Interview: Tony Award Winner, Stephen Karam, on His Timeless and Timely Adaptation of THE CHERRY ORCHARD

The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov's masterpiece about a family on The Edge of ruin-and a country on the brink of revolution. The story of Lyubov Ranevskaya and her family's return to their fabled orchard to forestall its foreclosure captures a people-and a world-in transition, and presents us with a picture of humanity in all its glorious folly. By turns tragic and funny, The Cherry Orchard still stands as one of the great plays of the modern era.

Since its Moscow premiere in 1904, the towering tale has received nearly a dozen Broadway revivals. However, its themes of the harsh denial of reality and the inherent dangers of romanticizing the past have never been more pertinent, nor timely, than in the incarnation currently inhabiting the American Airlines Theatre. With a stellar cast, led by veterans Diane Lane, John Glover, Joel Grey, Harold Perrineau, and Celia Keenan-Bolger. this sumptuous production seamlessly retools the work for a modern audience; effortlessly adapting its language to a present-day vernacular while lovingly preserving the lyrical poeticism of Chekov's original dialogue.

Tasked with adapting the timeless classic is Pulitzer Prize- finalist, Stephen Karam, whose family drama "The Humans", took Broadway by storm last season and earned the playwright the Tony Award for Best Play. Recently, Broadway World had an opportunity to speak with Karam about the revival. The prolific playwright provided fascinating insights regarding the challenges of adapting an existing work, his hopes for further nontraditional casting in Chekov's plays, and the thrill of bringing this classic work to modern audiences. Here's what he had to say:

What were some of the major challenges you faced adapting such a dense and historical work for a modern audience?

My guiding principle was pretty simple: the play needs no gratuitous updating to remain relevant or accessible to American audiences in 2016, so my goal was...to try and create a version faithful to Chekhov's original; a version that attempts land the play in American ears in 2016 the way it landed in Russian ears in 1904. The play - like all major works of art - it's timeless, it doesn't need interference from me to speak uncannily to the way we live now.

The gray area every adapter runs into is probably best - or at least most amusingly -- embodied by the challenges I faced translating the final word of The Cherry Orchard. No two adapters seem to agree. This is partially because the word, uttered by the old servant, Firs, is nedotyopa, which was not even a Russian word when Chekhov first used it. According to Laurence Senelick, the Chekhovian King of Footnotes: "[Nedotyopa]...was Ukrainian for an incompetent, a mental defective. Chekhov may have remembered hearing it in his childhood; it does not appear in Russian dictionaries until 1938, and then Chekhov is cited as the source."

As a result, many adapters focus on mimicking the word's rhythm and sound, others pursue a more etymological route, exploiting potential root-word meanings hidden in the Ukranian slang. Some recent results: flibberygibbet, good-for-nothing, sillybilly, rogue, ninnynonny, duffer, job-lot, lummox, half-chopped, silly young cuckoo, silly old nothing, nincompoop, muddler, silly galoot, numbskull, young flibbertigibbet, half-baked bungler, you old fool, you pathetic old fool, blunderhead.

After much trial and error, and after listening to a native Russian speaker ponder the subtle shadings of meaning of the word in comparison to some of my initial options (options which elicited: "too harsh", "too silly-sounding", "not silly enough", etc.) - and further emboldened by the fact that the word wasn't even formally adopted by Russian culture when Chekhov first used it -- I am using the original. I grew too attached to its sound. The entire play belongs to Chekhov, of course, but still, I'm glad the last word is his.

Where does a writer draw the line between preserving what's already there and creating something new?

I wanted to preserve all of it, but through an American vernacular. The literal translation (meticulously prepared by the invaluable Allison Horsley) revealed some surprises, most notably that - in addition to the play's well known lyrical passages - Chekhov often composes elliptical passages that are wonderfully colloquial. Many of these strange passages are often smoothed over in translations; I tried to honor them. I worked closely with the literal translation to find an unfussy American vernacular to mirror Chekhov's phrasing and language, to closely match his conversational and poetic turns. Beyond that, there was no attempt to make the play more "American". In other words, the patronymics are in place, a samovar is still a samovar, a ruble is still a ruble.

