Libby Appel is tinkering with a new adaptation of "The Cherry Orchard" as opening night looms. Anton Chekhov's classic play about a Russian family losing its estate in a changing world has already opened in previews.

"Tinkering is what previews are for," says Appel, who has been the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's artistic director since 1995.

"The Cherry Orchard" will open at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in the OSF's Angus Bowmer Theatre. That's after the OSF opens its 72nd season at 8 tonight with William Shakespeare's "As You Like It." Previews began last Friday. Tom Stoppard's "On the Razzle" will open Saturday night, and David Lindsay-Abaire's "Rabbit Hole" on Sunday afternoon.

"The Cherry Orchard" is not just another play. Appel, who is turning the OSF artistic reins over to incoming director Bill Rauch this year, commissioned a new, literal translation of the classic, then adapted it for the stage, then directed it. Chekhov is her favorite dramatist.

"And 'The Cherry Orchard' is his greatest play,' " she says.

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An example of tinkering: A stage direction in Act 1 says that when a servant named Dunyasha gets kissed, she drops a saucer, then remarks that she has broken it. But breaking dishes do weird things.

"We've had a lot of problems with it," Appel says. "Should they not try to break it and change the line to, 'I dropped it?' We don't know."

Translating Chekhov is not to be undertaken lightly. Appel once did an adaptation of his "Uncle Vanya" by blending one translation out of many.

"I realized it was cheating," she says.

For the 1993 "Cherry Orchard" she directed at Indiana Repertory Theatre, she used a new version by translator Paul Schmidt that was generally well-received, although it was also criticized for sounding "Americanized."

For her latest trip to the most famous orchard in world drama — her fourth — she asked Allison Horsley in 2004 for a literal translation of the 1904 masterwork. Horsley's job was to translate Chekhov's words from the Russian literally, with no regard to how they'd sound in English.

Some experts argue there can be no such thing as a literal translation.

"I tend to waver," says Horsley, who teaches theater at the University of Denver. "There are versions that are almost literal, like Constance Garnett's. You have to take sociological and psychological nuances into account."

Garnett was an early translator of Russian classics who was sometimes accused of making Russian into Victorian English.

"The idea was to do a fun, nerdy, linguistic analysis, and relay that to Libby," Horsley says.

She would flag archaic words. If syntax or vocabulary seemed weird, she'd note it. It was like an annotated road map, with Horsley as a sort of intermediary between Chekhov and Appel.

Appel filled legal pads with notes and questions, then she and Horsley had "jam sessions" and deconstructed the whole thing.

Appel eventually finished a draft of the play for the stage, and she and Horsley went over it line by line, stumbling at odd points. Like the cucumber/pickle conundrum. An old servant named Firs says a character named Pischik ate half a bucket of cucumbers/pickles/gherkins.

"Pickles would be so much funnier," Horsley says.

It was eventually decided the linguistic arguments were moot because nobody could have cucumbers in springtime in 1904 Russia. So pickles it was (the cucumber would have its moment, appearing in a later scene set in the summer).

As Appel continued fine-tuning the adaptation last year, casting for "The Cherry Orchard" was done, with Judith-Marie Bergan as the family matriarch, Lyubov, or Madam Ranevskaya, who lives in the past and loses everything. Appel says she never considered anybody else for the role.

"She's perfect," she says. "She has Lyubov's generosity, nobility, class, sexuality."

Richard Howard will play Lyubov's brother, Gayev, and Armando Durán will play Lopakhin, a newly rich family friend from a peasant family.

Guest artist Rachel Hauck designed the set, Todd Barton composed the original music, and Horsley also served as dramaturge.

Behind the scenes

In the OSF's scene shop on a recent Saturday, a header that will span the scene atop the Bowmer stage in "The Cherry Orchard" lies idle, detailed down to a fine patina suggesting age and perhaps decay. It is so massive it will roll on and off the stage. Windows for the estate stand about here and there.

In the Bowmer the same day, dress rehearsal is coming, and carpenters from the stage operations crew are setting up "The Cherry Orchard" set for the first time. They wheel in the set floor in sections and bolt them into place like pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. Four giant columns are brought in in pieces and assembled on the stage with the aid of a hoist.

The back of the set is marked by huge scrims, pieces of stage magic that are opaque when lit from the front but become transparent when the front lights go off and objects behind it are lit. Made of special fabric, the scrims will enable designers and lighting technicians to open up the set visually when actors go outside.

Clever moldings hide the points where the three main pieces of the set are fastened together to become an old building.

Construction supervisor Bruce Jennings says he'll try to build almost anything designers come up with.

"We work really hard to not restrain them," he says.

A play is a small miracle, a symphony comprising the work of many people, and it all has to work first time and every time.

"We're all cogs," Jennings says.

A deep investigation

There is a century-old argument around "The Cherry Orchard" as to whether the play is a tragedy or a comedy. Chekhov was bitterly disappointed in the 1904 Moscow Art Theatre premiere directed by the great Konstantin Stanislavski. He said he'd written a comedy, and the director had turned his characters into crybabies. Stanislavski insisted Chekhov had written a tragedy.

Appel calls the play "humorously ironic."

"Chekhov was very clear this is a comedy," she says. "It isn't fast, but the humor, there are funny moments, and most of it is the irony."

The second act usually ends with two characters, Anya and Trofimov, feeling attracted to each other and running to the river on the estate. Stanislavski cut — and Appel has restored — another scene in which Firs and another older character, Charlotta, share their loneliness. More tinkering.

"It adds richness," Appel says.

She says Chekhov is more difficult to stage than Shakespeare. In his sometimes maddening, outwardly uneventful world, lines may be spoken in various ways, and characters seem to drift off. There are subtexts.

"There is no subtext in Shakespeare," Appel says.

Many complain that in Chekhov nothing happens. Appel disagrees strongly.

"If you allow yourself to be engaged, there are deep investigations of the human spirit," she says. In a play like 'Death of a Salesman,' the confrontations are clear. In Chekhov, the other person isn't listening.

"To me, he says the world changes just when you're sitting down and eating dinner."

Horsley believes Appel's adaptation has found Chekhov's rhythm and simplicity.

"I really love it," she says.

Appel says the director's chief job is to find the right tone for a play, which with Chekhov is just "really, really hard."

In her view, he had his finger on a distinctively modern way of looking at the human predicament.

"I feel very strongly he was an existentialist," she says. "Beckett couldn't have written without Chekhov."

What does her adaptation sound like to her after all this time?

"I hear me," she says. "My voice has merged with Chekhov's. I'm interpreting his blood flow through American English.

"I'm inhabiting the play."

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.