Chekhov's Three Sisters and Woolf's Orlando

Two Renderings for the Stage

Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, Sarah Ruhl

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781559366496
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

"[Ruhl's Orlando ] captures both the intellectual spirit and the literary brilliance of Woolf's work.... Ruhl writes with the imaginative sweep that allows Woolf's poetry to soar."— Variety

"Sarah Ruhl's smart new translation [of Three Sisters ] feels just right to contemporary American ears—lean, colloquial, and conversational for us and true to Chekhov's original work."— The Cincinnati Enquirer

In her stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending, period-hopping novel, award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl "is her usual unfailingly elegant, unbeatably witty self, cleverly braiding her own brand-name wit with Woolf's" ( New York )magazine. Preserving Woolf's vital ideas and lyrical tone, Ruhl brings to the stage the life of an Elizabethan nobleman who's magically transformed into an immortal woman. In her fresh translation of Three Sisters, the Anton Chekhov classic of ennui and frustration, Ruhl employs her signature lyricism and elegant understanding of intimacy to reveal the discontent felt by fretful Olga, unhappy Masha, and idealistic Irina as they long to leave rural Russia for the ever-alluring Moscow.

Sarah Ruhl 's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dean Man's Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in many theaters around the world.

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Three Sisters

By Anton Chekhov
English Version by Sarah Ruhl

BASED ON A LITERAL TRANSLATION BY

Elise Thoron with Natasha Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati

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For my sister Kate

AUTHOR’S NOTES

When Cincinnati Playhouse approached me to translate Three Sisters I was both terrified and happy. Terrified, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play; happy, because I don’t speak Russian and I love the play. As such, I thought: I will learn from a great master, and I will try to learn Russian, a language I have always wanted to learn. They said: we need it in six months. So I thought: I won’t learn Russian. But I will learn from a great master, with some help. As it turns out, quite a lot of help. Let me explain about all of my help.

The night before I first met John Doyle, the director of the project, I was at a fundraiser. My husband and I were seated with New York business moguls who often attend fundraisers. I glanced to my left. Three chairs down was a woman wearing a flowing red silk shirt, and she had very long tapered fingers. The hands of a poet, I thought. She didn’t exactly look bored, but she looked intriguing. Who is this woman? I must move chairs, I thought. I moved chairs over dessert. It turns out the woman was a Russian scholar and an extraordinary playwright/director named Elise Thoron. We got to talking about Chekhov and his luminosity, transparency, and spareness, which is often lost in translation. It was serendipity. After I met with John, I asked if Elise could come on as my Russian language conduit. He, and the theater, happily agreed.

Meanwhile, I went to Los Angeles for a family vacation where my in-laws live. My sister-in-law Natasha who is a native Russian speaker sat down with me and read to me from the original. We sat on her stoop while her baby slept and while her twelve-year-old daughter Masha showed us Tae Kwan Do kicks. That Masha asked: what did the other Masha say? Natasha gave me literal translations of the idioms—as when Solyony says: pull my finger, meaning, just as it does in this country, make me fart, which the more polite translations usually cover, making Solyony seem completely opaque. Or when Masha says: Life is a raspberry! I wanted to keep the raspberry, even though it’s not readily accessible in English. Working with Natasha, it became clear to me that getting to the root of the original Russian was what I wanted, rather than putting my own authorial stamp on the text. I wanted to get as far away from a “stamp” as possible. I desperately needed a native speaker for things like: a word in act four that could either mean “a metal lid on top of steaming food” or “the kind of hat an entertainer would wear when performing for a czar.”

Not speaking Russian and translating Chekhov, is of course, a terrible disadvantage. Luckily I had four very able helpers. Cincinnati Playhouse procured for me a translation to look at, by Kristin Johnsen-Neshati. It is a lovely translation, clear and modern, and was very useful to read in the early stages of my work. Because it is a wonderful translation in its own right, and not literal, I couldn’t work directly from it. Still, it was a valuable tool for comparison, as was Stark Young’s translation; and his, I think, is one of the closest in English to the literal Russia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• When Woolf Saw Chekhov, something of an introduction
• Three Sisters
• Orlando
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author