chaika

auditions for my school production of chekhov's seagull will happen in just over a week, on october 10. the play has thirteen characters, two of which have no lines (the cook and the maid), and one of which has several lines that go something like this: "yes, sir." (yakov.)
with the help of an original russian script, my russian-english dictionary, and tom stoppard's translation (which starred meryl streep, philip seymour hoffman, natalie portman and kevin kline in central park several years ago), i am making my own translation/adaptation of the play. i have translated russian poems before, but i've never undertaken a project like this. though my russian vocabulary is okay, my grammar leaves more to be desired, so it often takes a while to figure things out. that's where stoppard's translation comes in handy. usually what i do is take a guess, then check myself against his version.
i started out with act four and went backwards. like, i started with the last speech of the play and actually worked backwards speech by speech or line by line. why did i do that? for fun, and also to throw myself off, so i would be less tempted to fabricate lines i knew were coming. backwards, i was translating it with less anticipation. i finished acts four and three like that. yesterday i finished act one. now all that remains is the eleven pages of act two.
the "adaptation" part comes in with my idea to bring the seagull into suburbia 2006. i don't usually care for plays which are taken out of their proper time and put into a modern context, but with this particular play, i feel like i know it well enough to experiment with it. names of russian towns ("yelets") are being changed ("jersey city"). all references to living in "the country" are being changed to living in "the suburbs." because chekhov's characters are mostly intelligentsia, this change from semi-luxurious summer home (complete with parks, avenues and servants) to run-down apartment building (complete with ambulance sirens and planes flying over) does actually make a big difference in how the characters interact. rather than boredom caused by excess, the contemporary version posits boredom caused by sheer suburban banality. it also changes some of the language so that it doesn't sound so dated (though don't get me wrong-- i love dated), so that students of this generation are more able to identify with it. i was going to provide an example, but when i started trying to find one it struck me as presumptuous.
maybe the whole thing is presumptuous. purists--if there are any left, and i doubt they would come see this anyway--would shudder. on the other hand, i love chekhov just as much or more than anyone i've ever met. so why not try it? so far it's a blast.