The shared red-and-black avian aesthetic is uncanny, no?

The three sisters themselves: Masha (Natalia Payne), Irina (Heather Wood) and Olga (Wendy Rich Stetson) in Sarah Ruhl's "new version" of Chekhov's The Three Sisters at the Yale Repertory Theatre through October 8. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Three Sisters
By Anton Chekhov. A new version by Sarah Ruhl. Based on a literal translation by Elise Thoron with Natalya Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati. Directed by Les Waters Scenic Designer: Annie Smart. Costume Designer: Ilona Somogyi. Lighting Designer: David Budries. Dramaturg: Rachel Steinberg. Stage Manager: James Mountcastle. Performed by Natalia Payne (Masha), Wendy Rich Stetson (Olga), and Heather Wood (Irina) play the title roles. The cast also includes Josiah Bania (Rode), James Carpenter (Chebutykin), Richard Farrell (Ferapont), Emily Kitchens (Natasha), Bruce McKenzie (Vershinin), Alex Moggridge (Andrei), Barbara Oliver (Anfisa), Keith Reddin (Kulygin), Thomas Jay Ryan (Tuzenbach), Brian Wiles (Fedotik), and Sam Breslin Wright (Solyony).
Through Oct. 8 at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

When is a translation not a translation? When it’s a hot playwright doing it; then it’s a “new version.”
It’s not that Sarah Ruhl doesn’t have strong feelings about how today’s theater should access the classics. Her post-feminist adaptation of the Eurydice myth retains the conceit of a Greek chorus, and provides empowering moments for its heroine in most unlikely places. Her version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is robust and alive, a transgender parable made to be staged live. Her Passion Plays uses a sacred theater format, and religious and political iconography, to dramatize mortal, earthbound struggles of today.
Call Three Sisters the exception to the Ruhl. It respects the form, intent, voice, period, style and rhythm of the original.
Instead of “Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, A New Version by Sarah Ruhl,” the credit could read “Sarah Ruhl Presents Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov.” In an essay printed in the Rep program, Ruhl uses the “t” word, and flatly announces “I came to this translation with no agenda.”
The concepts and emphases in this production come from the original script. Ruhl worked from a fresh literal translation Kristin Johnsen-Neshati further clarified with the help of New York actress/director/playwright Elise Thoron (who even writes musicals, such as Prozak and the Platypus and Green Violin) and Ruhl’s Russian-speaking sister-in-law Natalya Paramonova. But the textual changes are relatively minor, the sort of nips and tucks which directors and dramaturges work in without expecting extra credit.

Ruhl does make sure there’s humor in the play. She punches Chekhov’s jokes (including some which don’t announce themselves as jokes on the printed page) and adds a pull-my-finger fart joke, some Latin conjugation gags and some more metaphorical routines with echoes and rigidly posed photographs. But there’s nothing that seems out of place. There’s also more place not to seem out of—this Three Sisters goes the full four acts virtually uncut, clocking in at three hours. Ruhl retains far more Chekhov than expected, and rearranges almost nothing.

In this season of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, this level of respect is positively exhiilirating. This is a thoughtful, careful, well-articulated production of a classic. But I admit that I was suckered and distracted by that “new version” credit. Ruhl altered the tale of Eurydice by inserting a silent moment of hesitation and indecision in the final act. I kept waiting for this Three Sisters to turn like that, but it doesn’t. It just talks itself to a calm, reflectve ending, as Chekhov intended, the sisters Olga, Masha and Irina having matured a bit and endured a bit and no longer prattling quite so much about how they’re “going to Moscow!!!”

Moscow means Moscow in this production. There isn’t that vague Americanization or universalism or fantasizing found in some productions. The staging feels clipped and chopped and Russian. The city is pronounced to rhyme with “Bosco” (not “Boss cow”). The long Russian names are honored and enunciated. Debts are measured in rubles.

