The Cherry Orchard

Description

A fresh take on a classic by the Tony Award-winning playwright of The Humans "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 "Stephen Karam is among the very best of his generation of playwrights." -New York Magazine "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 New York Stephen Karam is known for his dedication to exploring the idiosyncrasies of human speech and behavior-the subtleties, the depth, and the won derfully awkward minutiae. With this new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's canonical masterpiece about a family on the brink of bankruptcy, Karam's fluid style pairs harmoniously with the work of the master playwright. Stephen Karam is the author of two plays that were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama: The Humans in 2016 and Sons of the Prophet in 2012. The Humans won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play. His other work includes the play Speech & Debate and a film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull for Sony Pictures Classics.

Richard Nelson's many plays include Rodney's Wife, Goodnight Children Everywhere, Drama Desk nominated Franny's Way and Some Americans Abroad, Tony Award nominated Two Shakespearean Actors, and James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey), for which he won a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, and the acclaimed Apple Family Plays, a quartet of plays that include That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry and Regular Singing. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced acclaimed translations of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their translations of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina won the 1991 and 2002 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prizes. Pevear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married to each other and live in Paris.