Woolf Virginia - Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando : two renderings for the stage

Chekhovs Three Sisters AND Woolfs Orlando BOOKS BY SARAH RUHL AVAILABLE FROM TCG Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando (two renderings for the stage) The Clean House and Other Plays INCLUDES: The Clean House Eurydice Late: a cowboy song Melancholy Play Dead Mans Cell Phone In the Next Room or the vibrator play Passion Play

Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage is copyright 2013 by Sarah Ruhl Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156 All Rights Reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the authors representative: Bruce Ostler, Bret Adams Ltd., 448 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036, (212) 765-5630. The publication of Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage, by Sarah Ruhl, through TCGs Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Ruhl, Sarah, 1974 Chekhovs Three Sisters and Woolfs Orlando : two renderings for the stage / by Sarah Ruhl. pages cm eISBN 978-1-55936-649-6 I. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 18601904. Tri sestry. II. II.

Woolf, Virginia, 18821941. Orlando. III. Title. PS3618.U48C48 2013 812.6dc23 2013001992 Book design and composition by Lisa Govan Cover art and design by Barbara de Wilde First Edition, April 2013 For Joyce Piven, who teaches generations of children how to change forms

ContentsOn another evening Vita and Virginia went to see Three Sisters and then called in on Dotty in her flat in Mount Street, who was lying asleep and woke up chattering & hysterical. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf My God! Virginia Woolf is in the room.

For Gods Sake Vita dont turn the lights on... We sat and drank.VIRGINIA WOOLF, HERMIONE LEE, P. 498I T IS PERHAPS an unimportant fact that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West went to see Three Sisters together one evening in London. The event could be a completely arbitrary (although tempting) justification for including Orlando and Three Sisters in one volume together, although truly, I put them in the same volume because I wrote neither one and my betters wrote both and in that sense they seemed to belong together.Still, imagine: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West went to see Three Sisters together one evening in London. Was the night rainy, was it pitch black? Did they weep at the end of the play, did they sigh, did they rise to their feet? Perhaps Virginia was too English to weep in public; perhaps the performance did not merit weeping. Perhaps she turned to Vita and merely raised one eyebrow.

Perhaps she commented on the slightness of the translation. We will never know. At any rate, after sighing or weeping or neither, Vita and Virginia left the theater and then called on Dotty who was lying asleep and then became hysterical upon seeing Virginia Woolf. Then the three women, these three women, sat and drank with the lights off.What did Woolf and Sackville-West make of Three Sisters, and why should it matter? And what do Virginia Woolf and Anton Chekhov have in common? For one thing, I think they were much funnier than we ordinarily take them for. They were of the nineteenth century and yet they formally destroyed the nineteenth century. They were both childless and sickly and wrote in many genres.

They both died too young. They knew aristocrats but were not themselves born into the aristocracy. They were acute observers of that elusive thing called human nature, and they were not content to write about this or that issue, or this or that personthey wrote about the whole experience, they wrote about being. They constantly redirect the reader to the present moment of experience, rather than relying on the easy clean sweep of an arc.Walter Pater, one of Woolfs favorite critics, wrote in The Renaissance:Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to usfor that moment only... Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. is to sleep before evening. is to sleep before evening.

With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.It is as though Paters rallying cry is also Woolfs rallying crythat experience itself, rather than the fruit of experience, is the end. One might imagine Three Sisters resident philosopher Vershinin philosophizing right along with Pater, but coming to a different conclusion. Vershinin believed in progress, and Im not sure that Woolf did.Both Woolf and Chekhov land, in the end, on the epiphany that never quite comes. Woolf once said that the only thing she knew about the ending of Orlando was that it would end in an ellipsis... The manuscript version does end with... (Perhaps it is difficult in publication to end in an ellipsis, as publication implies closure and finality.) At any rate, in this adaptation, I attempted to go back to Woolfs original intention and ended with a dot dot dot. (Perhaps it is difficult in publication to end in an ellipsis, as publication implies closure and finality.) At any rate, in this adaptation, I attempted to go back to Woolfs original intention and ended with a dot dot dot.

Next page