There are nonetheless a number of Americanizations and progressive interpretations in this generally traditional “new version,” yet they tend to come from Annie Smart’s set design rather than Ruhl’s script or Les Waters’ direction. For the first act, the set is a deep sitting room, with three-step platform, lavishly decorated and detailed. Later, the back end is blocked off by a new backdrop, confining scenes to a smaller, shallower playing area. The effect is of a 19th century melodrama. A really good one, direct and easy to follow. But an old fashioned melodrama all the same.

Top Girls: Three sisters, their brother, the husbands, the soldiers and everybody else. Photo by Joan Marcus.

At the head of that cast, the three sisters Olga (sturdy, redheaded Wendy Rich Stetson), Irina (blonde, busty Heather Wood) and Masha (svelte, severe, raven-tressed Natalia Payne) look completely unrelated, which has to be a conscious casting choice. Their differing outlooks and personalities unite through focused and intelligent acting; when these dissimilar siblings muse together on their disappointments and uncertain futures late in the play, director Les Waters groups them beautifully, with one on a bed and the other two huddled on the floor, with most of the stage bare.

The supporting cast is full of “types”: Thomas Jay Ryan (the monk in the Yale Rep production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play a couple of seasons ago) does the barking-yet-appealing soldier thing, behaving almost like a noir gumshoe. The servants are, to quote an Edwin Sanchez play, “more peasanty.” Emily Kitchens is a prissy Natasha who could have come from a Penelope Keith sitcom. Keith Reddin, another Passion Play veteran, channels Austin Pendleton as the dogged schoolteacher Kulygin, husband to Masha. In his drunken, bearded scenes, James Carpenter (Chebutykin) is a deadringer for John Carradine. Bruce McKenzie, a co-founder of the Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego who has a Stanley Kowalski, an Iago and a Krapp’s Last Tape on his resume, conveys an outwardly calm-seeming yet inwardly hotwired presence as Lt.-Col. Vershinin; he’s the most unpredictable of the various handsome soldiers who distract the titular sisters from their day-to-day boredom.

…unless you count a couple of relatively minor soldiers vividly enlivened by current Yale School of Drama students Josiah Bania and Brian Wiles. Having run already honed their roles and found their rhythms in at Berkeley Repertory Theatre during this Three Sisters’ premiere production this past May, most of the cast have settled into their roles as assuredly as the show’s central families have settled into their rural homes. Bania and especially Wiles—part of a crack ensemble that raced through Chekhov’s The Wedding Reception at the Yale Cabaret last year—bring a noteworthy energy to their scenes.

Josiah Bania and Brian Wiles in back, at left, watching Natalia Payne's Masha. Photo by Joan Marcus.

There are lots of neat little touches. Settings built with different types of wood, a subtle reminder of the ages and emotional varieties of the onstage community. A confessional scene in which those hearing the monologue are hidden behind dressing screens. Irina fends off unwelcome advances while sitting in a wicker chair. A post-conflagration gathering which evokes the smoke and fury of a WWI battlefield. Lines which deftly combine naturalism and theatricality: like “Well, if the tea isn’t coming, we might as well philosophize.”

Chekhov’s Three Sisters didn’t need any help from Sarah Ruhl, and she was smart enough to realize that. She brings a dogged dramaturgical sense of order and precision to the project, especially in how she respect the full four-act scope of the play and its leisurely yet carefully honed and issue-laden conversations. The virtue of this production is not how “modern” or “sensational” is it. It’s how classically Chekhovian it is. And that turns out to be just the Three Sisters we need right now.

The spirit of Sarah Ruhl will still rule the Yale Rep, even after her season-opening adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters ends its run.

The Rep’s just announced the cast of the second Rep show of the 2011-12 season, Belleville by Amy Herzog. The central role of Abby will be played by Maria Dizzia, whose last stint at the Rep was as Eurydice in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Before that, she was in the 2002 Yale Rep production of Iphigenia at Aulis—directed by Rebecca Taichman, whose own Sarah Ruhl connection is that she directed the world premiere of Dead Man’s Cell Phone.

