic, which opened Thursday at the CSC stage, feels like a captivating, if not overly sprite, two hours in the Russian countryside. Or is two hours in the Hamptons more like it?
With its leads Taylor Schilling and Peter Dinklage, there’s an easy modernity to much of the proceedings, even though director Erica Schmidt has chosen to outfit them and the rest of the ensemble in Tom Broecker’s sumptuous period costumes. Schilling, with her glossy beauty and superficial grace, would seem more at home on the deck of some Hamptons estate, playing the part of a famous model turned trophy wife of a Wall Street titan. I’ve never met the wife of a rich landowner from 1840s Russia, so it could be Schilling’s spot-on in her portrayal. This Natalya is pleasant without being particularly personable, she’s charming without connecting emotionally, and above all, she is lovely to look at. And she’s knows it. And she’s bored with your knowing that she knows it.
Does that patented insouciance have something to do with her choosing Dinklage’s Rakitin to be her confidante but not her lover despite his being very much in love with her?
Few characters in Turgenev’s somber comedy, which preceded Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by about 50 years, are in love with whom they’re supposed to be, or have their love reciprocated. Regardless, they’re terribly civilized about it. They shoulder their disappointment without exposing the weight of their deep regret.
“Terribly civilized” sums up Anthony Edwards’ Arkady when he confronts Rakitin regarding his wife. It’s a pivotal scene, but Edwards wisely doesn’t play it big, and instead swallows his shame. There’s also the young tutor Belyaev, played with marvelous understatement by Mike Faist, who immediately offers to leave the estate rather than endure the discomfort of Natalya’s attentions.
Belyaev is quite the fellow, pursued by both Natalya and her young ward, Vera (Megan West). Is he a total cipher or a beguiling enigma?
Faist plays Belyaev somewhere in between, even after telling us he’s no poet and confessing to any number of other 19th century liabilities.
As with Edwards, Faist makes sure never to deliver the grand gesture. Turgenev’s characters are nothing if not emotionally controlled, which may be why he felt compelled to give them soliloquies: to spell out what they’re thinking. Those soliloquies have been cut down to mere asides in John Christopher Jones’s translation, which also may be why this production’s star players, Schilling and Dinklage, make the occasional mistake of overreaching. They give too much – actually, they resort to screaming — in a world where exposing any emotion is a not only a breach of mores but morals. Again, so much angst is so Hamptons. Or worse, so Fire Island.
Everyone else is more appropriately restrained, even Peter Appel and Frank Van Putten, who play, respectively, the bumbling suitor Bolshintsov and the much put-upon doctor Schaaf. Turgenev gave these two characters most of the play’s big laughs. Appel and Van Putten are very restrained and, as a result, very funny, especially in their scenes together. In small roles, Elizabeth Franz and Annabella Sciorra maintain that fabric of understatement.