A star is taught, not born

The illustrious Chekhov Moscow Art Theater and attached school have seen many changes since their inception, but are still holding the torch of theatrical professionalism high

They come from all over Russia, with more hope than chances to enter the theater school attached to the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT), Russia’s leading school for those who see their future on the stage.

Two hundred young women and 120 young men compete for just one place in each year’s class of 30 students. For those who make the cut, there is the promise that few schools in Russia, or anywhere else, can offer – near-certain employment on the stages of Moscow or St. Petersburg after graduation and, after that, the possibility of joining the firmament of MKhAT stars – Vladimir Vysotsky, Oleg Yefremov, Yevgeny Yevstignayev, Tatyana Doronina, Alexei Batalov and Oleg Tabakov.

Today, students come not only from all over Russia, but from all over the world. The MKhAT school was first created by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and implemented by a decree of the Soviet Cultural Commissar in March 1943, as Moscow faced the German invasion. The first students were admitted the following September, and, in October, the first classes were held. This October, the school will celebrate its 60th anniversary. In preparation, the Kultura television channel will be screening a 10 part series on the school’s history, with rare footage of its most-famous alumni in performance. The series was prepared by the current rector of the school, Anatoly Smelyansky.

The MKhAT school, explained Dean of the Acting Department Sergei Zemtsov, teaches acting and theater to students each year from Detroit and Chicago and at the universities of Yale and Harvard in the United States, as well as in a summer program in Valencia, Spain. It is the American tie that is the strongest: Harvard and the MKhAT school have a combined theater studies program, which takes Russian theater masters to Massachusetts each year and brings a troupe of U.S. student actors to Moscow.

The U.S. students have produced some amusing cultural conflicts, Zemtsov recalled. "There was the case of a young woman who was assigned her own dormitory room and, then, told the school she wanted to have her boyfriend move in with her," he said. "We responded that this was against the school’s rules and also against the rules of the university she had come from in the United States. She replied, ‘I’m an American, and I’ll do what I want.’"

At the school, the teaching is intense – six to eight acting teachers for each of four years of study – and every form of lesson, from acting to direction, dancing to makeup, costume design to box-office management, is studied from 9 in the morning to 11 at night. In all, the school’s teaching staff numbers 79 with additional part-timers, many of them actors in Moscow theaters.

Administratively and legally, the MKhAT school is a federal-government institution, supervised by the Culture Ministry and funded by the government’s cultural budget. But that makes up at most 30 percent of the school’s budget. The remainder of its financing needs must be self-generated, which is done through charging roughly one-third of the Russian students for tuition. In addition, the international programs are an important source of revenue.

Interest in studying at the MKhAT school is keen around the world and is picking up in China, Japan and South Korea. "We could expand our intake," Zemtsov says, "but the space we have is limited." Modernizing the facilities requires money the school is currently trying to attract. A corporate sponsors’ fund is subscribed to by a number of small to mid-size companies that haven’t sought publicity for their donations.

Yukos is the best-known of the school’s corporate sponsors. It has helped pay for computers and building repair and is funding the construction of a new elevator in the school’s building next door to the MKhAT in the center of Moscow.

The teaching program culminates in the annual final-examination performance. This year’s first-year graduating class, taught by Sergei Zemtsov and Igor Zolotovitsky, drafted 150 sketches, which were later cut down to just 27, performed first for the school examiners and then for an invited audience.

Dean since 1997 and, before that, an actor and director with eight years of teaching in Paris, Zemtsov said that he and Zolotovitsky have teamed together for 20 years now. The MKhAT has now lasted through two revolutions in Russia and the MKhAT school through the revolution of 1991. Together, they have watched the transition from the Soviet to the Russian regime. How has this affected future actors and students? "They are now more free," Zemtsov says. But this has its downside, he concedes. "They don’t have the communist ideology. But they do have more problems with discipline."

The aspiring actors are arriving at the school as the theater itself struggles with what Zemtsov and his colleagues call a sharp change in the quality of the audience and the star system that it inspires on the stage. "After 1991," Zemtsov remembers, "the audience numbers fell off, and so the repertoire had to be changed to draw them back into the theater. Today, we have more comedy than in Soviet times. But we also have more of what was forbidden then – more imports from France, England and the United States, more sentimental melodrama, more nudity, more gay and lesbian themes, more boulevard theater."

In the decade since the end of the Soviet Union, MKhAT graduates have distinguished themselves in film, television and theater. They include Vladimir Mashkov (Hollywood’s stereotypical Russian gangster), Irina Apeksimova (who has played Anna Karenina in France) and Yevgeny Mironov (who recently starred as Prince Mishkin in the televised serial of Dostoyevsky’s "The Idiot"). "Number 13," one of the theater’s most financially successful productions, is a light situation comedy directed by Mashkov and starring, among others, Mironov and Zolotovitsky. It has been running for two years, and every performance is a sellout.

But the stage stars of Russia today are very different from those of the past. "If, before, someone became a star," says Zemtsov, "it required hard work and long experience. Now anyone can become a star by appearing in a soap opera on television. Face recognition is all there is to stardom now." To draw the audiences, theater directors must now pick casts of one-day wonders already known from television, because this is what pulls people in.

When reminded that Chekhov’s "The Cherry Orchard" is about one form of privatization that was dramatically changing the Russian landscape in the 1890s, Zemtsov said there has been no new Chekhov of post-1991 privatization. "The changes Chekhov dramatized had taken more than 15 years before he wrote ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ We haven’t had enough time yet."

But, then, Zemtsov is skeptical that a modern-day version would succeed at the box office. "If the theater can make a good comedy," he acknowledges, "it can make good money."