Belleville, about a young couple in crisis, has a cast of four. The last Amy Herzog play to be seen at Yale—The Wendy Play,  presented as part of the Carlotta Festival just before Herzog graduated from the School of Drama in 2007—had a cast nearly five times that size. (Herzog’s big recent New York hit, After the Revolution, had a multi-generational cast of nine.) Besides Maria Dizzia, Belleville stars Greg Keller (playwright, member of The Bat Theater Company, part of the ensemble that originated Moises Kaufman’s 33 Variations and Maria Dizzia’s co-star once previously, in Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All at the Manhattan Theatre Club), Pascale Armand (a recent Rep vet of Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed in 2009) and Gilbert Owuor (like playwright Herzog a 2007 grad of the School of Drama; his previous time on the Rep stage was in the partying ensemble of Strindberg’s Miss Julie).

Belleville’s to be directed by Anne Kauffman, the eminent New York director who came to Yale Rep just a year ago to develop the new musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The current issue of the Atlantic—the first annual “Culture Issue” for the 153-year-old magazine—features a short discussion with playwright Sarah Ruhl and set designer Scott Bradley about how she conceived, and he brought to vivid stage life, this stage direction from her mythic update Eurydice:

The sound of an elevator ding. An elevator door opens. Inside the elevator, it is raining.

The photo which illustrates the Atlantic article is from Eurydice’s original 2004 production at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2004, but Bradley engineered the same water trick for the subsequent productions of the play at Yale Repertory Theatre in 2006 (which yielded the photo above, taken by Joan Marcus) and Off Broadway.

It really was a mesmerizing effect, even during a period where it seemed like fountains of water were gushing out of every other play you saw. (The Bluest Eye and Underneath the Lintel at Long Wharf, Singing in the Rain at the Goodspeed).

You can’t call the Atlantic’s coverage timely—the regional theater realm had largely moved on from Eurydice by mid-2008 (partly, of course, because Ruhl continues to churn out fresh, exciting and experimental works). The script has trickled down (so to speak) to college and small theaters which probably aren’t spending the same amount of energy and water on that particular special effect.

Still, a worthy incursion of technical theater into a mainstream publication. Hope to have items like that—behind the scenes of magical stage moments—on this very site, as NHTJ continues to develop.
(Does anybody, for instance, have the recipe for the poop that covered that poor man head-to-toe last year in Battle of Black and Dogs at Yale Rep?)

While it doesn’t exactly stream light into the room after so many dark, downbeat shows over the last couple of seasons, the slate promises much amusement—of the introspective, culture-satire variety. For hardcore, longtime Repgoers, some of the choices bring back fond memories. There’s also appeal for those who only know the theater from the past season or two.

The five:
THREE SISTERS
(September 16 through October 8, 2011)
The Chekhov classis has been freshly adapted by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Les Waters; this will be a co-production with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ruhl’s had three plays at the Rep in recent years, one of which (Eurydice) was directed by Waters. (The others were the sublime Clean House and the ambitious Passion Plays). She’s also been well represented with productions at the Yale School of Drama (Orlando) and the Yale Cabaret (Late: A Cowboy Song). Ruhl was a visiting lecturer this year at Wesleyan (where her Melancholy Play was performed) and is one of the most celebrated alumnae of the Brown University playwriting program, where she studied with Paula Vogel (now head of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama).
Three Sisters was the play which served as the Yale School of Drama thesis project for then-student director James Bundy back in 1995 (starring Sanaa Lathan as Irina). Then as now, the trad-proscenium Yale University Theater, rather than the newer-fangled Yale Rep, is the preferred venue to stage Three Sisters.

