Chekhov: shorter, faster, Funnier and Uncut

A translator susses out the true Chekhov—with some surprising results

by Tom Donaghy

In the Novodevichy Cemetery, on the outskirts of Moscow, the legendary director Konstantin Stanislavky lies entombed under an enormous marble gravestone. The marker is etched with the slightly abstracted image of a seagull, the icon of the Moscow Art Theatre, where Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull premiered, and where, not so arguably, modern drama was refined in the wake of Ibsen and launched into the world.

A few yards away, the gravestone of Chekhov himself can be found. It is, compared to Stanislavsky's, demure. Perhaps four feet tall, it is a white obelisk, hewn from unpolished marble and capped with a bronze gable. On it, the playwright's name is spelled out in Cyrillic lettering, slanting in the triangled cursive that was the style of the then flourishing Art Nouveau movement. Chekhov's wife—Olga Knipper, who would perform in his masterwork, The Cherry Orchard, for some 40 years (photo records show her becoming stout and severe as the decades pass)—is buried at his side.

On July 15, Chekhov will have been dead for a century and a year. He breathed his last in a ritzy spa in Badenweiler, Germany, 1,500 or so miles from his grocery-store beginnings, after drinking a glass of champagne and sighing, "It's a long time since I drank champagne." His body was returned to Moscow, and since then his legend has grown there and everywhere. A portraitist by nature, originally writing humorous sketches and stories for newspapers in St. Petersburg, Chekhov was revered in his lifetime for four complex and cherished plays before tuberculosis and its ravages exiled him to the seaside resort of Yalta. It was a Chekhovian end to 44 years of labor, love, ennui and empathy.

His legacy is certain. His plays, however, remain open to interpretation. He himself notoriously insisted that The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard were "gay, lighthearted, comedies," but this was ignored by Stanislavsky, who directed the plays, according to Chekhov, as "weepy." The two men were often at loggerheads as a result. The premiere production of The Cherry Orchard, rehearsing in Moscow while the playwright withered in Yalta, gave Chekhov his final chance to decry what he saw as Stanislavky's enduring misinterpretation of his work. As his strength evanesced, he roused himself, fired up his pen and dashed off acid-tinged missives that warned Stanislavsky against employing his familiar, cloying theatrical tricks. These usually involved the offstage sounds of dogs barking, birds singing and frogs croaking. Early in their collaboration, an exasperated Chekhov even exclaimed, "I shall write a new play and the first words will be, 'It's wonderful, this calm! No birds, no dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no nightingales, no clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets.'"

But Stanisvlasky ignored the directives, and Chekhov, when finally taken to Moscow to attend opening night, was more or less disgusted by what he saw onstage. "Stanislavsky has ruined my play," he wrote Olga. "Oh well, I don't suppose anything can be done about it."

He supposed right. And in the 100 years that followed, something intractable began to take hold. By ignoring the playwright's intentions, Stanislavsky seems to have established a tradition for how Chekhov's plays would be directed—and often misdirected—to this day. They have been remade and deconstructed. They have been springboards for directorial theories, from Eva Le Gallienne's to Joshua Logan's to Andrei Serban's to Peter Brook's. A recent production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Eimuntas Nekrosius of Lithuania, clocked in at six hours. New York City's Wooster Group refracted Three Sisters through live video feed. The plays have been set in decrepit theatres, Northern Ireland, the Gullah Islands—you name it. They have often bored audiences to tears, and sometimes they have been as full of bells and whistles as a Ringling Brothers dressing room. They have played like Strindberg at his gloomiest and Neil Simon at his schtickiest. No doubt somewhere on this earth the curtain is about to rise on a shadow puppet version of Uncle Vanya.

What of the text, though, untethered to directorial interpretation? What does it say to us on its own? Even more important, how does it say it?

Lately, I've been reading a literal translation of The Cherry Orchard for an adaptation I'm creating for Atlantic Theater Company's current season. The work is by Ronald Meyer, director of the M.A. program in Russian literary translation at Columbia University. It is a verbatim translation from the original Russian text to American English—as close to reading Chekhov's original script as any non-Russian-reading reader can get. What's more, it is eye-poppingly different from any "Chekhov" I've ever read in the 20 years that I've been familiar with his plays.

What is striking at first about the translation is the text's sui generis nature. It is its own thing—exotic and resistant to seeming like anything else, adaptable to no other settings. Its integrity is utterly sound; to transpose its characters to a different time or place seems unnecessary and slightly cuckoo. And yet, of course, Chekhov's plays—more than any other playwright's save for Shakespeare's—seem to suffer a kind of mania for interpretation.

The other striking thing about the translation, which is apparent from the first page, is its twin strains of brutality and hilarity. The play possesses both, with very little transition between the two. The characters and their emotions, are, as Australians say, "all over the shop." At a moment in time when drama seems to need to explain, spell out, comfort and offer lessons, Chekhov's final play stands in gorgeous resistance to these tasks. It jerks you through the air; yet there is no net below. It does not comfort; on the contrary, it agitates—but at the most fundamental and emotional level. This is upsetting, but also exhilarating and, yes, very funny. You are unprepared as a reader—and even though you think you might be familiar with the play, you have no idea where you are being taken.

