Sessions will be facilitated by Jordan Hoffman

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“What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate,” English writer V.S. Pritchett claimed of the Russian short story writer and dramatist, “was something positive and precious: the private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude.”  

Seven years after working in the short story genre, Chekhov turned to the stage as the natural evolution of his aesthetic, one radically opposed to the conventional melodramas of his era.  After mixed success with his first projects (Ivanov and The Wood Demon) Chekhov found a sympathetic director in Constantin Stanislavsky; their collaboration would not only revolutionize Russian theater but Western theater more broadly.

We will read five major plays in chronological order from the early Ivanov (1889) and The Seagull (1895) to the later works penned for Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, Uncle Vanya (1896) and The Three Sisters (1900) and conclude with the 1903 masterpiece The Cherry Orchard.  Discussion will focus not just on Chekhov’s themes in each play but also his evolving refinement of dramatic technique in characterization, symbolism, and plot development.

“What happens on stage,” Chekhov wrote in a letter to his publisher, “should be just as complicated and yet just as simple as things are in life.  People are having dinner, that's all--but at the same time their happiness is being decided, or their lives are being destroyed.”

Online seminars in this series will take place on Tuesday evenings, 5:30-7:00PM Pacific Time. Attendees will be sent the anthology of readings, The Plays of Anton Chekhov by Paul Schmidt, ISBN: ‎ 978-0060928759. Sessions will be facilitated by Jordan Hoffman. Groups will be limited to 16 participants and no prior knowledge is required. Teachers will be offered1 CEU credit for participating. This five-week series is $325. Community of Lifelong Learner subscribers receive a discount of $25 through a refund.