“Les Variations Nina” was performed by the Nipissing Theater Arts class this week. The play is based on the final scene of Anton Chekov's "The Seagull" written by Steven Dietz. After being asked to write a new adaptation of "The Seagull," Dietz couldn't stop thinking about the final scene between the two, and he said, "I couldn't concentrate at all on the rest of the piece. I was fascinated by the magnitude of this single fateful encounter” (Burns). He never wrote the adaptation of "The Seagull" and instead created forty-three different variations of how the final scene might end between the two. The scene takes place between Treplov, a playwright desperately in love with Nina, who is desperately in love with another man (who happens to be Treplov's mother's lover). The play depicts forty-three variations of the final scene between the two, and the results range from a happy ending, with both characters admitting that they are in love with each other, to a desperate ending where Treplov breaks Nina's heart, or Nina breaks. Treplov's heart. It was difficult for me to find many parallels between this play and the works we studied in Canadian literature, because this play does not follow a plot and does not include many elements that could be related to the works that we studied. This also does not concern the themes that were highlighted in our course. However, I found that the careful analysis of the final scene of a play, performed forty-three different times, mirrored the careful analysis we did repeatedly in class with poetry and prose. It was interesting to watch these in-depth analyzes to understand all the possible interactions these characters could have had. This made me wonder about the endings of works that...... middle of paper...... (Chekhov). Furthermore, he asserted that “the artist should not be a judge of his characters and their conventions, but simply an impartial witness” (Chekhov). He was very influential in the evolution of the short story because of his "stream of consciousness" which is exemplified by Daisy in The Stone Diaries. Although I was able to find few similarities between Canadian literature and the "Nina Variations", an in-depth analysis of Checkov's techniques helped me better understand realism and its influences on Canadian literature. Works Cited Burns, Gail. Review of “Les Variations Nina”. August 2005. Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov's Letters to Family and Friends with Biographical Sketches, translated by Constance Garnett, Macmillan, 1920. February 16, 2007. Oxford English Dictionary. “Stream of consciousness.” April 1 2010.