Antosha and Masha

Facing an advanced stage of tuberculosis, Anton Chekhov, famed writer and physician, has retreated to far-off Yalta to recuperate, while his sister Masha - heretofore his best support - is suddenly flourishing in Moscow. Brother and sister struggle to negotiate each's career and marital ambitions, with Anton's affairs seeming to win out. When his marriage falters and his health founders, however, Masha is there and she finds a direction for her own ambition in the promotion of his artistry and legacy.

'Antosha and Masha' is a play about the Chekhov household written in homage to Chekhov's inimitable style. This is both in the play's form, which mixes the serious and comic, and in its content, as the characters discuss aesthetics and the "opening into eternity" his work invokes. It also documents, in some measure, the genesis of 'The Cherry Orchard', even as it mirrors the early sunsetting of the writer's life in his Crimean exile.

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