AMERICAN THEATRE | Henrik & Heidi & Anton & Amy

They premiered 16 years and 2,000 miles apart from each other, but in their own very different ways, both Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1883) and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1899) still loom large over Western drama: the first as the quintessential play of ideas, of the theatre as public forum and truth teller, and the second as the ultimate character study, the bearer of a more intimate kind of truth.

You might even trace the Ibsen influence to a play like Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, which grounds its political critique in the personal but doesn’t shy from the large polemical gestures implied by its title. And you might see Chekhov’s stamp on a play like Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, which observes with painstakingly patient detail the daily life of a mother with a chronically ill child. While Schreck’s play is currently the most-produced in the nation since its Broadway bow in 2019, and Herzog’s Mary Jane is now in previews on Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production starring Rachel McAdams, both of these Gen X playwrights are coincidentally also now on Broadway with adaptations of Chekhov and Ibsen. And neither is with the dance partner you might expect: Herzog’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People, starring Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli, with direction by her husband, Sam Gold, is now in a hit run on Broadway, while Schreck’s new version of Uncle Vanya opens at Lincoln Center Theater on April 24, directed by Lila Neugebauer and headlined by Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill, and Anika Noni Rose.

To be fair, though Herzog may be best known for the naturalism of plays like Mary Jane and 4000 Miles, her work has often engaged with political subjects, starting with her breakthrough play, After the Revolution. And Schreck, for her part an accomplished actor as well as a playwright (she appeared in the original Constitution production), has also written intimate, behaviorally observant plays like Grand Concourse and There Are No More Big Secrets. So it’s not like they’re playing entirely against type with these adaptations. Still, as I learned in a recent conversation with these two brilliant theatremakers, both took on these assignments with an eye toward the lessons they might glean, and learn they definitely did. While Herzog had tackled Ibsen before—it was her adaptation of A Doll’s House that Jamie Lloyd and Jessica Chastain turned into a kind of minimalist séance last season on Broadway—and Schreck speaks and reads Russian, neither was entirely prepared for the specific challenges of adapting Enemy and Vanya for 2024 audiences.

This conversation, held in March a week before Enemy opened, has been edited for length (I swear) and clarity.

ROB WEINERT-KENDT: There’s no use beating around the bush: Uncle Vanya is one of my favorite plays.

HEIDI SCHRECK: The one thing I have going for me is, I think it’s hard to ruin. You would have to really set out to wreck it. Also, there are like a million great translations of this.

AMY HERZOG: Is there one that haunts you?

HEIDI: I have always loved the Paul Schmidt version, even though he deviates more than almost anybody—well, not more than Frayn, there’s a lot of wholesale invention going on with the Brits. I didn’t know that about Schmidt, though, because I hadn’t spent a lot of time with this play in Russian before this, so I didn’t realize how much he diverged. But I still love it; I think it’s a great translation. I love Annie Baker’s translation. I read the Richard Nelson, the one he did with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear—very, very different, and very faithful. That one is the closest I’ve read to the Russian. I also really love Constance Garnett’s; I feel like people give her a hard time, but she was brilliant.

Do you feel like you’re collaborating with these playwrights, in a sense? How much of your voice is in these adaptations, or do you even think of it that way?

HEIDI: I feel like I started with one intention, and what I’ve learned over the last year, trying to translate and then adapt, has been that I had no idea what I was doing. When I started, I very much felt like: My goal is to be very faithful—whatever that means. Lila and I wanted to create a version that felt really immediate and contemporary, like it could be happening in America, say, in the near future, maybe 2030, but without anything gimmicky, like cell phones or slang that felt like it would take you out of it, without being cute in any way—all sorts of rules we had for ourselves. My first step was just to do a literal translation; I do speak, read, and write Russian, but my first literal translation was really bad. So I started working with a native Russian speaker, Tatyana Khaikin, who is at Harvard and is Dmitri Krymov’s translator—she also knows the play deeply, so I got the advantage of all of her years and decades of studying this play.

Then I took that and started adapting it into my own literal translation. That was when I started to get into really murky territory, like—what is it to be faithful? Faithful to whom? English has 100 times as many words as Russian. The play is very repetitive, but it doesn’t sound that way if you’re listening as a Russian speaker, because you don’t know there are a million other possible words. So this begins a series of decisions, of like, what am I trying to do here? That started to take me into deeper levels of questioning.

