A Play Made Out of Chekhov's Short Stories

“CHEKHOVEK” LAUNCHES RUN AT ARCLIGHT THEATRE

 By HENRY EDWARDS

Eddie Allen, Celia Schaefer, Elizabeth Founain, David Anderson and Rob Leo in "Chekhovek"

Over the course of his relatively short lifetime, Anton Chekhov wrote hundreds of short stories.  Hailed as one of the fathers of this particular form, the writer, a nascent modernist, often dispensed with traditional plot and relied upon the stream-of-consciousness  technique to capture impressisonistically the melancholic mood of life in 19^th-century pre-Revolutionary Russia.

Melania Levitsky has chosen nine of the master's treasure trove of tales and transformed them into “Chekhovek.”

The two-act production is currently on view at the ArcLight Theatre. Levitsky also directs.

Originally titled, "Virtue, Desire, Death and Foolishness" (a whopper of a mouthful for an evening of miniatures!),Levitsky's Chekhov revue began life in 2009 as Walking the dog Theater’s season opener in Hudson, NY. 

It arrives in New York courtesy of the Actors' Ensemble and GoShow Entertainment.

“Chekhovek” features five actors, Eddie Allen, David Anderson, Elizabeth Fountain, Rob Leo Roy and Celia Schaefer, and a sole musician, Jonathan Talbott.

Utilizing conventions frequently employed by praactioners of story theatre,  the ensemble portrays a troupe of actors putting on a play in an old theatre equipped with a number of steamer trunks. Those trunks house the props and costumes the actors utilize totransform themselves from one set of Chekhov  characters into another.

Levitsky divides Chekhov's tale of an adulterous affair, "The Lady with the Dog," into six parts.  Thus it serves as the evening's through line. Typically,  the story presents characters in a search for understanding but who fall short in their inability or reluctance to communicate. However, that failure is not helped by presenting it piecemeal.

In another story, “The Black Monk,” the writer utilizes mental illness to emphasize life's transience as well as humankind's subservience to the whims of fate. The illness—which ruins a marriage, kills a father-in-law and wrecks a prized orchard—serves to symbolize the disintegration of society at large.

It's a big idea, but it shrinks considerably when placed on stage. 

While Chekhov’s stories are for the most part succinct models of observation, depending on small moments of revelation and not gripping plot turns or surprise endings to achieve their impact, they simply do not contain the great conflicts that reside at the heart of drama. Mounting them in a theatre, they tend to reduce until they are nothing more than a Chekhovian gloss.

As a result "Chekhovek" is charming, well-acted and often very entertaining. And yet it feels thin and lacks impact.