Uncle Vanya

Anton Chekhov

Jan 2014 · L.A. Theatre Works · Narrated by Josh Radnor, Stacy Keach, and Martin Jarvis

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2 hr 8 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

In this classic of Chekhov’s canon, an overbearing professor pays a visit to his country estate, where Sonya and Vanya, his daughter and former brother-in-law, have slaved to maintain his wealth. But Vanya is enchanted by the professor’s new wife, while Sonya has fallen for the town’s melancholy doctor.

Includes a conversation with Rosamund Bartlett, author of “Chekhov: Scenes from a Life.”

Recorded in Los Angeles before a live audience at the UCLA James Bridges Theater in October 2013.

Director: Rosalind Ayres
Producing Director: Susan Albert Loewenberg
An L.A. Theatre Works Full-Cast Performance Featuring:
Jennifer Bassey as Mariya
JD Cullum as Telegin
Holley Fain as Yelena
Martin Jarvis as Professor Serebryakov
Stacy Keach as Vanya
Anna Mathias as Marina
Josh Radnor as Astrov
Devon Sorvari as Sonya
Associate Producers: Christina Montaño, Anna Lyse Erikson
Recording Engineer/Sound Designer/Mixer: Mark Holden for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood
Sound Effects Artist: Sam Boeck
Stage Manager: Tori Burnett
Editor: Wes Dewberry

About the author

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the provincial town of Taganrog, Ukraine, in 1860. In the mid-1880s, Chekhov became a physician, and shortly thereafter he began to write short stories. Chekhov started writing plays a few years later, mainly short comic sketches he called vaudvilles. The first collection of his humorous writings, Motley Stories, appeared in 1886, and his first play, Ivanov, was produced in Moscow the next year. In 1896, the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg performed his first full- length drama, The Seagull. Some of Chekhov's most successful plays include The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Chekhov brought believable but complex personalizations to his characters, while exploring the conflict between the landed gentry and the oppressed peasant classes. Chekhov voiced a need for serious, even revolutionary, action, and the social stresses he described prefigured the Communist Revolution in Russia by twenty years. He is considered one of Russia's greatest playwrights. Chekhov contracted tuberculosis in 1884, and was certain he would die an early death. In 1901, he married Olga Knipper, an actress who had played leading roles in several of his plays. Chekhov died in 1904, spending his final years in Yalta.

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