Hello, and welcome to the debut show from New Place Theatre!
This is not a straight adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. If you’re looking for that, there are many, many translations and adaptations out there that are worth a read. There are also many adaptations that take the original play into strange and unexpected directions. Last year, a Manchester, England group called RASHDASH did a version that cut out all the male characters and had songs and cheerleaders and it was weird and cool and still kept the essence of the play alive: how do we find happiness?
With this adaptation, my first goal was to modernize the dialogue, chuck the multi-syllabic Russian names, and bring the story into the 21st century. I did not feel the need to present the show in its original form, preserved in some sort of theatrical amber. That might be fun from an academic challenge, but it’s not very exciting, and it doesn’t put butts in the seats.
For New Place’s first new play, I wanted a mix of the classic and the new. I wanted a young (or at least young-at-heart) cast ready to try something new. I wanted to cast a show as color-blind and as gender-blind as I could. I wanted a show that could (hopefully) feel young and feminine and diverse, despite me being a middle-aged white dude.
And it should also still be Chekhov.
The characters are largely the same, although I made some interesting changes. Vershinin is now a queer woman named Gates. Ferapont and Anfisa are now the Pappas', an old Greek couple that have been with the family for decades. Solyony is gone, but I’ve given his corpse-smelling hands to Nick, poor Nick, desperately in love with the youngest sister, doomed to die in a duel.
Oh wait. The duel’s gone.
In fact, all of Act Four is gone. If we’re going to update this story to the 21st century, then I wanted to include some modern storytelling devices. When we read this play or watch it being performed, we want to shout at the three sisters and say, “Just go back to Moscow and stop whining!” But why don’t they? Are they actually unable to go because of distance or fidelity to their current home? No, of course not. They don’t go because they don’t have it in them. Chekhov’s characters continually have the opportunity to change and make their lives better, but they never do it.
Early in the play Vershinin/Gates has a speech about getting the chance to do it all over again. “I always think about what life would be like if we could just do it all over again, knowing everything that we know now. If the life we’ve lived was just a rough draft, and then we get to go and rewrite it, clean it up, make it pretty.”
So we’re going to give the three sisters exactly what they want. In our Act Four, they get their rewrite. They get their chance to make it pretty.
To our audience tonight, I say Welcome to New Place. I’m so excited to have you a part of this new adventure, and thank you for taking a chance on this unknown thing. We hope we please you with our efforts.
Brian Fauth, March 2019
