After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials wer...
One of Ostrovsky's most poetical works, The Storm is set in Kalinov, a provincial town on the banks of the Upper Volga. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Katerina is tormented by her widowed mother-in-law, Marfa Kabanova. Katerina seeks solace in an affair with a similarly tormented young lover, and the confession of this affair to her husband leads ultimately to tragedy. The Storm was a great success on its first performance the Maly Theatre, Moscow, in November 1859, and continues to be critic...
From the master twentieth-century playwright Tennessee Williams-an adaptation of Chekhov's The Sea Gull, never before available to the general trade. The Notebook of Trigorin is faithful to Chekhov's story of longing and unrequited love. Set on a provincial Russian Estate, its peaceful environs offer stark contrast to the turbulent lives of its characters. Constantine, a young writer, must compete for the attention of his mother, a self-obsessed, often comical aging actress, Madame Arkadina, and...
Includes the plays The Forest, Artistes and Admirers, Wolves and Sheep and Sin and Sorrow Four of Ostrovskys finest plays. The best known of these, The Forest (1871), has two young lovers in thrall to their tyrannical elders, who are prevented from marrying until a pair of strolling actors come to their rescue. In Artistes and Admirers (1881), a comedy of theatre life, a dedicated young actress renounces both love and fortune in order to pursue her sacred calling. In the comedy Wolves and Sheep...
Misha's Party
by Richard Nelson, Aleksandr Gel'man, and Alexander Gelman
Misha's Party is set one August night in Moscow: a man attempts to throw himself a sixtieth birthday party, a grandmother attempts a reconciliation with her granddaughter, and one half of the government attempts to overthrow the other half. With the 1991 attempted coup for its backdrop, the play is a funny and ironic tale about how simple solutions only look simple and how past mistakes aren't easily made right. This edition contains an introduction by Richard Nelson about the writing of the pla...