STAGE REVIEW : New Playwrights Group Returns With ‘Chekhov’

Anton Chekhov’s health is deteriorating. He is living with his younger sister, Maria, in Yalta and desperately trying to finish “The Three Sisters.” They’re clamoring for it back at the Moscow Art Theatre, where Chekhov’s bride, the actress Olga Knipper, has been cast as one of the leads.

We never see Olga. Playwright Jovanka Bach’s “Chekhov and Maria,” at the New Playwrights Foundation, features only the entitled characters. But we feel Olga’s absence as it gnaws at the ailing Chekhov and feeds the insufferable possessiveness of Maria.

The New Playwrights Foundation, formed in 1971 but inactive the last four years, has returned with a promising new play in a lovely new space in the Fairfax District. Only five people attended Sunday evening’s performance, and that might have contributed to pacing subtly slower than seems intended. Of course, this is not an action drama. This is Chekhov, literally and dramatically.

Playwright and director Bach (like Chekhov a medical doctor and of Slavic origin) based much of her material on the collection of Chekhov letters in the British Museum. And she has staged her play with Chekhovian simplicity. Characterization and atmosphere, not plot, are everything.

The actors, Jamie Angell and Catherine Theobald, recent graduates of CalArts MFA program, are excellent. They capture this domestic tale of betrayal and forgiveness with measured surfaces of light and shadow. But Bach has not parodied characters in a Chekhov play. Here the wry, patient brother and deceiving, overprotective sister finally explode in a way that Chekhov’s own characters never could.

The time is 1901 (a few years before Chekhov’s death at 44). We are in Chekhov’s well-appointed Crimean home, complete with a newfangled telephone that Chekhov fusses over.

The devoted Maria is secretly furious over Chekhov’s marriage. She intercepts letters from Olga and, in a callow effort to detain Chekhov in Yalta, even hides candles and gas-lamp fuel so he will take longer to finish his play.

Meanwhile, in well-wrought fleeting moments, we catch glimpses of the outside world.

Chekhov carps that back at the Art Theatre in Moscow, his director, “Constantin” (Stanislavsky), doesn’t understand that his plays are comedies. When the czar cracks down on his socialist friend Maxim Gorky, Chekhov is outraged, threatens to resign from the Imperial Academy and asks another friend, Leo Tolstoy, to join him in a letter of public protest. Tolstoy, above the fray, declines.

Set designer Michael Reidy has turned the spacious playing area (the site was previously a synagogue and then a fur shop) into an atmosphere redolent of comfortable stagnation.

Guido Girardi’s moody lighting, sound designer Dan Kelpine’s rain patter, and Laura Dermer’s period costumes earmark an ambitious renewal of a company that deserves much more support than was evident last weekend. On the other hand, with only two characters on stage for two hours, the production, particularly in Act I, can’t afford a depiction of Russian life in which, as Chekhov once wrote, “one day is very much like another.”

Performances run at 6111 W. Olympic Blvd., Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 7 p.m., through June 5. Tickets: $10. (213) 935-4874.