Nikolai and the Others

It’s 1948 and during a spring weekend in Westport, CT a close-knit group of Russian emigres, including choreographer George Balanchine, composer Igor Stravinsky, conductor Serge Koussevitsky, painter/set designer Sergey Sudeikin and composer Nikolai Nabokov, gather to eat, drink and talk. In NIKOLAI AND THE OTHERS playwright Richard Nelson reimagines, during the course of this weekend, the creation of Balanchine and Stravinsky’s historic collaboration, the ballet Orpheus, and explores the interesting and controversial ways American art was funded at the outset of the Cold War.