Background of the Chekhov Hyperdrama


In the late 1980s, after I had several produced hyperdramas under my belt, I became aware that a great deal of audience education would be necessary before the power and significance of hyperdrama were appreciated. At best, hyperdrama was appreciated as a kind of eccentric entertainment, the way "happenings" were appreciated in the 1960s, a trend that would continue with the later production of the most popular hyperdrama to date, Tony and Tina's Wedding.

But I took hyperdrama more seriously than this. I had come to believe, and still believe, that this dramatic form, more than traditional theater, mirrored reality as the new physicists had come to define it: traditional theater was Newtonian, a passive audience observing in the dark, while hyperdrama was modern ("quantum"), the audience defining its own play by the choices it made.

So the question I posed to myself was: what can be done to give hyperdrama respect, to have it taken seriously? My answer became: by adapting a classic work of theater to the form.

This decided, it did not take me long to decide that Chekhov's The Seagull was a perfect vehicle for this purpose. There was even an appropriate speech in the play to justify the experiment:

"Uncle, what we need is a new kind of theater," says Treplev. "A theater with new theatrical forms!"

There was an advantage to tackling Chekhov. I had served in the Army as a Russian linguist with the Army Security Agency. Although my Russian was rusty, with a dictionary and a pile of other translations, I was sure I could get through the text and adapt my own translation in modern American speech.

In the late 1980s, I began the translation. Five years later, I was still working on it. When I finally finished, I began adding all the scenes necessary for the hyperdrama. The work was slow and complicated, as technically challenging as it was artistically challenging. I decided that writing a hyperdrama from an existing work was the most intense form of literary criticism I could have undertaken.

Along the way, the project became even more ambitious: I decided to write a hypertext novel about a group of people watching the hyperdrama! Perhaps I already realized that this hyperdrama, given its setting and complexity, likely would never be performed, so I would perform it myself in fiction. At any rate, the layers of narrative began to pile one onto another.

But the hyperdrama itself, the next step I tackled after translating the play, had quite enough complexity, and I began to realize that a hypertext novel might take over a decade to finish. Did I have this kind of energy for such an obscure project? I began to think that finishing the hyperdrama would be challenge enough.

The hyperdrama was finished in late July, 2002, and put online in early August. Enjoy.

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