The Black Monk: From the Garden to the Stage

"Sentimental may not be a word that springs to mind when you think of Anton Chekhov or latter-day playwright David Rabe. But it's a fitting adjective, if an incomplete one, for a new drama linking the authors."  Although this quote comments on “The Black Monk,” the two authors penned their versions almost a century apart and in completely different genres.  Chekhov’s "Black Monk" is a short story while Rabe’s Black Monk is a play that he adapted from Chekhov’s original short story.  It is yet another example of the growing trend of modern authors trying to recapture the writing style and human characterization of Chekhov.  The paper, “The Black Monk: From the Garden to the Stage,” will explore what elements in Chekhov’s short story made it not only topical and captivating to the reader during its first publication but also how it is relatable to a modern audience.  This relatablity will be explored through an analysis of David Rabe’s adaptation of "The Black Monk" and the reception of the play’s performance.  Does David Rabe succeed in translating Chekhovian characters and themes to the stage?  Are modern audiences still able to identify and emphasize with these characters and ideas?

Michelle Mills
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Chellemi@aol.com

Bringing the Unreliable Narrator to the Stage: Chekhovian Devices in Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor 

Neil Simon’s 1973 play The Good Doctor uses the work of Anton Chekhov as a springboard into sketch comedy. Simon did not explore the Chekhov that wrote The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters, but the young Chekhov who wrote humorous articles for newspapers in order to pay his way through medical school. Early short stories like “The Death of a Civil Servant” lend themselves well to the printed page, but must be cleverly adapted in order to have the same effect on stage. Simon succeeds at recreating the Russian author’s early stories into Vaudville sketches, changing the story of Ivan Ilyith Cherdyakov in “The Death of a Civil Servant” into “The Sneeze” for modern audiences. I suggest that even as Simon uses actual Chekhov short stories and characters as the basis of The Good Doctor, his adaptations and embellishments further add to the Chekhovian style of character. Through these additions, Simon creates onstage the same unreliable narrator and social commentary that Chekhov so richly achieved in his early short comic stories.  

David N. Morgan
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
dnmorgan@uiuc.edu  

Cultures Meeting in 'Ward 6'. A Romanian director films a Yugoslavian Chekhov 

The 1976 Yugoslavian version of Ward Six by Anton Chekhov, directed by the Romanian Lucian Pintilie, becomes a place of cultural translation. My paper will discuss the effects of this cultural translation on a Russian cultural object which is now filmed during communist times through two different national lenses. Some of the questions asked are: Does the sense of marginality and dejection in the film also come from other sources than Chekhov’s text? The recreation of the Russian context does not achieve perfect mimesis, and the sliding starts with the fact that the film is shot in Serbian making the relationship between text and context increasingly opaque. Moreover, does this text become the perfect medium to talk about intellectual and emotional claustrophobia in communist societies? To use a psychoanalytic term, what is the invisible point de capiton around which the reality of this hybrid film is constructed?

Oana Popescu-Sandu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
popescus@uiuc.edu