Channeling Chekhov

Ryan McKittrick: With translations of Chekhov’s farces already available, why did you decide to make your own adaptation for this production?

Robert Brustein: Yuri Yeremin and I wanted to find some way to adapt the farces to Chekhov’s life. We had chosen three farces that had to do with proposals and a wedding, and we needed to find a way to unify these plays in both style and theme. So I decided to link the farces together with Chekhov’s letters to Olga Knipper, which I crafted into short scenes and placed between the farces. The letters show the evolution of their relationship, its coming to a proposal and, ultimately, to a wedding, albeit quite a different wedding from the one in the play. I then linked the farces to Chekhov’s death with Chekhov on Ice, a short play I’d written for the Boston Playwright’s Marathon last year. Paul Schmidt’s translations of Chekhov’s plays are wonderful, but we needed to be much looser with the material in order to create some formal unity for it.

RM: How would you place the vaudevilles in Chekhov’s development as a writer?

RB: He wrote a lot of vaudevilles, both as short stories and plays. They were all dry runs for the vaudevillian characters he introduced into his major plays. Chekhov always meant his plays to be funny. The Cherry Orchard, for example, is virtually a vaudeville. There are a number of major clowns in that play: Yepikhodov, Yasha, Pishchik. And I think The Weddingis a rehearsal for the second act of Ivanov. In both, Chekhov uses an impressionistic style to depict a social organism, picking up conversations here and there, moving in and out of focus.

RM: How would you describe the spirit of these vaudevilles?

RB: I think there’s a lot of pain underneath the lightness. I invented a line for Chekhov in one of the interludes in which he defends his use of farce. He says, “Farce is an explosion of pain in comic form.” I think that Chekhov might have described farce in the same way.

RM: What do the farces reveal about Chekhov’s attitude towards marriage?

RB: He was frightened of marriage his whole life. In one of the connecting interludes, I have Olga comment on the fact that relationships between the sexes seem to be a source of strife for Chekhov. In the farces, sexual relationships are all arguments and battles – comic versions of Strindberg. In his new biography, Donald Rayfield makes Chekhov out to be a rather cold person in regard to the demands women made on him. But what Rayfield views as frigidity, I see as Chekhov’s attempt to escape responsibilities. He’s running like Jack Tanner in Man and Superman.

RM: What scared him so much?

RB: It may have been his own parents’ marriage, or the rather unhappy marriages he saw in his extended family. Perhaps he simply thought his life was busy enough. Maybe he was too taken up with medicine and literature to devote himself to a wife and children.

RM: Is there conflict in the correspondence of Anton and Olga?

RB: Chekhov was always fleeing from strife and confrontation. But there is tension in the letters. For example, there was a lot of disagreement about whether Olga should come to Yalta or Chekhov should go to Moscow. He was of course too sick with tuberculosis to go to Moscow. Olga refused to acknowledge that until the end, when she rushed to Germany to nurse him. But these separations were a source of tension. There was also jealousy in their relationship. At one point, Olga rushed down to Yalta, even though she only had a weekend and Chekhov had asked her not to come for such a short time. On her way back to Moscow from Yalta, she wrote to Chekhov that she was in an “interesting condition.” She wanted him to believe she had become pregnant over the weekend. In the end, she miscarried. But there was some question as to who the real father would have been.

RM: Why do you think Yuri Yeremin is the ideal director for this project?

RB: We went through a number of possibilities when we were looking for a project for Yuri. I always thought he would be a great Gogol director. But then I recalled the joy I had felt in watching Yuri’s Institute productions ofThe Bear,The Proposal, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya. There’s no question that Yuri is a great Chekhov director. He creates spectacular images, especially at the end of the play. I’ll never forget the ending of his Uncle Vanya, in which all the actors started dancing with each other. It was very moving both as a moment of reconciliation and as a meta-theatrical device. Yuri also found a stunning final image for my play Nobody Dies on Friday, which he recently directed at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow. In the final moment, all the characters stood upstage against a mirror holding hands, achieving a moment of reconciliation and grace after fighting throughout the entire play. Yuri preeminently has a capacity to get at the soul of a play. He doesn’t adhere to the letter, he looks for the spirit. He did that with Ivanov so brilliantly. That persuades me that he is an ideal director for the A.R.T., where we’re always trying to get a fresh look at a play instead of being bound by tradition.

Ryan McKittrick is a recent graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute dramaturgy program.