Director Jack Serio’s intimate staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya had a brief run in July at a private loft in the Flatiron District (16 nights, with 40 spectators per night), and has now returned for a few weeks at a different loft in the same neighborhood. The original run cultivated a buzz of exclusivity—“sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it,” as described in the New Yorker. The impression that you have been granted entrée to an event persists in the encore engagement: the program given to the relatively few (but more than 40) audience members includes a countdown of how many performances remain.
The Seagull/Woodstock, NY
Anton Chekhov’s 1895 chestnut, The Seagull, has always been a crowd pleaser. The tale of unrequited love and petty jealousy among egomaniacal adults and self-doubting youths, sown through with treatises on the craft of writing and the purpose of theater, then capped with a dead bird and a tragic ending, has spawned eight Broadway productions over the past century.
The Orchard
After squandering her inheritance as an expatriate in Paris, Lyubov Ranevskaya, protagonist of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, comes home to Russia to discover that the old order, so favorable to the haute bourgeoisie, has been scrambled by burgeoning social mobility. Unable to meet the carrying charges on the family estate, Ranevskaya (Jessica Hecht) and her brother Gaev (Mark Nelson) dither rather than addressing the double whammy of altered personal circumstances and a transformed national culture.
Three Sisters
It seems to never be a bad time to stage Chekhov’s Three Sisters: timeless and timely, funny and devastating, remarkably in tune with the currents of real life, and providing material for great actors to explore memorable and fully rounded characters.
Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories
The Mint Theater Company has once again returned to excavating the long-forgotten dramatic works of Miles Malleson, a 20th-century British actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories presents a pair of one-act dramas based on short stories by the Russian literary giants and adapted by Malleson. Audience members with passing familiarity of works by Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy will surely not expect to see a rom-com double bill, and yet the plays reflect the authors’ depths of compassion and devotion to social and spiritual uplift.
The Seagull
The Instigators’ adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Lillian Meredith, uses immersive elements to enhance and punctuate both large and small moments. Actors break the fourth wall, and the staging brings actors in line with the audience.