Your play, Uncle Jack, is based on Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. What drew you to that play, and made it appealing to you for re-interpretation?
I have done two contemporary adaptations of Chekhov. The first set The Seagull in the Hamptons with the unwieldy title of The Seagull: The Hamptons: 1990s (there was also a production on Cape Cod that swapped “Wellfleet” for “the Hamptons”), and the second put Uncle Vanya in West Virginia and I called that Uncle Jack. The adaptations, rather than being a gimmick or an attempt to deconstruct or one-up Chekhov, were a serious attempt to restore the original intent of the author for a contemporary American audience. I realize that is a bold statement, so allow me to explain.
What was revolutionary about Chekhov’s plays was their slice-of-life quality. For the first time, a playwright wrote about real people in real relationships having real conversations. And the result was that Chekhov had an absolutely unique relationship with his audience. They were able to look up on stage and actually see characters that reminded them of themselves or folks they knew. They could relate to these people and their stories on the most intimate level. We’re used to that now in our contemporary culture, which is saturated with personal stories, but, at the time, when theatre and opera were formal and primarily depicted royalty and gods, Chekhov’s achievement of making theatre personal was remarkable. His plays are chock-full of pop cultural references that were contemporary and familiar to his audiences. I understand that his dialogue in Russian was extraordinarily close to the way people of the time actually spoke, as opposed to the more poetic syntax of the age’s more classical dramas. And his depiction of fractured families and the crisis of ordinary life resonated with his audiences in a way that they had never seen before.
But all of that seems to be missing in the way Chekhov is presented today. His works have suffered the fate of reverence: they have been placed in the theatrical equivalent of a museum, and, while universally admired, they are not, I would contend, enjoyed in the way that his audiences enjoyed them. More importantly, I firmly believe that he intended for the plays to be contemporaneous with his audience, to be enjoyed on that most intimate level, and that he would not have wanted them to be admired as one admires a famous painting, from behind a velvet rope in a museum. Without taking a contemporary audience into consideration, translators and producers do a disservice to Chekhov’s intent, and their very fidelity to the exactness of his words is unfaithful to their spirit. Chekhov without his audience is not Chekhov at all.
I realize that it is presumptuous to suppose what Chekhov would have written had he written in America one hundred years later. But that is the task that I set for myself. And The Seagull and Uncle Vanya are the two of his major plays that best lend themselves to this contemporary re-imagining. Those who have admired these adaptations have asked why I have not done the same with The Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard. My answer is that I cannot quite re-imagine them in a contemporary milieu. The Three Sisters is set on a military outpost so far from civilization that Moscow seems but a grand and distant dream. I do not know of such an outpost today that would make New York City or Washington, D.C., so inaccessible. In addition, the play depicts a military structure of commissioned nobility versus ordinary soldier (Vershinin and Tuzenbach versus Solyony) for which I am hard pressed to find a contemporary equivalent. As for The Cherry Orchard, it is steeped in the foment of revolution, of the breakdown of the landed gentry and the irresistible rise of a bourgeoisie unburdened by the confines of a centuries-old class system. And while we in America are certainly divided by economic and racial classes, ours is not a revolution of continental proportions. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov at his most prescient, predicting the chaos and turmoil that would embroil Russia for the next century and beyond. There is no such American equivalent.
In The Seagull, Chekhov wrote of a famous actress, a famous novelist, and a rebellious exemplar of the avant-garde. He set his play at a vacation resort where the wealthy and famous are served by the townies. And he depicts an ambitious young townie girl who is willing to do just about anything to achieve celebrity and fame. Where better to set this play than in the Hamptons? In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov wrote of a man who is in the throes of an unbearable midlife crisis and of a doctor who takes up the cause of environmentalism because he suffers a crisis of confidence when he accidentally kills a young boy on his operating table. Chekhov set the play on a family estate in the country. Upsetting the applecart is the arrival of a famous professor from the big city with his extraordinarily beautiful young bride. Where better to set this story than the despoiled beauty of the hills of West Virginia? At the beginning of the 21st Century I hope that the reader and the theatre-goer find a connection to Uncle Jack that is as thrilling as the connection experienced by Chekhov’s audiences at the end of the 19th Century. My aim is to remove the distance between us and the play, and I hope in some way that I have succeeded.
You've adapted other classic plays as well, such as Woyzeck, Tartuffe, and Orestes. What interests you about the classics?
I find it hard to imagine that folks aren't interested in the classics. But they usually aren't. I mean real people, not theatre people. They are classics because they tell stories that grab hold of you and don't let you go. Unfortunately, they are so often done with such lack of imagination or immediacy that most folks would rather have oral surgery than go see, let's say, another production of The Seagull where poor Masha is in a black wool foot-to-neck dress moaning about how she is in mourning for her life. I refuse to believe that's how Chekhov wanted to begin his comedy.
You have previously started and run two theatre companies - RAPP Arts Center and Worth Street Theater Company—and are now on your third, Dog Run Repertory Theatre Company. What drives you to keep starting them, and what do you like about producing?
The only thing I like about producing (and like is a strong word) is that it gives me the freedom to do the projects that appeal to me. Institutional theatre in New York (and regionally) is just too political for me. I don't know how to talk a good game so it's hard for me to convince someone that my work and choices as a director are worthy of their hiring me. I let my productions do my talking. And, I have a knack for finding new talent and new work that the institutional theatres won't touch, until I do them first. Discovering playwrights like Christopher Shinn (Four) and Tristine Skyler (The Moonlight Room) or revivals like Tennessee Williams' Small Craft Warnings, or numerous actors ranging from Laura Linney to Kathryn Hahn to Michael Ealy to Laura Breckenridge to Peter Scanavino—that gives me enormous satisfaction.
You also produced and directed Stage Door Canteen for workers at Ground Zero following the World Trade Center attacks. What exactly was the Stage Door Canteen, and what was that experience like for you?
Wow. Feels like so long ago. My theatre, the Tribeca Playhouse, was 5 blocks away from the Trade Center. So my partner, Carol Fineman and I decided to put on a show every Monday night for Ground Zero workers. It kind of captured the attention of the world, we were headline news everywhere and every network did a story about us. But it was seeing the grimy, filthy workers every week laughing and crying as brilliant stars came to entertain them, that's what made it so worthwhile.
Your bio states that you are Top-10 ranked tennis player at the Riverside Clay Tennis Courts. What's the secret to your consistency?
Last year I had a heart attack. The brilliant doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital fixed me and put a stent in. It made me a new man. That is the secret to my athletic success.
What's up next for you professionally?
I am creator and director of a wonderful musical revue called Into the Weeds at the West Bank Cafe which showcases the brilliant songs of Bill Weeden and showcases a wonderful cast of up and coming stars. It is running indefinitely. I hope to be directing a musical called Move It And Its Yours which is scheduled to come to New York in the near future. Also written by Bill Weeden, and his co-writers Sally Fay and David Finkle, I directed the show last year at Trenton, NJ's Passage Theatre. I hope to be directing a revival of John Patrick Shanley's Italian American Reconciliation this winter in a Brooklyn church hall with a good Italian meal included in the ticket price. And I am looking for workshops and productions of several original plays of mine: Loft (about a Tribeca artist trying desperately to hold on to his loft in post 9/11 New York) and God's Stones (a documentary play about the Dee Laney and Andrea Yates infanticides and the rising tide of Christian evangelism driving the world at breakneck speed toward Armageddon). Finally, I teach scene workshops to actors here in New York and am teaching a class in screenwriting at Johns Hopkins University. Other than that, I have nothing on my plate.
Interview with Jeff Cohen was conducted by Michael Criscuolo October 2006.