Chekhov’s Rifle

The Lord Strange Troupe presents the world premiere of the new dark comedy/mystery Chekhov’s Rifle by Alex Ladd with OBIE Award-winners Austin Pendleton and Jess Osuna. The play is about Harry, a misanthropic playwright, and his dim but charismatic actor roommate Tim. When Harry rails against what is wrong with contemporary theatre, he uses his own script as an example. Ironically, it’s the best thing he has ever written! When Tim steals the script and pawns it off as his own the story begins to unravel the same way as the maligned script. Rifle is humorously self-aware of its own device, down to the maxim that Chekhov himself first coined: “If a gun hangs from the wall in the first act of a play, it must fire in the last.” As a commentary on pop culture, this murder mystery is as much about the lives of the characters in the play as it is about the writer who has written it, the artists who are acting in it, and the audience watching it.