AMY: It’s the same with Dano-Norwegian. I worked with this literary translator, Charlotte Barslund, who is British. I originally thought I’d get an American to do it, and it just so happened I was working on a very tight deadline with Jamie Lloyd’s company in England to do A Doll’s House and she had it ready. But I kind of liked it, because she’s translating into a tonality I would never want to steal—there’s a level of distance. I had this conversation with her early on where she said the same thing. She said, “The vocabulary is so much smaller, and these people are very plain spoken and the language is very pedestrian.” She said that one of the biggest pitfalls was these kind of florid translations that people want to do with it. I’m really jealous that you read Russian and that you have some level of access to even just the sound.

HEID: Yeah, that definitely became a part of the translation. One of the 10,000 layers is that I know what this sounds like in Russian, and is there a way to give it the same syllable sounds in English? Sometimes I would make decisions based on that—like, in Russian this is a two-syllable word with a sibilant ending, so can I do that in English?

AMY: It sounds almost like you’re translating it as a poem.

HEIDI: Maybe, yes, a little bit. I don’t know if this happened to you, but I did get to a point where I was like, “It’s a lie—translation is a lie!” [Laughter] I’m making this up, and everybody else has been making it up too. We’ll never really know what this play is.

AMY: I took a translation class in undergrad where we translated from French into English. The two things that I really remember from that class were the idea that to arrive at some kind of essence of the original usually required a lot more departure than you would at first think. And also that—and I don’t know that I really did this in mine—but that a really good translation has a whiff of foreignness, that there’s some way that you feel the foreignness of the original. With An Enemy of the People, I was going for something different, but I love that idea. It sounds like you were doing that a little too.

HEIDI: That rings true; the way you’re articulating it sounds true to me. I would struggle when I made it too accessible sometimes—where I felt like, oh, I want to be faithful. But in order to be faithful, I have to totally reconceive and reimagine an idiom that is just virtually untranslatable. Vanya says to Waffles at one point, “Turn off the fountain, Waffles.” We’ve gone back and forth, because, obviously, no one says, “Turn off the fountain.” It’s usually translated as, “Stop it with the waterworks,” or “Stop whining,” or something. But I loved it, and so did Lila, and then Steve, when he came on, loved it. So we’re like, what are the things that are just the way Vanya likes to express himself? We’re gonna leave that in, because it does allow a little bit of the strangeness and foreignness of the play to live on.

Are you working mostly on the level of the dialogue, or are you also playing with the actual dramaturgy and structure of these plays?

HEIDI: We have reconceived a few things, like the character of Yefim, who’s now a neighbor kid, and we’re pushing that further. And Maria, Vanya’s mother, has expanded a little—is continuing to expand in rehearsals.

AMY: Who’s playing her?

HEIDI: Jayne Houdyshell.

I can understand wanting to give Jayne more to do onstage. That character is so under-used.

HEIDI: [Whispers] She’s under-written.

True.

HEIDI: So she’s changing quite a bit, and we’ve done other little things. But no, it is not some kind of radical adaptation.

Amy, you’ve definitely done some streamlining, and I noticed a few things you’ve introduced.

AMY: There are real changes to the dramaturgy; there’s a large character that was cut, and we don’t have the children onstage. There are things about characters’ backgrounds that are different, and there are characters who weren’t in certain scenes that I put them in. Unlike with A Doll’s House, which I felt essentially had a perfect play inside of it and just needed a few things to be stripped away, with this I felt, for it to be really legible to us, it needed more construction.

No spoilers, but I think you’ve added a bit more to the character of Horster, and you’ve even given him a good laugh line that’s not in the original.

AMY: Thank you for noticing. I worked hard on Horster. It’s funny, I had a meeting with some Norwegian diplomats, and also a few people from the theatre, and they were expounding about An Enemy of People, and one of the things they said was, “Of course, Captain Horster is known as the worst character written in the history of dramatic literature.” And I was like, “I think I see something in him.” It’s still a small role, but that’s an example of something I really wanted to lift out.

Amy, let me ask you what you asked Heidi: Were there other versions of Enemy that haunted you?

AMY: Unlike with A Doll’s House, where I didn’t feel like there was some kind of dominant version, to me An Enemy of the People is basically an Arthur Miller play in our culture. That’s the version that’s known, and he took a lot of liberties. But people think that is the play. So I read it early on, and then I put it away and never looked at it again, because I didn’t want to be influenced by it.