And you are, no question, being taken. For something that seems on the face of it plotless, nonlinear and willfully static, there courses underneath this play a vitality that is antic and not entirely kind. The play wants to toss you about. Similar to the vertiginous feeling you get as you try to grab hold of Virginia Woolf's sentences, with their incautious swoops, Chekhov's play can fling you somewhere, and you arrive before you even realize you've been flung. And then you are off again. At the end of the play, when axes are heard taking great chunks out of the cherry trees, the reader is breathless, shaken and suspicious of the ground beneath. But giggly—giddy even. People behave ridiculously; this is life.

Then why is it we don't always feel this when seeing a production of these plays? I have a hunch the problem begins with adaptations.

Adaptations happen. But how? One of two ways, really. They can be generated from a literal translation of the original text (what I'm doing): the translator one person, the adaptor another. Or, in rare cases, such as when a playwright speaks Russian, the translator and adaptor can be one and the same. This is the case with the elegant adaptations of the scholar and theatre artist Paul Schmidt.

There are, however, a whole lot of dunderheaded adaptations of Chekhov's plays, such as the one I—and many others—first read in college by the artistically named Constance Garnett. The fault with these adaptations seems to be embellishment: straightening out the kinked way Chekhov's scenes proceed; having the characters make more "sense" by smoothing over what seem to be their abrupt reversals of mood; theatricalizing the plays, akin to what Stanislavsky did in his productions, in order to foster a kind of naturalism that the plays do not really possess on the page. Often adaptations want to make the characters merely tragic, or worse, loveable.

In Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov, she observes that when you utter the name "Chekhov" in Russia, no less than in our own country, people "arrange their features as if a baby deer had come into the room." This fawning reference surrounding Chekhov's reputation has transferred itself to the adaptations and productions of his plays, resulting in a kind of pretty veneer that has built up over them in the course of the last century. But this gauzy, huggable overlay is not warranted. It would have outraged the famously unsentimental playwright, who spent many years hacking due to the blood in his lungs.

There are also adaptations that politicize the plays, by tilting them toward a prescient and specific awareness of the Russian revolution to come. But Chekhov was not concerned with politics. On the subject of political action his plays are, if anything, about people's inability to actually engage in it. Chekhov is not like his friend, the revolutionary Maxim Gorky. Chekhov wrote about people and their inability to organize their own world, not about people who were able—or even truly interested in—reorganizing the larger one.

All of these interpretations have the ability to distort adaptations and wrench Chekhov's plays from their very simple conveyance of life as it is actually lived—even today. People go about talking and making love and hoping and having tea, and all the while things are being simply, effortlessly lost.

The most striking thing about the literal translation I am basing my adaptation on, however, is its remarkable brevity. It is 73 pages. As many of us know, a playscript is usually nearer 120 pages, signaling—the rule is a minute a page—a two-hour play. A 73-page play starting at 8 p.m. would then come down about 9:13 p.m. This begs an important question: Who among us has ever seen a Chekhov play and made it to dinner by 9:45?

When I asked Meyer what he may have cut to make the play so short, he said, "Nothing. You're getting it word-for-word from the original Chekhov text." Why then have we endured three-to-four-hour versions of The Cherry Orchard? Chekhov himself said the last act should run 12 minutes—he even wrote it this way because the characters are running for the train.

And as I read the translation for the first time, I saw exactly why the play shouldn't be long: Its brevity is precisely what creates the 3-D nature of its power. It is fast because it is dire. One wants it to slow down for the sad parts, and it does, but then it lifts again with velocity because it is inexorably moving toward its end—an end, by the way, that has shades of both light and dark. Before seeing the literal translation, I only ever remembered the tragedy of the characters losing their cherry orchard, but Meyer's translation suggests there is, for the characters, just as much relief as grief.

Indeed, one gets the feeling that Lyubov Ranevskaya, the owner of the orchard, will be able to finally axe this Russian part of her life, lived near the river where her only son drowned, to return to Paris where she can continue to cheerfully—as they say today—reinvent herself. When she's asked when she'll return to visit, she evades the question. Leonid Gaev, her brother, remarks that everyone seems much more content now that the orchard is sold. Her daughter, Anya, is made positively buoyant by what we have come to think of as a crippling loss. A new life without the worries of a big estate sounds just peachy to her. There are only three characters who seem to be truly put out: Varya, but she is heading to a new job in town; Charlotta, the governess, who as a former circus performer has been itinerant her whole life anyway; and the ancient servant and former serf, Firs, who wants nothing more than to die, and then promptly does-it seems so anyway—as the lights come down. What is so "weepy" about this?

In the end, perhaps, any adaptation should adhere to the only dictum I was able to glean from Anatoly Smeliansky, an associate director at the Moscow Art Theatre and head of the Moscow Art Theatre School. I met Smeliansky, an elfin man full of charm and seriousness—considered by many to be the world's foremost authority on Chekhov—in his offices on Kamergersky Lane, several floors above the stage on which Chekhov's plays were first presented. When I asked him how long my adaptation should be—or how many minutes he thought the play should run—he gave me a level look. "The play works long, and it works short," he said in his thick Muscovite accent. "Yes, but—" I said. "Listen to me," he said, cutting me off. "If it takes four hours, fine. If it takes 90 minutes, that's fine too. The important thing is that your audience understand the story you think Chekhov wanted to tell."

"Aha," I thought—and set about my work.

Tom Donaghy's adaptation of The Cherry Orchardopens May 25 at New York City's Atlantic Theater Company