When Ivan Turgenev submitted his play A Month in the Country (first titled The Student and then Two Women) to the Russian censors in 1850, they demanded some significant changes. It would never do for a married woman to admit to falling in love with a man other than her husband, they opined. So Turgenev obediently omitted the husband and transformed the wife into a widow.

Fortunately, the play survived the censors of the imperial regime and the indifferent reception to its first performance in 1872. It gained popularity with a subsequent production in 1879, attaining the status of a classic after Konstantin Stanislavsky both directed the work and played the pivotal character of Rakitin for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1909. By then, the cuts had been restored.

Nicholas Martin, artistic director of the Huntington Theatre Company, first saw A Month in the Country performed by fellow students at Carnegie-Mellon University when he was 17 years old, then attended the New York production in which the great Uta Hagen starred. " I feel that the plays that you love are frequently the plays you fell in love with in your youth. When you’re older, you want to do these works with the depth of maturity that you’ve accumulated. "

Of course, Martin has a big heart that encompasses every sort of drama. A Month in the Country could not be farther from the light-headed production of Where’s Charley? he directed this summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. And that followed his staging of the stern anti-war play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme for the Huntington and Broadway in Boston at the Wilbur last spring.

Martin chose Irish playwright Brian Friel’s adaptation of the Turgenev drama, which was first presented in London in 1992, rather than one of the older English translations. " I read a bunch of translations, including the one by Emlyn Williams, when I re-read the play for the Huntington production. I decided that the Williams version was so much of its time, so mid-20th-century, too operatic. When I read Friel’s play, I felt it was his take without losing the original. But I’m not above taking a sentence or two from Williams or another adapter. You have to direct into the production the texture of the play. The subtext is to be sought. "

Turgenev was 50 years ahead of Chekhov in writing about minor Russian gentry who waste their lives in country houses where they are trapped by their inability to change and by the persistence of tradition. A Month in the Country is propelled by the restless nature of Natalya Petrovna, the dutiful but unloving wife of the landowner, Arkady, and mother of his 10-year-old son. Her constant companion is her husband’s best friend, Rakitin, who adores her. But Natalya prefers Aleksey, her son’s 21-year-old tutor. Her passion for him and the jealousy of her young ward, Vera, who’s also in love with Aleksey, throw the household into turmoil.

" The first thing I said to the cast, " Martin says, " was that I wanted to lay to rest a notion that young people have that Rakitin has slept with Natalya. That is not what the 19th century had to offer. The play is pre-Freud, and they weren’t always thinking with their genitals. In our society, the closest to a character like Rakitin is the gay best friend of the family. " Jennifer Van Dyck, who played Thea Elvsted in Martin’s production of Hedda Gabler, which went from the Huntington to Broadway, will play Natalya; James Joseph O’Neil, who appeared last season in Heartbreak House, is Rakitin and Boston University grad Jessica Dickey is Vera. Boston-based actor Jeremiah Kissel, the trench-coated flasher in Martin’s last-season staging of Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation, has the role of Doctor Shpigelsky.

Although Martin believes that one theme of the play concerns " a woman’s awakening — too late, " he also points out that Turgenev wrote the work before the emancipation of the serfs. The censors were no doubt aware of anti-establishment references in Shpigelsky’s bitter speech about his childhood and in the contrast between the lives of the servants and their masters. " Friel’s version of A Month in the Country is remarkably free of political impact, but it’s really about a society on its last legs. The greatness of this adaptation is that he’s able to give you the whole situation without dwelling on it.

" I think the Boston audiences are very interested in language and in the exchange of ideas. If this play doesn’t move you to laughter and tears, it’s because you’re holding your hands in front of your eyes and screaming, ‘Don’t look.’ If we do it right, of course. "

The Huntington Theatre Company presents A Month in the Country at the Boston University Theatre September 6 through October 6. Tickets are $12 to $62. Call (617) 266-0800.