Part of the 6 Playwrights in Search of a Production…
Playwright: Alex Ladd
Director: Alex Ladd
Cast: Austin Pendleton*, Andy McCutcheon*, Tarynn Wiehahn, Jen Danby, Victor Arnold*, Jess Osuna*, Lauren Munger.
Managing Director: Marlene Mancini, Technical Director: Corrie Beth Shotwell, Office Manager: Tara Webb, Stage Directions: Catherine Siracusa
*Appearing courtesy of Actor’s Equity Association
Chekhov’s Rifle was performed on April 6th & 7th, 2008
Synopsis: This play is about Harry, a misanthropic playwright, and his dim but charismatic actor roommate Tim. When Harry rails against what is wrong with contemporary theatre, he uses his own script as an example. Ironically, it’s the best thing he has ever written! When Tim steals the script and pawns it off as his own the story begins to unravel the same way as the maligned script. Rifle is humorously self-aware of its own device, down to the maxim that Chekhov himself first coined: “If a gun hangs from the wall in the first act of a play, it must fire in the last.” As a commentary on pop culture, this murder mystery is as much about the lives of the characters in the play as it is about the writer who has written it, the artists who are acting in it, and the audience watching it.