Theater

Trinity Rep Explores the Dark Side of Comedy

The 2014-15 season opens with Anton Chekhov's Ivanov

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Did you know that there was such a thing as a comedic, Russian Hamlet? I didn’t either. And there isn’t, kind of. At least not in the sense that the squishy, lovable Hamlet we all know and love hasn’t gotten a Ruski rewrite at any point in the recent past, unbeknownst to us. Rather, this September, Trinity Repertory Company will be kicking off its 2014-2015 season with Ivanov by Anton Chekhov in a new translation and adaptation by Curt Columbus, the company’s artistic director. Curt says the play is darkly comic, quite topical and, being “a big ensemble piece,” perfect for his troupe.

“It’s been eight years since we did Cherry Orchard,” notes Curt. “A number of audience members were saying, ‘When are you going to do Chekhov again?’ And the acting company wanted to do it. They very rarely request plays, all of them, at once.”

Curt says that he hadn’t really looked at the play until a couple of years ago, when, at the behest of the acting company, he began a translation. After two readings with the company in its off-season company workshops, Curt says he was able to take advantage of funding granted by the Pew Charitable Trust while he was down at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia last spring as they presented a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which he translated. “The money let us do readings of other Chekhov plays, because we had time. And I was able to sharpen the play up a bit and make it more produceable,” he says.


It’s in the sharpening that Curt gets credit for adapting the work in addition to translating it; Chekhov was a young writer at the time he penned Ivanov, he says, and there were a few places that struck him as somewhat repetitive. Curt, who speaks Russian fluently, says that the challenge of translating a piece of writing for the stage is that it’s meant to be heard and understood instantaneously, as opposed to absorbed slowly. “You really have to figure out the rhythm and flow and musicality of it,” he says.

The result of Curt’s efforts will be given a “modern-ish” treatment in the intimate Dowling Theater, where Curt says he expects Director Brian McEleney to create an “intense and intensely close” experience for the audience. “He doesn’t want a lot of fussy scenery,” he says.

All the better for acting company member Stephen Thorne, who played the Bard’s Hamlet in an earlier production during Columbus’s tenure, to breathe his particular brand of life into Nikolai Ivanov. It’s in Ivanov himself where Curt draws parallels to the less Russian, less funny antihero of the other play: “Like Hamlet, Ivanov is surrounded by people who are telling him to behave. He knows how he should act, he can see what he needs to do to fix things, [but] he just can’t get it right,” he says.

The comedy comes in, in part, because Ivanov is surrounded by what Curt calls “larger than life characters” in this small town, all of whom play integral roles in what company literature calls “[turning] the conventional expectation of Chekhov on its head... Funny, bittersweet, modern and relatable.”

The themes – which, for all the comic moments, are quite serious – do seem pretty resonant today. “Topical without being ‘ripped from the headlines,’” Curt says. “It’s definitely speaking to us and who we are.”

The subject matter? Everything from anti-Semitism to xenophobia to enormous piles of debt. And at the bottom of it all, a man who just can’t quite connect with his in-laws, help his wife battle an illness and stop the town from speaking ill about him in his time of need. Of course, his own sardonic disposition and wandering eye don’t really do him any favors, either.

Curt says we can expect all of this to take place in a lush, musical landscape, similar to what the company did with The Grapes of Wrath last year. A house-band made up of actors and MFA students will be playing original music penned by student Ian McNeely, who is in the nine-person cast. Curt describes the music as “a little Tom Waits-y, a little Mumford and Sons,” and in support of the longstanding Russian troubadour tradition, which celebrates guitars and ballads and all that good stuff.

If it seems a little more inventive and interactive than the notions many of us have of Chekhov, that’s because that’s part of what Curt is trying to show audiences. “I’m trying to dispel this notion that Chekhov’s world view is all darkness and dreary and gray. This production is going to be so colorful, and it’ll tell people immediately that it’s not that. But he’s much more of a Buddhist than an Ayn Rand. He really believes in human nature,” says Curt. “There’s bad things that happen and good things that happen but they all have equal value in the eyes of an unminding universe. And that’s a beautiful philosophy that isn’t dark at all. It’s accepting.”

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, September 4-October 5

Trinity Repertory Company. 201 Washington Street. 351-4242

chekov, ivanov, play, season opener, theater, 2014 season, trinity repertory company, Curt Columbus

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