The Proposal: An inside look into a Chekhov play

What goes into a One Act: directing, acting, and improv

Photo by Kate

Imagine this: call time is 8:30. One of the actors has to rush over from a basketball game. Anton Balyuk ‘24, the director, has to look his best for his actor’s big day. Everybody is excited and confident that they will do well. And bam: the first One Act goes off and you need to be ready because you’re the third act. This was the scene moments before Andrew Matarese ‘24, Molly Nye ‘24, and Maggie Huse ‘25 went on stage to perform, Anton Chekhov’s play, directed by Balyuk.

Matarese was Natalya Stepanovna, the daughter of a wealthy man and the love interest of Ivan Vassilevitch, Nye, a very nervous fellow, and Huse was Matarse’s grandfather, Stepan Stepvanitch. Balyuk wanted to modernize the play by casting Matarse as a woman and Nye as a man, putting his own spin on the play and trying to make it more suited for today. The play was very rowdy throughout and included a lot of action, which Balyuk had to add in to make the scene more interesting, creating a sense of conflict from the beginning. But, the play wasn’t as put together on the first day of rehearsal and needed a lot of preparation to pull off.

According to Balyuk, it was hard to work with people’s schedules, as sometimes Matarese’s games would conflict with rehearsal or Nye had a field hockey tournament, so it was important that they did as much work as they could each night. According to Nye, one of the hardest parts of the whole process was memorizing her lines and there were often arguments if people did not have their lines memorized. Nye and Balyuk both emphasized the importance of movement in the scenes and putting one’s own perspectives into their characters, creating a more authentic performance for the audience. 

At the beginning of the early rehearsals, they would all play an improv game to get warmed up, and then they would go over their lines for a particular scene and then practice it for a few takes. Balyuk would tweak certain things after every run-through of a scene and would make sure it was to his liking before he moved on to another scene, making sure the movement and the reactions of the characters were perfect. Also, because this play is Russian, it was sometimes hard for the actors to understand certain parts of the language and culture, things Balyuk had to make sure were clear to them and the audience.

But, as the performance was getting closer and closer, instead of feeling more nervous and hesitating that they had everything together, all the actors and Balyuk felt confident in themselves and thought they had done all they could and they just had to perform now. And, throughout the many rehearsals and eventual performance, they all grew closer to each other, and according to Nye, even though she wasn’t close to them before, she grew to know both of her fellow actors and director and had a lot of fun along the way.

As the curtain closed and their performance, Balyuk thought they all did great and even gave them all flowers afterward and treated them to a cast party a few days after. Even though it was a long One Act and they all had a lot of lines to memorize, Matarese, Huse, and Nye went out there and performed their best. And with all the laughter and applause, it seemed like the audience enjoyed this unique performance of Chekhov’s play.

Nick Costantino