Excerpt from The Actor’s Chekhov: Nikos Psacharopoulos and the Company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on the Plays of Anton Chekhov
Interview with AUSTIN PENDLETON
JEAN HACKETT: But playing Tusenbach in Three Sisters was different. You mentioned that with that role, you came to a real breakthrough in your work. What was that all about?
AUSTIN PENDLETON: Well, first of all â this was something I always thought Nikos (Psacharopoulos) was wonderful at with people he knew and loved and who loved him. When we did Three Sisters â that was a summer â it was the most painful summer, I think, of my life, so far. Emotionally speaking, I was an open wound walking around up there. Some very painful things in my life that summer. And of course Tusenbach is a character who is in perpetual pain.
And Nikos ⦠Now let me try to find exactly the words for this, because it’s a very exact, specific thing. Nikos, as I intuited at the time, knew everything, internally, that was going on with me. I intuited this, but then I much later found out, indirectly, that in fact he actually did know. But he never said a word about it. He just created a rehearsal atmosphere where you knew he wanted everything from you. He wanted you to bring in everything that was going on and he wanted it working in that rehearsal room. So, first of all, I came in with all this â woundedness â it was all with me, in the rehearsal room. And then Nikos immediately put me on to how active Tusenbach is. And what I saw â I say I “saw” but it wasn’t really an intellectual process. The realization happened somewhere in the body, although I don’t know where, but it happened. But what I saw was that Tusenbach was a person who converted his pain, he converted all of his great pain into â an appetite for joy.
I sat that, very early on, from the things that Nikos was guiding me to. And, as I said, on top of everything else, I knew that Nikos knew what was going on with me personally, although he never said a word about it. He had that with people he liked and trusted ⦠He would never ever say anything, never presume really, to talk about your life with you, but you knew he knew. And you knew that you were not only being given permission to bring it into rehearsal, but you were being urged to. And through all of this, through all the spoken and unspoken things between us, he got me into the perception that Tusenbach turns his pain into an appetite for joy.
JEAN: And wouldn’t you say that’s the play too?
AUSTIN: Exactly. Once that alignment took place, I was incapable of not being in the moment in that play.