BELLEVILLE
(October 21 through November 12, 2011)
World premiere of a new work by 2007 Yale School of Drama playwriting grad Amy Herzog. New York success arrived for Herzog arrived last year with her sociopolitical drama After the Revolution. Herzog is still well remembered here in New Haven for her ambitious The Wendy Play at the YSD’s 2007 Carlotta Festival; that Shakespeare-tinged summer-camp spectacle featured a dozen students from New Haven’s Educational Center for the Arts magnet high school in a 20-strong cast. This script’s smaller-scale (at least in the size of its cast), concerning upheaval in the seemingly idyllic life of American couple living in Paris. Anne Kaufman, who helmed the tricky musical We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the Rep this season, is one of the go-to directors for works by new young playwrights these days.

A DOCTOR IN SPITE OF HIMSELF
(Novemeber 25 through December 17)
Moliere’s 1666 Le Medecin malgre lui, doctored by physical-comedy physicians Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp, respectively the director and star of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters at the Rep two seasons ago. Servant’s saucy adaptress, Constance Congdon, is missing from this new equation—Epps and Bayes and reworking the script themselves this time. But Moliere tends to provide a more solid foundation for frolic than does the looser Goldoni. And there’s a grand tradition of riotous Moliere at the Rep, from a host of directors: Mark Rucker directed James Magruder’s adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, Liz Diamond did both School for Wives and The Bourgeois Avant-Garde (Charles Ludlam’s update of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) in the mid-1990s, Andrei Belgrader’s production of The Miser (translated by Miles Malleson) in 1988 starred Lewis Stadlen Jr. and Oliver Platt. Plus there’ve been a couple of Tartuffes. (My disdain for the most recent one, which largely eschewed clowning in favor of post-modern trickery, has not abated.) The Rep’s devotion to Moliere goes all the way back to the theater’s founder, Robert Brustein, and his landmark productions of Don Juan and the collection of one-acts Sganarelle: An Evening of Moliere Farces.

TO BE ANNOUNCED
(February 3-25, 2012)
And yet we do now something, since the Rep press released specifies that this is “a new play to be announced,” and further elaborates that more info will come as soon as “later this spring.” So probably more about confirming contracts and schedules than about picking the project, then. Lots of new this year. Good thing.

THE WINTER’S TALE
(March 16 through April 7, 2012)
A Winter’s Tale was once done at the Rep during the tail end of the Lloyd Richards regime, in 1989. That was a chilly, bleak and modernistic production redeemed by the overbearing (as in “pursued by bear”) presence of Ben Halley Jr. Liz Diamond, who joined the Rep faculty just a couple of years later, is slated to direct this one. Productions by faculty members often get less attention from the local press than do the New York “names,” but I’m more excited at the prospect of a Diamond-studded Winter’s Tale than I am by most of the flashier stuff on the Rep 2011-12 sched. Well known nationally as a shaper of new works (by such talents as Suzan Lori-Parks, Lisa Loomer and Marcus Gardley ), Liz Diamond is just as confident and creative with classics, as Yale Repgoers have seen with her bracing productions of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Seamus Heaney’s Cure at Troy (an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes), Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Out Teeth, not to mention her aforementioned Molieres. I don’t think she’s done Shakespeare before at the Rep, though as the head of the School of Drama’s directing program, she’s guided dozens of student directors through their mandatory second-year “verse projects,” which almost always are by the bard. In 1992, while she was still getting started in her faculty gig at Yale, Diamond co-directed (with Doug Hughes, later to become, and unbecome, artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre) what sounds like a fascinating stripped-down version of Julius Caesar at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Washington state.
You might think of The Winter’s Tale as seldom done, but not only has this very Yale Rep done it previously (albeit over 20 years ago), the local Elm Shakespeare Company put it on in Edgerton Park just last summer, with Yale Rep veteran Mark Zeisler as Leontes.

THE REALISTIC JONESES
(April 20 through May 12)
Finally, another new-play-by-hot-contemporary-talent coup for the Rep: a world premiere from ace reality-based abstractionist Will Eno of Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Middletown fame. Sam Gold, who has squired many a young playwright to sustainable commercial success, directs. The Realistic Joneses concerns two neighboring suburban Jones families “who have more in common than their identical homes.”