On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco and Other Substances

With an eye toward contemporrary relevance and humor, director Lita Lofton adapts and combines multiple texts by the great Russian ironist Anton Chekhov—including short stories, letters and the 1886 solo play On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco, a lecture that devolves into a catalog of marital strife—into a single work set a dinner party. The all-Black cast of eight is pointedly set against an empty white space.