This summer Feiffer and Posner adapt, with more or less fidelity, two Chekhov plays, “Three Sisters,” which Feiffer styles as “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” and which opens at MCC on July 18, and “Uncle Vanya,” which Posner has retitled “Life Sucks.” and which reopened on Theater Row in June. Both plays argue, often forcefully and sometimes obscenely, that Chekhov’s characters, habitués of 1890s Russia, speak to our lives with such clarity that they must have purchased really excellent phone plans.
“The only difference between these characters and the people I surround myself with today is basically that we drink cold brew, they drink tea out of samovars,” Feiffer said. “Nothing has really changed.”
Recently, Posner, a director and the author of a previous Chekhov reworking, “Stupid _______ Bird,” and Feiffer, an actress and a writer for the Jim Carrey comedy “Kidding,” saw each other’s plays. Last week, they met — on Google Docs — to discuss inspiration, exasperation and why Chekhov’s endings need work. These are excerpts from the conversation.
Q: How did you come to adapt Chekhov?
HALLEY FEIFFER: In “Three Sisters,” there was something so inherently millennial about the way these three women behave. They are so entitled, so obsessed with their own unhappiness, so unwilling to take any actions to overcome said unhappiness, so cruel, judgmental and petty and at the same time, so capable of love, compassion and growth. I thought it would be fun and funny to translate the play into millennial speak and then start to strip away that stylized syntax.
AARON POSNER: When I wanted to start writing about my own life, I turned to Chekhov. He has never been my favorite playwright, but he gave me the structure — and the permission, maybe? — to write about things that were deeply personal to me.
Q: Did you do much research? Did you use a particular translation?
POSNER: I worked from the worst, most unspeakable translation I could find online. Any research was internal. Internal excavation.
FEIFFER: I used several translations and had them open in front of me on my desk and would literally read each of them a line at a time and then filter the words through my demented warped brain.
POSNER: I don’t find his world distant at all. That’s why I find it so funny when people say my plays are totally “Chekhovian” when that is not what I am trying to do. They really just mean “human,” I think.
Q: Aaron, you’ve seen Halley’s play, what does she get unrepentantly wrong? And Halley, in which ways is Aaron tragically mistaken?
FEIFFER: I didn’t feel Aaron got anything “wrong.” I will say that what he sees in “Vanya” is different. Your play ends on a much more hopeful note than the original (mine does, too), so it makes sense to extract some of the devastation from the story.
POSNER: So yeah, there are things in “Three Sisters” that I see quite differently, but that’s the point. Our projects are actually really different. Halley is translating the play to her own language and world. I’m using it more as a jumping-off place. We are both filtering the plays through our own sensibilities. The plays are both finally really idiosyncratic and connected to who we are more than to Chekhov.
FEIFFER: For me, this play is not more personal than it is Chekhovian: I wanted to make Chekhov proud (#daddyissues). I know that might sound insane. For me, it’s about a manic insistence on escaping pain by relying on humor. And also the human tendency to careen between elation and despair in the span of a nanosecond. The dichotomy between love and cruelty. The obsession with finding meaningful connection and the terror of intimacy. Chekhov captures it so perfectly.
Q: So that’s Halley’s sensibility. Aaron what’s yours?
POSNER: Trying to get through each day while living in deep relation to your own flaws, I guess. Oh, God, that sounds so bleak. Chekhov has a quote about how “Any fool can stand a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” I’ve always loved that.
FEIFFER: I’m so good in a crisis. Buying a weekly MetroCard still baffles me.
In adapting, what did you think you could and couldn’t change? Did anything feel sacred?
POSNER: Not for me. I was not worried about Chekhov or Chekhov purists, ever. [Expletive] Chekhov — in the most respectful and grateful way possible, of course.
FEIFFER To be very honest I feel slightly horrified reading the words “[Expletive] Chekhov” — that’s how much I revere him! So I had a very different approach. Unlike Aaron, I didn’t use the play as a jumping-off point; I wanted to tell its exact story. That said, I brought a lot of the subtext to the forefront in an effort to heighten the pathos and catharsis in the storytelling.
POSNER: Watching you dance between his version and yours was really fun. I hardly know you, but knowing “Three Sisters” as well as I do and seeing what you did with it, I feel that I actually know you pretty well.
Q: Halley, do you feel like you know Aaron from his play?
FEIFFER: I don’t feel as clear on it. Hearing you share about how life is a struggle and how we make it worse for ourselves is helpful. I see that clearly in your play. I also see a light touch, an insistence on mordant humor, a compulsion to forge bonds albeit imperfectly that makes me feel like I know you.
POSNER: I feel seen.
FEIFFER: Yay!
Q: Both plays mess with the endings? Why?
FEIFFER: I changed the ending, because it’s very important to me to tell this story in a way that feels truthful to my experience of life. In my experience, life isn’t bleak — it isn’t a vale of tears, and it isn’t existentially meaningless. It’s the opposite: devastatingly painful and unbearably gorgeous. The play has enough devastating pain in it; I wanted to point toward some of that unbearable beauty that awaits these women, if only they are willing to push through their fears and take some action.
POSNER: Where you varied from Chekhov and brought your own sensibility more fully to bear was my favorite part of the whole production.
FEIFFER: Thank you. I appreciated the ways in which you did the same, especially the ways in which the characters relate directly to the audience. That felt very Chekhovian to me: They’re so lonely and desperate, they’re even trying to get these strangers to understand them.
Q: Chekhov’s characters, as written, are white and seemingly straight. Both of you have complicated that, writing and casting in a way that expands how the plays depict race, gender and sexuality.
FEIFFER: It’s a question we dealt with of course very early on in casting the production at Williamstown [Theater Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts] two years ago. We wanted to cast a diverse group of people for this play, not only because representation is, of course, important, but also because if we want to illuminate how universal this story is, it only makes sense that we have an inclusive ensemble so that everyone can see someone to whom they relate.
Q: And Aaron, you made some interventions. I don’t think Vanya had a lesbian character originally.
POSNER: No, right, I don’t think so. The character Waffles became Pickles. My wife’s idea, actually.
FEIFFER: I love Pickles. I love that she’s queer. I love that her queerness is never commented on. I love her monologue about lost love. I related to her deeply, felt frustrated by her and uplifted by her all at once.
Q: Were you nervous about how audiences would respond to your plays?
FEIFFER: No. I don’t care about that. I knew certain people would not respond to this take, would misinterpret it as irreverent, would find it offensive. They’re allowed to. I literally held the door open at Williamstown for people as they walked out. In a way it’s sort of exciting to piss people off — it means we may be doing something right. Tom Sadoski, who played Andrey in Williamstown, said to me, “We’re like the Sex Pistols!”
POSNER: One thing I am very proud of is that I have been writing the plays I believe in, saying the things I want to say and not worrying too much what people think. It’s why I kept the title “Stupid _______ Bird” and chose “Life Sucks.” I didn’t want people thinking it was going to be quiet and Chekhovian.
FEIFFER: Same. I was deliberating between five and six Moscows. A friend said. “Six is more annoying, so do that.”
POSNER: Five would have been way more charming and Chekhovian. But six!
FEIFFER: LOL.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.