Uncle Vanya - Paperback

by Anton Chekhov (Author), David Mamet (Adapted by)

"Simply, plainly wonderful."--The Boston Globe

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet's Uncle Vanya is a sparkling restoration of a masterpiece of the modern stage, marked by Mamet's finely tuned ear for dialogue and memorable poetic imagery.

In Uncle Vanya, a retired professor and his beautiful young wife return to the country estate left by his deceased first wife to find themselves overwhelmed by the stagnant inevitability of the rituals of their life and class, and mercilessly taxed by the encroachment of age at the expense of youth. All of the play's characters are plunged into that precarious state where, in Beckett's words, "the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being."

Working from a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik, Mamet, who has also adapted Chekhov's Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, opens the way for a contemporary audience to establish immediate contact with a classic, infusing the power of Chekhov's play with the potent precision of his own modern voice.

Back Jacket

In Uncle Vanya, a retired professor and his beautiful young wife return to the country estate left by his deceased first wife to find themselves overwhelmed by the stagnant inevitability of the rituals of their life and class and mercilessly taxed by the encroachment of age at the expense of youth. All of the play's characters are plunged into that precarious state where, in Beckett's words, 'the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.'

Author Biography

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) is known both as a playwright and a master of the modern short story. His plays, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, are among the most widely performed in the world. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 44, but didn't achieve American recognition until twenty years after his death.

David Mamet is the author of the plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984 Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award), Oleanna, American Buffalo, A Life in the Theater, Speed-the-Plow, Edmond, Lakeboat, The Water Engine, The Woods, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Reunion, The Cryptogram (1995 Obie Award), and The Old Neighborhood.