From the golden age of Russian theater: The Inspector General by Gogol; Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard; Gorky's The Lower Depths; and A Month in the Country by Turgenev.

Curt Columbus endows these timeless dramas Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard with dialogue that is faithful to the russian original but dazzlingly attuned to contemporary audiences.

This is a collection of four plays from Chekhov - 'The Seagull', 'Uncle Vanya', 'Three Sisters' and 'The Cherry Orchard'.

The play focuses on the lives of three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, young women of the Russian gentry who try to fill their days in order to construct a life that feels meaningful while surrounded by an array of military men, servants, husbands, suitors, and lovers, all of whom constitute a distractions from the passage of time and from the sisters' desire to return to their beloved Moscow.

While the influence of Chekhov in modern theater worldwide, and especially in America, has been immense, translations into English have tended to be too literary and have not communicated the full emotional power and precise attention to detail of Chekhov's Russian. Milton Ehre began translating Chekhov's plays to provide professional theaters with performance texts that capture the feel and rhythms of spoken, rather than written, language. Chekhov for the Stage is the first publication of his revised versions of The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Sea Gull. Ehre's sensitive renderings of these classics make this volume the translation of choice for performers and directors, teachers, and the general reading public.

This collection ranges from humorous social realism to powerful explorations of man's capacity for evil. the anthology offers the reader six important Russian plays of the nineteenth century, in readable modern translations.