Translating Chekhov’s Experiments

When Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE) was founded in 2011, its artists never planned to spend a decade with the work of Anton Chekhov. PETE, “a company of artists who make new plays in a collaborative way,” is led by co-artistic directors Jacob Coleman, Rebecca Lingafelter, Cristi Miles, and Amber Whitehall, who direct, produce, act, and run the company’s education wing. These four work alongside a collective of directors, designers, performers, and production staff on devised pieces and revivals.

A focus on Chekhov emerged in partnership with Štěpán Šimek, a Czech-born translator and professor at Lewis and Clark College. PETE’s first full-length production, R3—an adaptation of Richard III directed by Gisela Cardenas in 2013—highlighted three of the company’s co-artistic directors: Lingafelter, Miles, and Whitehall. Šimek was so inspired by the strength of the three lead actresses that he approached PETE to direct Chekhov’s Three Sisters with the company.

PETE agreed to produce what would be its first revival of a play. Šimek was frustrated by existing English translations, which cast Chekhov as “this ‘poet of the Russian soul’ that we never will understand.” From this frustration, Šimek chose to translate the text of Three Sisters from Russian himself—starting by adding “The” to the title.

Thus began what would become a ten-year project for PETE. Over time, PETE’s process drew increasingly from techniques of devised theatre, wherein a piece is generated by artists in rehearsal using source material to guide elements in a collage-like structure. Chekhov’s metatheatrical focus on the state of theatre itself pushed PETE to investigate its own production practices, allowing them to make changes to become more humanly sustainable. PETE’s artists were inspired by adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, a manifesto that encourages human collaboration to better mimic organic processes, like the communication networks of underground root systems. These factors combined to underscore the literary act of translation, re-framing translation as a multi-pronged process—incorporating text, design, and performance as equally important tools—that allowed PETE to rediscover and boldly stage the fundamental experimentation of Chekhov’s plays.

The success of The Three Sisters, which sold out before it opened in 2014, inspired PETE to embark upon a Chekhov series: Over the next decade, the company would translate and produce the remaining three of Chekhov’s four major plays. In 2016, the company received a $77,000 grant from the Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights initiative that enabled Šimek to translate Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull; it also funded a production of Uncle Vanya in 2018, directed by co-artistic director Cristi Miles. In the summer of 2018, PETE collaborated with Lewis and Clark College on a symposium, “Chekhov in the 21st Century,” at which the company staged readings of Šimek’s translations of all four plays. Alice Reagan, who had previously directed PETE’s 2015 production of María Irene Fornés’s Enter the Night, approached the company to direct The Cherry Orchard. After hearing it aloud at the symposium, Reagan decided to pare down the script to focus on the family at the play’s core. With these cuts came a new title, simply Cherry Orchard. Cherry Orchard—originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed due to the pandemic—premiered in the summer of 2022. The final installment was an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (re-titled a seagull), directed by co-artistic director Rebecca Lingafelter and devised by the company and playwright Chris Gonzalez, with Šimek’s translation as a source text.

We're asking all the same questions, whether we start with a play or we don't.

From 2014 to 2024, these four plays formed the backbone of PETE’s work, garnering them a reputation for experimentation, both in Šimek’s translations and in design. Each translation pushed the boundaries of stagecraft further by taking design risks and involving the audience through various degrees of immersive staging. “Over the years, PETE's approach to the plays has become much more interventionist,” Rebecca Lingafelter mused, as the company’s loyalty to text took a back seat. “We have been inside of the plays with the question, ‘What do they mean to us now?’ And using devising techniques to crack them open.” Jacob Coleman, actor and co-artistic director, described the company’s evolution as a matter of dissolving a barrier between the categories of “scripted” and “devised.” When PETE was founded, it oscillated between two distinct types of productions: a contemporary take on a classic play and a devised piece. By the time a seagull rolled around, there was “functionally zero difference” in the company’s approach. “We're asking all the same questions, whether we start with a play or we don't,” Coleman said. “The way that we create material using compositions is essentially the same, whereas at the beginning, it wasn't. You can see that evolution by looking at the four Chekhov pieces.” Despite the evolutionary pattern that would emerge, the company never laid out a map for which play would fit where in the sequence. Every time PETE’s artists sat down to program the next season, they selected the play that felt relevant to the moment.

Too often, Šimek emphasized, “translators” are actually adaptors who rewrite pre-existing translations, lacking the fluency to return to a source text in its original language. With Chekhov, a consequence of this practice has been the misconception of “the Russian soul,” a literary concept coined in the mid-nineteenth century by writer Nikolai Gogol and critic Vissarion Belinsky. Though this phrase originated with Russian writers to capture an essential “Russianness” in art from this period, it has since become a catch-all term to typify this period of Russian art in a way that Šimek and others argue is reductive and cliché. This dated concept has dogged Chekhov’s diffusion throughout the world of English-speaking theatre, with many translations of Chekhov’s plays filtered through British English origins. These early twentieth century Edwardian translations mis-interpolated Chekhov’s characters from a feudal society in Russia’s stark landscape to a bucolic English countryside, rife with the nostalgic malaise of aristocrats, while misinterpreting perceived Russian values and norms. When Šimek returned to Chekhov’s words in the original Russian, contrary to the popular stereotype of Chekhov’s language being ornamented or dull, he found simple, active sentences full of ironic humor.

