About This Show
An upper class family spends the summer at their country house, and idle hands become the devil’s playthings. Natalya, the wife and mother of a ten year old boy (never seen onstage) has a husband who adores her, a lover who is her husband’s oldest friend, and a crush on her son’s tutor, who is half her age.
The other characters in this comedy of bad manners are Natalya’s mother-in-law, her beautiful young ward Vera, a local doctor who never wants to go home, and two servants, as full of passion as their employers. The consequences of betrayal are examined by Turgenev, and in turn Brian Friel, in this new translation by one of Ireland’s leading playwrights.
Set in suburban America, during the “Me Decade” of the 1970’s, director Dorothy Lyman brings to life a morality that would appall Dr. Laura Schlessinger, yet is familiar to most of us.
