Im always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.
I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
No author has created with less emphasis such pathetic characters as Chekhov has.
"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven. " "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then. "
For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.
Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett to me are the most revolutionary.
I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.
I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.
If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.
Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
I come from the theatre where there are no boundaries to the style you're doing; you're doing Molière, then you're doing Chekhov and then you're doing Arthur Miller in a season and no-one bats an eye.
I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.
