From "APT’s 'Uncle Vanya' drowns existential despair in vodka" (Capital Times).
APT = American Players Theater, in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
June 30, 2026
"In this new adaptation of Chekhov’s text by Nate Burger, Astrov calls himself a 'weirdo.'..."
"Burger has adapted the translated text with clarity and a sense of humor. I can’t recall ever hearing 'yada yada yada' in Chekhov before."
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4 comments:
A creep. A weirdo. What the hell are they doing there?
People still think of Chekhov in the context of late tsarist Russia. "Creep" and "yada yada yada" would be jarring in that context. To make it work you'd have to rewrite the play. It could work, but it would be a different play.
According to Copilot:
"Variations of this expression appeared in Yiddish, such as yatata or yaddega-yaddega, during the early to mid-20th century, often used to indicate that details were unimportant or repetitive....The modern form "yada yada yada" emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with comedian Lenny Bruce using a version spelled “yaddeyahdah” in his 1967 book The Essential Lenny Bruce. The phrase gained wider recognition in the 1971 song Yada Yada La Scala by Dory Previn.
So quite a lot of Jewish etymology. Which could have come from the shtetl. Chekov might have heard the phrase, especially as he did a lot of medical work among the poor and downtrodden, and one of his close friends was the painter Isaac Levitan. CC, JSM
Chekhov might have heard the phrase, though it's unlikely (Russia was a big country; Jews weren't allowed to live everywhere, and assimilated Jews who did live outside the Pale were less likely to use Yiddish phrases). The characters of the play wouldn't have used it though. To us the phrase is more likely to evoke Seinfeld than imperial Russia.
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