Thankfully, this bleak portrait of conditions in Czarist Russia is offset by two purely comic vignettes, one involving a risqué work of decorative art, and the other, a studious bachelor besieged by romantic damsels, one of whom manipulates the reluctant scholar into wedlock, despite his claims to unswerving resistance.Īnton isn't the only Chekhov contributing to the evening's enjoyment: The acting techniques formulated by his nephew, Michael Chekhov - chiefly its emphasis on body language as a tool for conveying character - are employed by director Dawn Arnold's ensemble with an expertise rarely seen in our Meisner-dominated theater community, rendering each individual personae immediately recognizable after little more than a change of a vest or a shawl, with any cognitive obstruction arising from the cross-gender casting likewise quickly dissipating. The author at his most pessimistic introduces a farm wife and her estranged husband, the latter pampered to dissolution by their property's overlord, who confront the grim reality of their economic inequalities. ![]() This year's program encompasses such foible-prone personnel as a misanthropic professor whose excessive caution engineers his own downfall, a forlorn mother who clings to the hope of her daughter marrying well as a means of delivering the family from poverty, and a mischievous youth whose successful ruse to remedy his sweetheart's fear of tobogganing backfires upon him in unforeseen ways. ![]() ![]() Moving Dock Theater Company's page-to-stage adaptations of these sketches formed the basis of their 2015 anthology titled, “The Anton Chekhov Book Club” - a venture that proved so popular as to mandate a sequel, this one appropriately dubbed "The Anton Chekhov Book Club Returns." Anton Chekhov is mostly known for his plays, not for the hundreds of short stories serving as a kind of verbal photo album of his society as he viewed it.
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