Stone’s Cherry Orchard, which originated in Seoul, is more Parasite than Stanislavski—offering a novel spin on the class dynamics of the original. “All of those lines about the aging nanny who’s still living with the family, the housekeeper, the chauffeur that's just a little bit of an idiot, but they keep him in the family—all of that stuff happens in Korea,” says Stone.

“All of those jokes are in the original Chekov.” Humor might pose an additional challenge as the play will be performed in Korean with English subtitles—with Park Hae-soo (Squid Game) and Jeon Do-yeon (a Cannes winner for 2007’s Secret Sunshine) in starring roles, both making their New York stage debuts. But Stone asserts that the comedy transcends any vernacular: “A lot of jokes are funny because people know what it’s like to have a mother that nags them.”

Stone has a roving, transnational background, and often works in languages not native to him. This play, he says, was adapted “by a Swissborn, Austrian-residing Australian for Korean actors, some of whom have never left Korea.” He’s also known for staging innovative productions that upend theatrical convention.

A provocative 2018 interpretation of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma with Billie Piper became a modern fertility parable; a startling 2020 Medea with Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale placed the tragedy on a disorientingly bright white stage, the better to distill its impact. Here he is working with the avant-garde architectural designer Saul Kim (in Kim’s theatrical debut) to erect a cut-away building, illuminated like a giant dollhouse.

No matter the cultural background, family dysfunction is entertaining to observe.

Earlier this year, I spoke to Stone while he was editing Elsinore, his poignant new film that tells the story of the last days of actor Ian Charleson’s life—and is currently garnering rave reviews at Telluride.

Where are you calling or where are you calling in from?

This is a massive name drop right there, but I am at Abbey Road Studios. We're just finishing the mix for my film, Elsinore.

I wanted to ask about the film—the case is very intriguing.

Andrew [Scott] plays Ian Charleson, who was the lead in Chariots of Fire and in Gandhi as well. Ian had worked with Richard Eyre who had just taken over the National Theatre [in London] as artistic director, and he asked Ian to step in when Daniel Day Lewis walked out on a production of Hamlet.

Unbeknownst to the audience, Ian was dying of AIDS, and he died of AIDS seven weeks after the final performance.

It's a story about pouring your last lifeblood into sharing a gift with the audience. Of course, Hamlet gets better the more you are facing those existential questions in a true, open, honest way.

So the play is about the way art can be of great solace to us in our daily lives. It's this rallying cry for the value of art and community in contemporary society, especially at a time where it feels like everything is talked about in terms of its financial value.

It's a really special message for a film.

I was thinking about Andrew Scott, actually, because I saw him do Vanya, and I’ve seen a lot of variations on Uncle Vanya, but I haven’t seen The Cherry Orchard. Why are you doing this play set in Korea and in Korean?

It feels to me like going to Korea at the moment is like what Hemingway did and Gertrude Stein did when they traveled to Paris in the 1920s. There is no artistic mecca as on-the-pulse as Seoul right now. It has the same wide-reaching cultural resonance that Paris had in the ‘20s.

Korean pop and Korean cinema and television hit this sweet spot between the elegance and stylization of Asian culture, but also a very American-focused interest in making themes feel very emotionally punchy and very unsanctified. The reason American culture became so significant in the 20th century, apart from the fact that America had its finger in all pies geopolitically after the Second World War, was also to do with this fact that America had this emotional honesty in its cinema, in its pop, in its music that felt very unrestrained.

I felt like I had to make the pilgrimage to the Mecca of this moment, and I looked for a play that I thought that these actors could do. I looked at Seoul and I looked at the fact that there's this kind of incredible hierarchy socially.

People check with each other what age they are before they choose what grammatical form they'll use with each other, because they need to know whether to speak to someone formally because they're older than them or not. And that is totally taboo in the West, but it's the first thing you need to know.

I looked at that society, and looked at the way that power trickled down. It felt like imperial Russia.

And so, all of those lines from the play about the aging nanny that's still living with the family, the housekeeper, the chauffeur that's just a little bit of an idiot, but they keep him in the family because he's related to the previous chauffeur or whatever. All of that kind of stuff happens in Korea.

All of those kind of jokes that are in the original Chekhov—about running out of money and how are we supposed to keep all of these people on. I find Chekhov really hard to do in the kind of flattened hierarchy of the West because you've lost the comedy, you've lost the stakes, you've lost the kind of social anxiety.

The stakes are certainly heightened by an ingrained sense of hierarchy and class and even a caste system—but some might say we have that in the West.

You can't look at what someone is wearing and tell if they're a billionaire or not in America. There is so much obfuscation that goes on in terms of looks, in terms of manner of speaking.

All of those signifiers that used to be aids that societies have to go, "Well, that person's the boss and I'm the worker”—that's been eradicated, especially in America. And that kind of upending of the traditional structures comes with massive benefits for the privileged, but it doesn't necessarily come with any benefits for the underprivileged.

That's sort of a very non-American way of thinking about it, I would argue, in the that one of the things Americans like to celebrate about themselves is that society is flat and anyone can do anything.

I think that it can be more damaging socially to a whole group of disenfranchised people to think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than it is to accept pathways where you go, okay, well, the average person of my abilities gets that far. And yes, I might be exceptional, but not everyone's going to be exceptional.

Anyway, back to Chekhov—I've read about how Chekhov thought of this play as a comedy. It was then produced as more of a tragedy, but that there's this tension inherent to it. How did you capture that balance while working in a different language?

I work 90 percent in languages that are not English: Dutch, French, Italian, German. And I think the difference between humor within the English-speaking world is sometimes bigger than the difference between English and non-English humor.

The Koreans were very obsessed with this when I first arrived. It was like, “You need to realize that the Koreans might not find that funny.” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.

But I think it is funny.” And people did laugh. A lot of jokes are funny because people know what it's like to have a mother that nags them.

I'm not sure if any of the jokes are jokes that I took straight from Chekhov. I wrote a play based on Korean society that brought in the plot elements of the original.

What was it like to work in Korea?

There's this kind of reckless insanity. When I was rehearsing, we would go drinking pretty much every evening. I'd be the first to leave and it would be two o'clock in the morning or something and I'd be like, “I've got to go and work and I've got to be sleep enough to direct tomorrow.

And how do you think a New York audience is going to receive this work?

I think New York loves eating up cultural artifacts from elsewhere. This work is a kind of portal into the rest of the world, and I think that that is more essential than ever in America right now—where there might be a tendency toward a bit of isolationism—to have a city like New York going, "No, our eyes are looking outward.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.