Chekhov, Anton (Pavlovich)

Chekhov, Anton [Pavlovich] (1860–1904), playwright. The great Russian writer of stories and plays did not achieve American recognition until nearly twenty years after his death. The earliest performances of his works in the United States were generally given in Russian by small groups of émigré artists. Among these performers were Alla Nazimova, who played in The Seagull in New York in 1905. A few tentative translations were made available to English‐speaking ensembles and allowed such avant‐garde companies as the Washington Square Players to present his one‐act The Bear in 1915 and The Seagull a year later. Almost all of these productions were failures since the plays were perceived as arty, gloomy tragedies instead of as dark comedies about a decaying bourgeoisie. The visits of the Moscow Art Theatre during the 1922–23 and 1923–24 seasons, and the company's mounting of The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vanya, coupled with the virtually simultaneous availability of superior translations, brought about a real appreciation of the works. The Civic Repertory Theatre offered The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull between 1926 and 1929. Subsequent noteworthy revivals included the Lunts in The Seagull (1938); Judith Anderson, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Dennis King in The Three Sisters (1942); Uncle Vanya by the visiting Old Vic in 1946; and a series of Off‐Broadway revivals under David Ross in the 1950s. Perhaps the most controversial Chekhov production was Andrei Serban's stark, white‐on‐white mounting of The Cherry Orchard in 1977. Ivanov, the playwright's first full‐length work, is the most frequently revived of his lesser‐known pieces, with productions in 1958, 1966, 1986 (as Wild Honey), and 1997. Neil Simon's The Good Doctor (1973) dramatized several Chekhov stories, as did The Chekhov Sketchbook (1980).