Turning out a new Chekhov play takes nerve: The Russian master, after all, died in 1904. David Rabe, though, has always done bold things.

The playwright, 69, launched his career with a ferocious trilogy of plays about the Vietnam War. His most famous piece, Hurlyburly, which he also helped turn into a 1998 movie, peers fearlessly into the dark world of sex and drugs in Hollywood.

In 2003, Rabe adapted Chekhov's novella The Black Monk for the Yale Repertory Theatre. Though it garnered some rave reviews, it hasn't had another production – until tonight, when Undermain Theatre opens a revised version.

What made the Tony Award-winning American playwright risk comparison with an icon like Chekhov, many theatrical folks' favorite modern writer?

"Of course I like the plays and so on, but I have to say I am more of a fan of the stories," Rabe said by phone from his Connecticut home.

He first encountered The Black Monk on tape, while he was driving to pick up his son from a New England bicycle camp.

"I drove off into a retired spot and parked by the side of an old dirt road and sat in the woods till I heard the end of it," Rabe said. "It captivated me beyond words. I honestly found many ways it related to my own life challenges, otherwise an adaptation might not have worked."

The Chekhov story is about a young philosopher who visits a childhood friend and her father. The young man falls in love with the girl, but soon begins to hallucinate visions of a black monk who claims to visit the Earth every 1,000 years.

The original prose doesn't have much dialogue, so Rabe had to invent words for the characters. At times, he developed a single paragraph of the original into a long scene. And Rabe allows the characters to address the audience directly, something Chekhov never did in his mature dramas

"I kept the flow of Chekhov's language in my ear, but I had to find dramatic solutions," the playwright said. "Sometimes it almost seemed like I was writing the real thing, though I knew better."

Since the first staging of The Black Monk, Rabe has spent most of his time writing fiction in the home that he shares with his wife, actress Jill Clayburgh. (Their daughter, Lily Rabe, is a Tony-nominated actress.) His novel Dinosaurs on the Roof came out last year. His plays Streamers and Hurlyburly, though, have had recent off-Broadway revivals.

Although an unrelated musical version of The Black Monk played off-Broadway this season, it was a New York Times review of the Yale production that ultimately brought Rabe's play to Dallas. Undermain artistic director Katherine Owens said that when she read the review, she knew that her Deep Ellum company should do the play.

"I cut out the clipping and put it in a pile of things to look through later and didn't see it again until last year," Owens said. "When the play was new, I didn't think we had the resources to do it. But at this point I could cast it."

Undermain produced one of Rabe's most experimental and difficult works, Goose and Tom-Tom, in 1989 and 1991. Owens remembered that experience as the most important turning point in the life of her company.

Former Dallas Cowboy Pat Toomay, an Undermain fan and friend of the playwright's, raved to Rabe about the show. Rabe came to Dallas to see it, and said that Undermain was the only theater that ever made the play work onstage.

The playwright and director Owens have been in close touch during the production of The Black Monk. Rabe did some significant revisions, and Undermain is the first to perform them.

There's also a second Tony Award-winning artist involved with the Dallas production: John Arnone, who designed the sets for The Who's Tommy and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? on Broadway. In its Deep Ellum basement, Undermain is finding itself in some high cotton these days.

PLAN YOUR LIFE: Through May 2 at Undermain Theatre, 3200 Main. $15 to $25. 214-747-5515, www.undermain.org.