I don’t want to over-generalize about your work. But Amy, I associate most of your plays with what might be thought of as Chekhovian realism and restraint, and Heidi, your most famous play, at least, is a big swing at history and politics, which I think of as more Ibsenian. So these adaptations feel a little bit like a reversal of expectations. Does that ring true for either of you?

AMY: Heidi, do you like Ibsen?

HEIDI: I love A Doll’s House, and I love your Doll’s House. And I love The Wild Duck. I don’t know An Enemy of the People that well, and I’m very excited to see it. And I love Hedda Gabbler but I feel like it’s sort of unperformable.

You were in a movie of Hedda Gabler, according to imbd.

HEIDI: When I was very young, our theatre company did a production of it in an airplane hangar, set on and around a giant moving truck. That was in like 1998; I played Hedda, and then we shot it in my parent’s house. But I just feel like I’ve never seen a version of the play where I don’t see the mechanics of it. I don’t feel that way about Doll’s House; every time I see it, by the end I’m just [explosion sound] done. You’re right, there’s a perfect play in there that needs a little lifting for now. But I don’t feel that way about Hedda. I don’t understand it, at the end of the day.

Amy, you said you made a lot more changes to Enemy. Is that because you found more wrong with it?

AMY: I feel a little sheepish, the way you phrased that. I think that Ibsen wrote a great play, but as the person adapting it, I had to let my own taste and understanding be the compass. There were a lot of things I didn’t fully connect to in the play, so I made a lot of changes. I can’t say that’s because Ibsen fell short and I’m “fixing” his play.

It is a singular play in his output, isn’t it? It was very personal, for one thing.

AMY: Which is one of the things that interested me most about it, actually. You know, he wrote A Doll’s House and was celebrated for it, and then he wrote Ghosts and he was pilloried. He was really hurt, and so he wrote this thinly veiled parable about a doctor trying to tell people that their town’s baths are poisoned and they don’t want to listen. So there’s a totally righteous, heroic story in the play, but there is also a petty rage, and I find that really interesting.

What’s interesting to me is that the play has a polemical form, but it doesn’t ever offer the moment of vindication. Dr. Stockmann says there’s gonna be an epidemic, but we never get the scene where everyone starts getting sick and he’s proven right. He sends away for the test results, sure. But the way even his allies talk about his writing sometimes being over the top, and his pigheaded stubbornness throughout the play—he doesn’t seem entirely reliable. As in Doubt, we never get the full answer.

AMY: That is the other thing that really interests me. We talked a lot about Naomi Klein and her book Doppelganger, where, on the one hand, you’re completely assured of your absolute righteousness, and on the other hand, you find yourself more and more similar to a nightmare version of yourself. I think most people watching the play will find Thomas mostly heroic, but we tried to build moments into this play where you see his flaws quite plainly, and you also see how other people’s arguments start to take some weight and uncertainty creeps in.

And there’s the speech he gives late in the play that’s basically a pro-eugenics rant.

HEIDI: That stuff probably wouldn’t have been received the same way back when it was written.

AMY: No, proto-eugenics science would, at that time, have fallen on the progressive side of things. Ibsen clearly had a deep suspicion of democracy on some level, and he felt that some of us are spiritually superior. That has to be recognized in some way. At the same time, I’d say that on some level, I believe Ibsen was in control of letting this character go too far. How that lands on a 21st-century audience is one of the biggest adaptation questions—how to stay in control of that so it doesn’t get away from you.

Two mysteries haunt me about these plays. In the case of Vanya, the main one is: Does Astrov really not realize that Sonya is in love with him? I feel like he’s got to, on some level. In the Jack Serio production last year, it was clear that he kind of did know, despite his protestations. Where do you stand on that, Heidi?

HEIDI: That’s the beauty of the writing, there are so many possibilities. I think, of course he knows on some level, but it feels very human to me—there are all sorts of things we don’t allow ourselves to know we know. Right?

Right, and it’s not just Astrov. Everyone in that play seems oblivious to something that other people can see clearly about them.

HEIDI: Yes, and the extent to which they’re consciously or aggressively oblivious, or just oblivious and don’t know who they are—that’s such rich territory to explore. That’s one of the things that makes the play so compelling. I also feel like Vanya morphs to be the story of whoever you put in it; it can hold so many. There are as many Yelenas as there are people who would ever play Yelena. That’s true of any play, but somehow, this play, because it’s not plot-driven, can hold such a huge variety of approaches and interpretations. It’s very exciting and liberating.