Šimek’s translation of The Three Sisters was the most faithful to the exactitudes of the original Russian. He went so far as to count syllables, matching his work strictly to the outline of the original Chekhovian language. He felt that the rhythms of Chekhov’s sentences were clues into the characters and pacing of the story. Many translators project English grammar onto Chekhov’s dialogue, which, in Šimek’s view, can alter meaning and obfuscate character. Chekhov’s idiosyncratic punctuation, far from erroneous, can provide clues into the mental processes of his characters, who “have to keep talking so that everything will be okay.” Šimek cleverly draws the ear to the translation by leaving elements of Russian syntax and idioms intact. A clear example of Šimek’s stylistic translation comes from his Uncle Vanya, where Serebryakov, the retired elderly professor, says the phrase, “Ladies and gentlemen, please hang your ears on your undivided attention hooks.” This strange and striking line is a direct translation of the original Russian idiom.

As the eventual director of The Three Sisters, Šimek was quick to emphasize that he never saw translation as a solution to problems of acting or directing and was careful not to adjust the text for those problems in the rehearsal room. He was, however, open to input from the actors and keen on finding what felt natural in their mouths and bodies. In the subsequent productions, he left making cuts up to the directors, while his translated script for a seagull was further adapted by playwright Chris Gonzalez and the company.

As PETE’s Chekhov series progressed and Šimek’s translations grew less fastidious, the text became less central to the process of rehearsing and designing the plays. Beginning with Uncle Vanya, Šimek’s translation process was looser than The Three Sisters—he was no longer counting syllables, though he was making the same effort to keep the rhythm and syntax as faithful to the Russian as possible. He broadened his approach, focusing on bringing Chekhov’s words to life in a stage-conscious way. Actor and co-artistic director Amber Whitehall describes PETE’s actors as “writers in time and space” and “co-creators of performance events,” two identities that amplify actors’ contributions to the multi-pronged process of translation. Performances evolve from the text, and the text takes on new meaning when rendered by performers. With the evolution of PETE’s working style, the processes for the Chekhov productions grew increasingly similar to those of devised work. “PETE has been working on... discovering what is the process by which design, text, and performance event can be generated simultaneously in real time, such that all elements are speaking to each other,” said Lingafelter. By reframing the typical process, design, and PETE’s core designers, became increasingly central to the interpretation of these plays.

Scenic designer Peter Ksander, lighting designer Miranda k Hardy, costume designer Jenny Ampersand, and sound designer Mark Valadez are PETE’s core four designers. Each of them worked on all of the Chekhov plays, with the exception of Valadez during Uncle Vanya, which featured a live band playing near-constant underscoring. Together with PETE’s artistic leadership and roster of actors, these core designers—along with Maggie Heath and Trevor Sargent, who work with objects, video, and experiential elements—forged a new process wherein design is another mode of translation, immersing themselves in Šimek’s words to bring what was on the page to life onstage in three dimensions.

The four designers think of themselves as a collective, or as Valadez refers to them, “a band.” Having forged a shared aesthetic, they can “artistically finish each other's sentences.” PETE’s design process utilizes similar devising tools to those used by the actors in rehearsal to expand upon Chekhov’s texts, playing off of each other’s creative offerings. “The boundaries between our [design] areas are more porous than in a traditional process,” said Valadez. “There's no attempt to make it 100 percent unified,” Ksander said. “Do we ever sit down and say, ‘This is the color palette of the show. Jenny, does your blue harmonize with Peter’s blue?’ No. Jenny does something, and I respond. And the cast responds, and they bring in their own ideas and props and objects.”

Many minds are better than one; that's why we do theatre.

This process is heavily influenced by the company’s immersion in emergent strategy. Costume designer Jenny Ampersand said: “We're not trying to discover the right answer. We're just trying to collect as much as possible, send as many tendrils out as possible. Many minds are better than one; that's why we do theatre.” PETE’s existing commitment to its people was reaffirmed by emergent strategy’s tenets, like “Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships,” and “There is always enough time for the right work.”

