The Undermain Theatre production of Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters closes this weekend, and as much as I was glad to see Chekhov produced in Dallas with the added publicity of having his play "adapted by [a] MacArthur "genius" grant winner" (which led to a 5th week of representations), I'm not sad to see the production go. Now, I have to say, as someone who has spent a substantial amount of her life in New York and Paris theaters, the acting was not bad, and while I found the design and costumes a bit on the underwhelming side, I suspect that seeing it at the Comedie-Francaise (France's state theater) in Paris a few years back spoiled every minor production of Three Sisters for me forever, but I will be the first to agree that a minor production of Three Sisters is better than no production of Three Sisters. And of course, given the three sisters' hope of returning to Moscow, there is some added relevance to the play for the artists in Dallas who dream of moving away to New York or Los Angeles. But that is not what I want to focus on for today's post.
Let me start by saying that Sarah Ruhl is widely recognized in the theater world, and was offered by Cincinnati Rep the opportunity to translate Chekhov - it was not her idea. This out of the way, it is also a fact that she doesn't speak Russian and had to get her sister-in-law to make a literal translation of the play so that she could rewrite that translation in a way that supposedly achieved her goal of "getting to the root of the original Russian", as she writes in the author's notes to the book. This is all very convoluted, preposterous, gimmicky, insulting to professional translators (I'm not one of them, in case you're wondering) and nothing more than a transparent ploy by Cincinnati Rep to drum up interest in a Russian play in Ohio when they staged the production back in October 2009. Elsewhere, one would hope that producing one of the world masterpieces of the theater repertoire would be enough to sell tickets, but perhaps Ohioan theater-minded audiences require a little more convincing. So be it.
In itself, while this little ploy to get Americans to care about a Russian play is a bit grating (it reminds me of Americans' tendency to remake European movies to generate more income at the box office), it would be quite harmless if Ruhl's "translation" was actually good. But she simply put 21st-century colloquial English into the mouths of 19th-century Russians, giving the text an odd feel of continued anachronism and vague mediocrity throughout. In Russian (which I read), Chekhov renders the three sisters' anguish with stunning lyricism and musicality. Ruhl's translation is nothing more than lowbrow and plodding. If you care about a good translation of Three Sisters, I highly recommend the Penguin Classics edition of Three Sisters (in Plays), translated by the late Peter Carson. Carson's work is of the highest caliber. Every line of his is like a gem that I admire both intellectually on the page and viscerally when I read the words aloud. Ruhl's translation, on the other hand, is best forgotten.
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