Tuesday, July 23rd @ 7:30pm
Chekhov Stories
An evening featuring the works Anton Chekhov | Narrated by Christopher Lydon
Directed by Robert Walsh and Alexis Rappaport
Christopher Lydon is an American media personality and author. He is best known for being the original host of The Connection, produced by WBUR and syndicated to other NPR stations, and for Open Source, a weekly radio program on WBUR. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, he is considered to be one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Some of his most well known works include Three Sisters, The Seagull, and The Cherry Orchard.
Christopher Lydon (Narrator) thinks of himself as the slow-reading child of a big family of Boston Irish autodidacts, and also as a sort of incurable Yale History major. He got his first solid work experience at the Boston Globe, covering Mayor Kevin White’s rescue of Boston politics 50 years ago and then in the Washington bureau of the New York Times covering presidential campaigns in the seasons of Nixon, McGovern, Carter and Reagan. But then he’d tell you he learned almost everything he knows boning up for his public-TV and radio interviews over the last 35 years on WGBH and WBUR. He jumps at the chance to take the stage now and then — with Gloucester Stage in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory.
Jersey, Riverside Shakespeare Company (NYC), American Repertory Theatre, Barter Theatre, The Gamm Theatre, Lyceum Theatre, San Diego, Merrimack Rep. International: toured Bulgaria with Divi Zheni, performing traditional Bulgarian songs, Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada and the Roy Hart International Arts Centre, France. Narration for Boston Pops, Handel & Haydn Society and Cantata Singers. Teaching: Ecstatic Voice and Lamentation, Shakespeare and Presentation and Presence workshops span the U.S., France, Italy, Poland, Greece, Cyprus and the UK; Marya joined the faculty at Brandeis University since 1989 and is a mentor to incarcerated women in Massachusetts.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: “Medicine is my lawful wife”, he once said, “and literature is my mistress.”
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a “theatre of mood” and a “submerged life in the text”.
Chekhov had at first written stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.