AMY: Liberating or daunting?

HEIDI: I mean, both! One of the other guiding principles of the adaptation/translation/new version, whatever we’re calling it, is that the final work is being done now that we’re in rehearsal with actors. When we were casting it was very much driven by like, Okay, who am I just so excited to see play Yelena? And then really just allowing us to put together our dream cast and then seeing who these people come to be. In our cast, everybody is sort of who they are, and they’re the age that they are.

The mystery I can’t figure out about Enemy is whether Stockmann really doesn’t understand how poorly his words are landing, or if he just doesn’t care. At one point, he says, “This will all just work itself out.” Is he just so pure of heart that he can’t think politically or strategically at all? Or is he naïve like a fox?

AMY: I don’t think I tried to answer that in my adaptation. But I will say that we talked a lot about Greta Thunberg, and the people in the world who are willing to take on the powers that be with this kind of sense of costlessness—not that there’s not a huge cost, but still. Greta has defined very specifically that her superpower is autism. I don’t think we’re trying to tell the story of Stockmann being neurodivergent, but I do think that sometimes the messengers of these very straightforward and impossible messages are people who, for whatever reason, don’t perceive the social consequences of their actions the way the rest of us do.

The big question with a revival is always, why do this play now? What’s your answer?

HEIDI: It makes sense to me that Vanya is being done all over the place right now. Reading it again, after coming out of the pandemic and years of isolation and grieving, with sort of a feeling like, what is it we’re all doing? And what does it mean? What are we working for or toward? The play just felt very deeply culturally resonant to me when I read it again at this time. I’m 52, and I’m an old parent, and having had kids, I’m standing in the river of time as a middle-aged person and as a parent being like, “Oh, right—it’s so, so finite.” I reread Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov when I first started working on this, and she says that over and over in Chekhov’s stories, he’s saying: Life is given to us only once. I just feel that very acutely right now. And I think maybe a lot of people do. I feel it personally at my age, and it’s brutal.

Another layer, I would say, is the question of masculinity. It’s funny, because we played with a lot of things; we talked about casting a woman as Vanya. And Lila and I both kind of came to: This feels like a very specific examination of masculinity. One thing that hit me in the last week is the fact that Vanya has such shame about his life and what he spent his time on, when in fact, what he’s done is help raise his niece and caretaken this farm and made this other man’s career possible—but that’s not something, as a man, anyone in the play thinks is worthwhile. Just thinking about what we value, what kind of work we value, what kind of work we don’t value, particularly in men, felt very resonant.

AMY: I always think about the line in the play where someone says, “Everyone’s eating at the wrong times.” There’s something so evocative about that; it feels like it’s every play or something.

Amy, you have another play on Broadway, Mary Jane, also opening soon.

HEIDI: I’m actually teaching that play at Harvard. I think it’s one of the greatest plays.

How is it to sit with that play again?

AMY: It’s good. I would like to be there more. I’ve been at An Enemy of the People a lot; we’re just putting in rewrites and whatnot. But it’s been wonderful. It’s a really beautiful room, full of all women, including the directing department, stage management department. 

And Heidi, Constitution is going everywhere.

HEIDI: Yes, it’s very exciting and it’s very strange. I’m not gonna lie. I’ve had so many people write to me all the time while they’re doing it, and I’ve been very moved by people wanting to do it, and the events they’re doing around it, and the reasons they have for doing it. I feel really lucky.

I’m trying to write a new play. I had a hard time writing after giving birth and toddlers and stuff. So it was such a pleasure to spend my mornings with Vanya, to spend it with this genius, basically, and with a very concrete task—although it got more confusing as I went along. It sort of gave me my brain back and allowed me to teach myself to write again, to concentrate again. It was good for my psyche, good for my depression. For me, it was a little bit of a lifesaver.

AMY: Do you think that imprint will be there in your next work?

HEIDI: I mean, I hope so. I should only be so lucky. What about you? Do you want to have some Ibsen in your work?

AMY: Maybe. Working on Enemy frightened me, because it is far from what I usually do. So I’m hoping it will give me some kind of courage about scale. But who knows?

HEIDI: That’s interesting, because I think maybe what I hope Vanya will give me is some sort of faith and trust that I don’t have to explain everything to people. Maybe I can allow things to live a little less explicated.

AMY: But Heidi Schreck explication is one of life’s delights.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

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