Featured Event
Downtown Artists: Neighborhood Tour
11/16/2024
11AM
Conversations
My Chekhov, Not Yours: Annie Baker, Kristen Kosmas, Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar, and Tina Satter
Half Straddle in Residence
Cover Image:
Anton Chekhov
Presented in conjunction with Chekhov (Thinking of you): Half Straddle in Residence.
New York City is alive with radical theatrical interpretations of the writings of Anton Chekhov. The nineteenth-century Russian physician, dramatist, and author is venerated in classical theater circles for his revolutionary contributions to theatrical realism in works like Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Seagull. But this season his work is receiving a dramatic makeover in a coincidental series of adventurous new adaptations by luminaries of New York’s contemporary performance avant-garde.
Each artist on this panel takes a particularly idiosyncratic approach to Chekhov. Annie Baker’s critically acclaimed Uncle Vanya at Soho Rep emphasizes the familiar lull of contemporary conversation while presenting period details with equally matter-of-fact familiarity, placing the entire audience inside a carpeted A-frame house built inside a theater. Kristen Kosmas’s There There at Performance Space 122 this January contemplates the meta-theatrical metaphysics of celebrity actors performing on stage, putting forth the absurd premise that Christopher Walken’s female understudy Karen is forced to take the stage in a one-man adaptation of Three Sisters (that is simultaneously being translated into Russian). The Man in the Case, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, coadapted and directed by Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater, takes a short story by Chekhov about a narrow-minded schoolteacher who is obsessed with following rules and transforms it into a dance-theater piece for five performers spliced with found text from an instructional video on how to open a door and detailed discussions of turkey hunting tactics. And finally, New Museum artist-in-residence Tina Satter of Half Straddle is presenting Seagull (Thinking of you) with Performance Space 122 in January. A dark and comedic group portrait set to an original Russian folk metal-inspired score, Tina Satter’s Seagull (Thinking of you) revels in the strange resonances between Chekhov’s Seagull and the Half Straddle ensemble of female and/or genderqueer performer/artists brought together for this particular show.
Join these artists as they discuss their productions, their individual motivations for adapting Chekhov, and their thoughts on the current spate of contemporary Chekhovian adaptations.
Jessica Del Vecchio moderates.
Jessica Del Vecchio received her MA from the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas, Austin. Currently a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, she is working on a dissertation that analyzes the recent resurgence of explicitly queer and feminist performance in New York City’s experimental scene. She has taught in the theatre departments at Hunter College and Drew University, and created the instructor’s manual for the 2012 edition of Mira Felner’s THINK: Theatre textbook. She has written about experimental performance in the Brooklyn Rail and might be good e-journal, as well as for Theatre Journal and The Drama Review. weirdtheatre.org
Sponsors
This program is made possible, in part, through the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David and Hermine Heller.