With a few exceptions, the most well-known English language adaptations of The Cherry Orchard are British (I'd posit British Chekhov is often what American students are first introduced to in school, as was the case with me), adaptations where, appropriately, Russian colloquialisms are frequently traded for British ones. And even with magnificent American adaptations like David Mamet's rendering of Uncle Vanya (as heard in the film Vanya on 42nd) and Annie Baker's recent adaptation of Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep - even with these great and lasting entries into the cannon, I'd still argue that many Americans believe "correct" English-language-Chekhov should sound...well, British. More like Shaw than, say, O'Neill.

Beyond all of that -- even when your aim is to be faithful, you run into gray area constantly. I tried to avoid phrases that felt distractingly modern, that took audiences out of the play. Testing how far I could go - a phrase that is literally word-for-word "a pig's snout in Kalashny Row" - was, for two performances, "lipstick on a pig". Recent adaptations have used "perfume on a pig", "pig in a parlor", "pig in a china shop", "silk from a sow's ear", etc - but I was pushing the envelope too far not necessarily because of the word "lipstick" (whose origin dates to around 1880) - but because people so heavily associate that phrase with Sarah Palin, it was horribly distracting. I couldn't justify it, at the end of the day, people were thinking of Palin and Alaska, not Lopakhin, so I quickly changed it to: "a pig in a palace".

Conversely, our director, Simon Godwin pushed me - wisely, I think - to not let references that were lucid to Russian audiences sit in obscurity for Americans out of my desire to be 100% faithful. One example of is the play's mention of Menton, France, which was a nice plot point for original Russian audiences who would have had a clear image of where Ranevskaya's summer home was located -- a vacation coastal retreat 5 miles from Monte Carlo. I initially kept "Menton", but Simon was right to note that the vast majority of Americans don't even know what country Mentone is in, let alone the kind of place it is; so part of the story was actually lost.

Diverse casting is not commonplace in Chekov's works, in what ways do you feel having actors of color portray these characters sheds new light on the themes of the play, if at all?

I hope diverse casting with Chekhov becomes commonplace. Similar casting is routine when it comes to Shakespeare, but Chekhov is still predominantly performed with all-white casts. Here's the thing: I realize discussions surrounding color-conscious versus colorblind casting with classic works can be complex and multi-layered, but I do worry that those complexities make it easy for us to shut down and avoid the conversations entirely. In previews, I've overheard audience members question whether diversity in the work of a Russian writer of such a specific time upsets the authenticity of the work (perils of a playwright using the bathroom at intermission); to those people I'd ask: if you're doing a Russian play in English with actors who are not Russian - are you really preserving a more authentic Russian experience by casting only white Americans?

When a black actor is cast as Lopakhin - an adapter faces questions like: does the production then too neatly propose that serfdom equals American slavery? I'd argue the flip side of this question exists now too: does casting a white Lopakhin in 2016 allow Americans too much distance from what Chekhov intended? -- terms like "serf" and "peasant" conjure deep, dark, specific and painful associations for Russian audiences, it the their national shame, sin, their history; the same words to us (when asked, one young friend informed me he thought of "peasants" as "sort of farmers...?") might allow Americans too much distance, especially now, with the #blacklivesmatter movement on our minds. Also of note, in the climactic and memorable moments, Lopakhin uses the word "slave" - not "serf" -- and in Trofimov's memorable speech, again, Chekhov speaks of the family "owning living souls"... so the moments that probably sound like I'm injecting American history into the enterprise are moments where I'm following the literal translation closely.

What do you hope an audience will take away from this adaptation of "The Cherry Orchard"?

I hope audiences will feel the uncanny thrill of hearing Chekhov's play reach across time and speak to them about the way we live now.

The story of a Russian family in harsh denial of the change that is knocking on their door is almost comically prophetic at a time when a major American political party is fetishizing our past, feverishly looking back in order to "make America great again". History teaches us that change is inevitable, that the world only spins "forward!" (as Trofimov - and Tony Kushner - might tell us), but such change comes at a cost; it can be painful and gut-wrenching to face. When Lopakhin utters, "Oh, if only we could move faster through this next part...if only there was some way our awkward, sad lives could change faster...", I'm overwhelmed. Chekhov seems to be reaching across time to help us make sense of our current headlines and ourselves.