Lady With a Lapdog

From Moscow's Young Generation Theatre

A deceptively simple tale: Dmitry Gurov, a comfortable, middle-aged husband, father and womanizer, has a casual affair with Anna Sergeyevna, an unhappy young wife, while vacationing in Yalta; to his amazement, the jaded Gurov falls in love for the first time in his life, just as Anna does with him.

Kama Ginkas has made a career of creating powerful theater based on the prose of classic Russian authors, including Fyoor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin and Chekhov. His famous Chekhov trilogy- Lady with a Lapdog, The Black Monk and Rothschild's Fiddle-emerged as one of the most celebrated achievements in Russian theatre in the 1990s and 2000s.

Ginkas's dramatizations-although they rarely change anything in the original text-are never examples of narrative literary theater. By breaking up the text and distributing it among actors in unexpected ways; by translating description into dynamic action; and by bringing out concealed character motivations in performance, Ginkas reveals the highly dramatic nature of non-dramatic work.

Golden Mask Awards for Best Performance (2003), Best Director (Kama Ginkas)