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Year 2015 & 2017
by Claire Beckman, adapted from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard
Directed by Claire Beckman
FREE site-specific staged reading based on “The Cherry Orchard” world premiere on Governors Island.
Set in Virginia 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War and eight years before Jim Crow, is an American retelling of Anton Chekhov's play seen through the lens of Reconstruction.
2015: A Staged Reading on August 16
2016: The World Premiere: 4 performances on September 18 and 25
2017: Returns, by popular demand, for 10 performances at The Commanding Officers House on Governor’s Island: Aug 31, Sept 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 15, 17, 23, 24
Fringe Festival? Not This Summer. Fringe Spirit? Definitely. - The New York Times
By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
SEPTEMBER 5, 2017
In the glory days of Lillian Randolph’s down-on-its-luck plantation, long before war broke out and the family fortune disappeared, Robert E. Lee was a guest in her very house.
“He was always a gentleman,” her frail old servant Furs reminisces, and when he pictures Lee standing in the elegant room, we envision him there as well. “He danced the Virginia reel with Miss Lillian at her debutante ball.”
This is how close the layers of history feel in “The Plantation,” a startlingly visceral immersive adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” set in post-bellum Virginia and performed in the gracefully colonnaded Commanding Officer’s House on Governors Island, with a humor and humanity that would surely please Chekhov. The comedy he insisted was in his play is alive and well in “The Plantation.”
Like Nora Sorena Casey’s “False Stars,” at the Corkscrew Theater Festival, and Justin Kuritzkes’s “—hole” at Jack in Brooklyn — more about both of which shortly — “The Plantation” is an off-the-beaten-path adventure, the kind of theatergoing we’ve had too little of in a summer when the New York International Fringe Festival took a sabbatical.
Click to Read the Full Article Online.
Read Article on Broadway World.
Brave New World Rep to Bring Full Production of THE PLANTATION to Governors Island
