The Cherry Orchard

by Anton Chekhov, David Mamet (Adapted by)

Overview

Chekov's great tragicomic eulogy for a passing way of life is superbly adapted to make a powerful and beautifully playable drama. Plays for Performance Series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802130020
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/11/1994
Series:	Chekhov, Anton
Pages:	91
Sales rank:	1,049,492
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anton Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860 in Taganrog, Russia. He graduated from the University of Moscow in 1884. Chekhov died of tuberculosis in Germany on July 14, 1904, shortly after his marriage to actress Olga Knipper, and was buried in Moscow.

Laurence Senelick is the Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and author of more than a dozen books, including the award-winning The Chekhov Theatre and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and the Theatre. He is director of his own translations of Gogol’s The Inspector General (1998) and Euripides’ The Bakkhai (2001).

What People are Saying About This

James Parer

"Carnicke's Cherry Orchard is direct, easily accessible to young American students, and mercifully free of all that blather that mucks up so much of the other versions that I know." --(James Parker, Late Professor of Theatre, Virginia Commonwealth University)

Editorial Reviews

Jean-Claude van Itallie's adaptation is splendid, colloquial without being cute, simple, moving, funny.

Village Voice

I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like this production on a stage before—I left the Beaumont exhilarated.

NY Times

...a new, faithful, very playable and gorgeous translation by Jean-Claude van Itallie.

NY Post

"Senelick . . . has done his job as scholar and translator nearly to perfection."

Weekly Standard

Frayn's translation, which strikes me as splendidly lucid and alive…will be acted again and again” —New Statesman

From the Publisher

"Mr. Karam’s plays aren’t tearful, but they are often about loss—of love, of health, of innocence—and the messy, haphazard, necessary ways we get on with our lives afterward . . . He specializes in painful comedies that really shouldn’t be as funny as they are. Karam is a mature writer, very much in command of his gifts."

New York Times

"The more you see Anton Chekhov’s final play, the weirder it seems . . . The Cherry Orchard contains distinctly bizarre touches: unexplained offstage noises, ominous portents of revolution, and a morbid ending that's nearly Beckettian . . . Adapter Stephen Karam layers American accents (racial and immigration anxieties) into his lean, accessible script."

Time Out Magazine

"Stephen Karam is among the very best of his generation of playwrights."

New York Magazine