Theater

Rachel Chavkin Stages ‘Eugene Onegin’ Adaptation in Arkansas

Rachel Chavkin directs Sarah Gancher's "Eugene Onegin" adaptation, "Eugene," set in Arkansas and presented as an immersive experience at TheatreSquared.

American Theatre·Jun 8, 2026·via American Theatre

Rachel Chavkin Stages ‘Eugene Onegin’ Adaptation in Arkansas

Adrian Blake Enscoe, Sydney Shepherd, Cory Jeacoma, and Jane Bruce in 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' at TheatreSquared. (Photo by Wesley Hitt Photography)

Front and Center | Spring 2026

June 8, 2026 Rob Weinert-Kendt Leave a comment

‘Eugene’ Holds a Picking Party

Sarah Gancher’s hootenanny-inspired, Arkansas-set adaptation of ‘Eugene Onegin’ gets the Rachel Chavkin immersive treatment at TheatreSquared.

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

Writer Sarah Gancher’s last play was the queasy workplace comedy Russian Troll Farm , and among director Rachel Chavkin ’s early credits were Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls . So you might think their new version of Eugene Onegin , the Pushkin verse epic that Tchaikovsky turned into grand opera, marks their return to the Motherland.

Think again. The new show, bowing June 10-28 at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas, has the helpful subtitle “A Bluegrass Musical,” and it’s set partly in the Ozarks in 1949 and partly in Nashville in 1960. In this version, Pushkin’s titular poet and his frenemy Lensky are guitar-toting country singer-songwriters, and so is Tanya, the woman who inadvertently comes between them. While the tragic plot mostly follows the original, and there are musical Easter eggs for Tchaikovsky devotees, the sound is pure down-home picking party, with original songs by Gancher.

The unlikely idea occurred to her years ago, when she worked in the education department of the Metropolitan Opera and repeatedly saw Robert Carsen’s stark staging of Eugene Onegin . The bucolic setting of the first act always made her think of Arkansas, whence one side of her family hails. When, years later, during the pandemic lockdown, Gancher got a commission from Dorset Theatre Festival’ s then-artistic director Jade King Carroll to write an outdoor-friendly piece, the notion of a hootenanny-style Onegin resurfaced. One hitch: Who would write the score?

“Then I thought, well, this is never gonna happen, because theatre doesn’t exist anymore, so I should just try writing the music,” recalled Gancher, who’d once been a professional jazz musician and who still regularly fiddles at a weekly bluegrass jam at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn. “It felt very low-stakes to me.” Once she started, though, the piece took on a life of its own: “Suddenly I was writing monologues, and they were coming out as songs. They were coming to me almost faster than I could get them down.”

The result, according to Chavkin, is “finely wrought and tortured and sexy and wonderful,” with music that “carries this incredible wisdom and ache in its refrains, and captures something about falling in love and playing music together.” Chavkin compared the show’s nearly-in-the-round staging to the immersion she created for Dave Malloy ’s Great Comet . “If that was a many-fingered runway around the audience, where we were touching everywhere in the theatre, Eugene is almost like the inverse of that, where we’re just gonna gather everyone around a campfire.”

Included in that invite: some of Gancher’s Arkansas relatives who’ve never had the chance to see her work onstage, even a few she’s never met at all. While she said she loves her family members from that region, she added, there have been “many times in our lives where we haven’t seen eye to eye. Diving into this part of American music and the heritage of this part of the country has healed something in me.”

Members of the ensemble in a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' by Sarah Gancher, directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall) Members of the ensemble in a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' by Sarah Gancher, directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall) Members of the ensemble in a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' by Sarah Gancher, directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall) Members of the ensemble in a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' by Sarah Gancher, directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall) Members of the ensemble in a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical' by Sarah Gancher, directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall) Playwright Sarah Gancher looks on at a workshop of 'Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical,' directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Photo by Sander Randall)

Rob Weinert-Kendt is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre .