Samovar allows four authors to put their own twist on four Chekov short stories. It is the second time I have seen this attempted with different Chekov works. But we can reach the conclusion that this approach does not tend to actually work. Shakespeare’s plays have provided the world with some of the most flexible staging opportunities ever found in theater. Not having any stage directions or character descriptions, you can set them in virtually any location and cast them has freely as you choose and still make them brilliant. What you cannot do is try to “improve” or modernize the text. No author is good enough and any attempt (and there have been many) is bound to be ill-fated. It appears that the same may be said of Chekov. Although his plays allow more wiggle room than Shakespeare’s do, at least when performed in English since the translation already removes at least part of the language skills, his short stories do not seem to afford the same opportunities. Even in a translation, a story will rely on pages of description rather than dialog to create a setting. Characters, also, will tend to be painted with great attention to detail. None of that can be effectively brought onto a stage without losing much of the story’s substance.

Samovar, of course, contains all of those shortcomings. And those shortcomings are amplified if you are not well versed in Chekov’s work. The structure of Samovar demands that you are familiar with each of the stories before entering the theater. That is too much to ask of an audience who should be able to watch a performance and understand, just from the performance, what is going on without prior research. Samovar will leave unprepared audience members lost as they are taken on a journey through these four pieces. Unless an audience member reads and researches the program before the performance or are familiar with Chekov’s full bibliography, and the transitions from story to story will make little sense.

The one thing that works, although done in a mixture of Russian and English, is the folk song sung throughout the show by Marlene Villafane. It probably works because it is generic and universal and unique to this show.

None of this is to criticize the writing talents of any of the adapters. They each provided moments of quality theater, but the task they undertook did not provide much opportunity for success. Put into a program with three other hard to distinguish transitions, and knowing that Chekov tends to write soap operas, the transition from piece to another was anything but clear.