YAKOV (to Treplyov). Konstantin Gavrilych, we’re going for a swim.
TREPLYOV. All right, but be in your places in ten minutes. (Looks at his watch.) It’ll be starting soon.
YAKOV. Yes, sir. (Exits.)
TREPLYOV (looking over the platform). This is what I call a theater. Curtain, downstage, upstage,9 and beyond that empty space. No scenery at all. The view opens right on to the lake and the horizon. We’ll take up the curtain at eight-thirty sharp, just when the moon’s rising.
SORIN. Splendid.
TREPLYOV. If Miss Zarechnaya’s late, of course, the whole effect will be spoiled. It’s high time she got here. Her father and stepmother watch her like hawks, and it’s as hard to pry her loose from that house as if it were a prison. (He straightens his uncle’s tie.) Your hair and beard are a mess. You should get a haircut or something.
SORIN (smoothing out his beard). The tragedy of my life. Even when I was young I looked like I’d gone on a bender — and all the rest. Women never found me attractive. (Sitting.) How come my sister’s in a bad mood?
TREPLYOV. How come? She’s bored. (Sitting beside him.) She’s jealous. She’s already dead set against me and the performance and my play, because her novelist10 might take a shine to Miss Zarechnaya.11 She hasn’t seen my play, but she hates it already . . .
SORIN (laughs). Can you imagine, honestly . . .
TREPLYOV. She’s already annoyed that here on this little stage the success will belong to Miss Zarechnaya and not to her. (After a glance at his watch.) A case study for a psychology textbook—that’s my mother. No argument she’s talented, intelligent, ready to burst into tears over a novel, can rattle off reams of social protest poetry12 by heart, has the bedside manner of an angel; but just try and praise a star like Duse13 to her face. O ho ho! You mustn’t praise anybody but her, you must write about her, rhapsodize, go into ecstasies over her brilliant acting in flashy vehicles like Camille or Drugged by Life,14 but now that that kind of stimulant isn’t available here in the country, she gets bored and spiteful, and we’re all against her, it’s all our fault. On top of that she’s superstitious, scared of whistling in the dressing room or the number thirteen.15 And she’s a tightwad. She’s got seventy thousand in a bank in Odessa — I know it for a fact. But ask her for a loan and she’ll go into hysterics.
SORIN. You’ve got it in your head that your mother doesn’t like your play, so you’re upset and all the rest. Take it easy, your mother adores you.
TREPLYOV (picking the petals from a flower). She loves me — she loves me not, she loves me—she loves me not, she loves me—she loves me not. (Laughs.) You see, my mother doesn’t love me. Why should she! She wants to live, love, wear bright colors, but I’m twenty-five, and a constant reminder that she’s not young any more. When I’m not around, she’s only thirty-two; when I am, she’s forty-three, and that’s why she hates me. She also knows that I don’t believe in the theater. She loves the theater, she thinks she’s serving humanity, the sacred cause of art, but as far as I’m concerned, the modern theater is trite, riddled with clichés. When the curtain goes up on an artificially lighted room with three walls, and these great talents, acolytes of the religion of art, act out how people eat, drink, make love, walk, wear their jackets; when they take cheap, vulgar plots and cheap, vulgar speeches and try to extract a moral — not too big a moral, easy on the digestion, useful around the house; when in a thousand different ways they serve up the same old leftovers, again and again and again—I run out the exit and keep on running, the way Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower,16 because it was crushing his brain beneath its tawdry vulgarity.
SORIN. You’ve got to have theater.
TREPLYOV. New forms are what we need. New forms are what we need, and if there aren’t any, then we’re better off with nothing. (Looks at his watch.) I love my mother, love her deeply; but she smokes, drinks, lives openly with that novelist,17 her name constantly in the papers — it gets me down. Sometimes it’s just my plain human ego talking; it’s a shame my mother is a famous actress, because I think if she were an ordinary woman, I might be happier. Uncle, can there be a more maddening and ridiculous situation than the one I’m in: her parties will be packed with celebrities, actors and writers, and I’ll be the only nobody in the room, and they put up with me just because I’m her son. Who am I? What am I? Expelled from the University in my junior year for circumstances which, as they say, were beyond the editor’s control,18 with no talent at all, and no money either, according to my passport I’m a bourgeois from Kiev.19 My father actually is a bourgeois from Kiev, but he was also a famous actor. So when all those actors and writers at her parties used to condescend with their kind attentions, I’d feel as if their eyes were sizing up how insignificant I was—I could guess what they were thinking and I’d go through agonies of humiliation.
SORIN. While we’re on the subject, tell me, please, what sort of fellow is this novelist? I can’t figure him out. He never opens his mouth.20
TREPLYOV. Clever enough, easygoing, a bit, what’s the word, taciturn. He’s all right. He’s not even forty, but he’s jaded, jaded within an inch of his life . . . Now he only drinks beer and can love only those who are no longer young . . .21 As for his writing, it’s . . . how can I put it? Charming, talented . . . but . . . compared to Tolstoy or Zola,22 a little Trigorin goes a long way.
SORIN. But I love authors, my boy. There was a time when I desperately wanted two things: I wanted to get married and I wanted to be an author, but I didn’t manage to do either one. Yes. It would be nice to be even a second-rate author, when all’s said and done . . .
TREPLYOV (listening hard). I hear footsteps . . . (Embraces his uncle.) I can’t live without her . . . Even the sound of her footsteps is musical . . . I’m out of my mind with happiness. (Quickly goes to meet NINA ZARECHNAYA as she enters.) Enchantress, girl of my dreams . . .
NINA (excited). I’m not late . . . I’m sure I’m not late . . .
TREPLYOV (kissing her hands). No, no, no . . .
NINA. All day I’ve been on edge, I’ve been so worried! I was afraid Father wouldn’t let me go . . . But he’s just gone out with my stepmother. The sky was red, the moon’s already on the rise, so I took a whip to the horses, lashed them. (Laughs.) But I’m glad I did. (Squeezes Sorin’s hand tightly.)
SORIN (laughs). I do believe your pretty eyes have tears in them . . . Heh-heh! Mustn’t do that!
NINA. You’re right . . . You see the way I’m panting. In half an hour I’ve got to go, we must hurry. Don’t, don’t, for heaven’s sake, don’t make me late. Father doesn’t know I’m here.
TREPLYOV. As a matter of fact, it is time to begin. I have to collect everybody.