On the High Road

by Anton Chekhov

Directed by Laura Lassy Townsend

In French with English Titles 

L'Atelier Theatre NY

2018

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With Nadège Beillevert, Léa Caen, Fiona Dalmier, Patricia Georget, Geneviève Lavaud, Benjamin Nadal, Nicolas Saint-Gregoire, Gladys Venturelli.

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Stage Manager: Alexandra Gontard

Set & Costume Design: Nicolas Saint Grégoire

Light Design: Andrew Carr

Sound Design: Jerome Rouquette

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Russia, 1884. Pilgrims, peasants, craftsmen, bandits and other passers-by find shelter from an icy storm in Tikhone’s cabaret. In this congregation of unfortunates, every character has their own story, shaded with misery and filled with hope.

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A note on the play​

The very existence of On The High Road (1884), probably the earliest of its author’s plays, will be unsuspected by French & English theatergoers alike. During Chekhov's lifetime, the play was censored. The treatment of the peasant condition was deemed “depressing and dirty” by the authorities. It became a family legend while he was alive, and after his death, a family mystery. A copy was finally discovered in 2004 in the Censor's office. In it, we see, in an embryonic form, the whole later method of his plays – the deliberate contrast between two strong characters (Bortsov and Mérik), the careful individualization of each person in a fairly large group by way ofan introduction to the main theme, the concealment of the catastrophe and the distinctive Chekhovian group-atmosphere. For the rest, this piece differs from his later plays in its mixed genre, alternating between realism and melodrama – constituting a bridge between the short stories and the dramatic plays – as well as in its presentation, not of Chekhov's favorite middle-classes, but of the moujiks, the Russian working class, nourishing, in a particularly stuffy atmosphere, an intense mysticism and an equally intense thirst for vodka.

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