The design for each play became increasingly bold, vivid, and inventive. The Three Sisters, keeping with the rigidity of Šimek’s translation, was the most straightforward, though its experiential design placed the audience in the house of the Prozorov sisters, closely packed near the action of the living room in a seating configuration dotted with end tables. Uncle Vanya implemented a live band composed of local klezmer musicians, transforming the theatre into a barn-turned-raucous-cabaret. This elevated the social performances of Uncle Vanya’s characters, literalizing the artificiality in their interactions by staging them as explicitly performative. Cherry Orchard took an environmentalist angle, wherein Reagan and Ksander placed its characters in a room atop an iceberg, symbolizing their place at the end of a dying world. a seagull’s design took a metatheatrical approach, deconstructing the boundaries between onstage and off by blending the two spaces so the play’s story about the pains of theatremaking could be shown as it was told. 

a seagull was the furthest formal departure for PETE during its Chekhov project, and it was during this devising process that the designers became more explicitly involved in rehearsal. “Rebecca wrote prompts for the devising work that asked the designers to do the work of designers,” said Hardy. “It was successful because it was asking people to do what they're good at doing.” This focus on the artistic impulses of each designer not only references ideas from Emergent Strategy, it also makes the work richer by weaving in a thread of visual storytelling from the beginning. “The way PETE works is the way that, deep in my soul, I want to work,” said Jenny Ampersand. “It’s the opposite of what I was fighting against when I was working in other ways.” At its core, a seagull was an expression of company values, and of theatre’s necessity as an urgent life force. Konstantin, the playwright character at the center of a seagull, is committed to “making new forms” in his work, said Hardy. “We tried to honor that [...] and take that as far as we could.” What resulted was a performance event where the craft and labor of theatremaking was on full display.

PETE took the time offered by pandemic closures to shift the company’s working structure to become more balanced, with responsibility distributed horizontally. “I think the company has attempted as flat a hierarchy as we can get away with,” said Ksander. PETE’s transformation aligned with Chekhov’s themes of the artistic process and the human condition. Cherry Orchard, the company’s first major production after the pandemic shutdowns lifted, was the first time PETE revised the technical rehearsal process by extending the total length of the tech period, but shortening the days, giving them the same hours for a comparable cost. To replace traditional “ten out of twelve” (ten hours of work during a twelve hour period) tech days, the company developed what they call “total rehearsal,” or “tech lite.” During this period, designers integrate elements earlier in the process than is typical, “so that by the time you get to tech, you have a pretty good sketch of where things are supposed to be,” said Valadez. “The actors aren't walking into tech without having experienced any of those design elements,” which allows for the work of the actors to deepen in response to design elements over a longer period than a standard “tech week.”

“Why Chekhov now?” is a common question for PETE’s artists, though they think the answer should be obvious. Chekhov’s forceful, subtle plays of emotional hardship are as relevant now as ever. While struggles between good and evil play out on the global scale, Chekhov’s plays offer an intimate portrait of everyday survival. Chekhov renders a dispassionate portrait of humanity muddling through: “It's very human,” said Ksander. “There are no clear heroes or villains, they're all mixed up, messy human beings.”

Chekhov’s political relevance has not waned in the 130 years since he began writing plays. The sociopolitical crises behind the lives of his characters—a crumbling empire, growing class stratification, war—remain alive and present today. Ksander noted the placement of Chekhov’s characters in Russian territory that is present-day Ukraine. The ongoing onslaught of Ukraine by Russia brings Chekhov’s characters’ amassing of land and their refusal to cede dying aristocratic power into a new focus. Chekhov’s scientific outlook on the world brought to the fore questions of technological advancement versus the old ways, a friction plainly felt today. As Whitehall said, “The things that moved the human heart [then] are still moving us.”

Treating Chekhov’s plays—some of the most revered in the Western canon—like performance experiments can invite fans of both types of theatre into the room, making the familiar bizarre and the unfamiliar inviting: “It’s a bridge,” said Hardy. By reframing Chekhov’s plays as radical performance experiments, which the company argues they always were, PETE is able to appeal to more groups at once than if they did “straightforward” Chekhov, subsequently building a larger audience for future devised work. a seagull was performed at Portland Center Stage, a larger and higher-profile venue than the theatre at Reed College where the previous three plays were staged, reflecting the company’s successful attempt to attract larger, younger, and more diverse audiences, while retaining their older audience, and impressing most everyone.

Chekhov’s radicalism has been gradually lost in his absorption into the canon, and his fluid experimentation calcified through imprecise translations. He wrote within a company structure, and his action-driven writing was integral in the development of the Stanislavski method of acting, Šimek noted. It’s only fitting that a company such as PETE further experiment, further activate, and further collaborate on projects Chekhov began. PETE’s adaptations strip away to the barest scaffold of Chekhov’s ideas, then explode from within with confetti-cannon force.

PETE’s artists are aware that their model is unique to their company for many reasons, and hard to replicate at scale. “Financially, most companies can’t spend a year working on just one show,” Valadez confessed. Furthermore, several company members have teaching positions in higher education, roles which come with subsidies for creative projects, access to space, even equipment. And their process is still evolving, which, according to Ampersand, is for the best: “Each show is so different. I don't know that we'll ever be like, 'this is the process.' I think we'll be done with making at that point.” PETE’s model is, as Ksander put it,

a long conversation with people who have a lot of knowledge about each other, about their interests, and how to push their buttons in constructive ways. The work is company-based; we are an ensemble. That makes us almost like one of those living rooms full of Chekhov characters, like a slightly dysfunctional family.