Translating into Polyphony: Creating a Dramaturgical Translation for Three Sisters at Steppenwolf

At the end of act 2 in the recent Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (adapted by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna D. Shapiro),¹ Irina Prozorova² sits alone on a chaise at the edge of a starkly whitewashed stage. Behind her, hanging in midair, looms her house, a massive, solid, structure made ethereal with blue, wintery light, a picture frame enclosing it and holding it at a distance from her. While Irina’s refrain of longing (“To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow”) merges with the sounds around her, her suspended house is surrounded on all sides by falling snow. The audience cannot see where the snow comes from, nor does it seem to come to a rest on anything; instead, it falls above, beside, but also through and under the house, giving the sense that the audience is witness to a small piece of something infinite.

Besides the fact that this snow provides practical temporal exposition, it is a precisely rendered metaphor for Irina’s state of yearning and an echo of Tusenbach’s assertion that life, like snow, does not have meaning—it simply is. But it is how designers Todd Rosenthal and Donald Holder constructed this theatrical image that is most significant; with this image, they visually transposed a fundamental structural aspect of Chekhov’s play. In each act, scene, and conversation, the action begins and ends in full motion: everything is a continuation of something that happened before, while each scene points forward to action still to come.

This falling snow is one example of how a theatrical production can interpret something essential about a play that is unrelated to the meaning of the dialogue that is spoken. This idea is not new, of course; fundamental to the theatre is its ability to generate images that draw from several planes of meaning and have resonances in multiple sign systems. Mining a play for such things becomes more challenging, however, when working with plays in translation, as all translations, to varying degrees, inevitably differ from their source. As this production’s dramaturg, my attempt to confront this dilemma was to create what I have come to call a “dramaturgical” translation of the play.

In December 2011, Shapiro asked me to be the dramaturg for Three Sisters. Letts had premiered his adaptation of the play at Artists Repertory Theatre in Oregon (2009), but he had not yet finalized or published the script, intending to make final revisions during rehearsals with Shapiro at Steppenwolf. For the initial development process at Artists Repertory, he at first worked exclusively with the literal translation that theatre had given him: a word-for-word, “interlinear” translation photocopied from Hugo’s Russian Made Easy (1916); he later sought additional help from Charlotte Hobson, a British novelist and Russian speaker, who shared her literal translation of Three Sisters with him and answered questions via e-mail.³

For the Steppenwolf production, Shapiro sought me out as a Russian-speaking dramaturg who could provide Letts and herself with detailed information on Chekhov’s play and world. As part of the preproduction process, she asked me to create a new translation of the play that conversed with Letts’s adaptation and that helped her to understand Chekhov’s source text more thoroughly. In response, I decided to superimpose my translation onto Letts’s adaptation, writing below and around his printed words on the page, showing how his version conversed with Chekhov’s; I also worked dramaturgical commentary into my translation. Once rehearsals began, Letts used this double text, in conjunction with listening to the actors and in collaboration with Shapiro and myself, to make final revisions. For the purpose of this essay, however, I will focus not on these revisions, but on how my dramaturgical translation was used during the production process. Shapiro, Letts, and I actively used this dual translation throughout rehearsals to clarify interpretations, to aid actors in developing their characters and relationships, and to track and artistically illuminate patterns, rhythms, and structural elements of the play.

Although I will be identified...