Tony Award winner Alan Cumming will play Trigorin, the lover to Dianne Wiest’s magnetic actress, Arkadina, in Anton Chekhov’s 1896 play, The Seagull, at Classic Stage Company (136 East 13th Street). It is to be directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev, artistic director of the Moscow New Drama Theatre. Previews begin on Feb. 20, with opening night set for March 13.
Written in 1896, The Seagull is widely regarded as Chekhov’s first masterpiece, subtly dissecting the affairs of the heart and the demands of a life in the arts, while balancing the comic, the lyric and the tragic.
The most recent major New York production of the play was a 2001 mounting in Central Park directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline as Arkadina and Trigorin.
Wiest, a two-time Academy Award winner for Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and Her Sisters, most recently starred in on the New York stage in Wendy Wasserstein’s Third at Lincoln Center and Kathleen Tolan’s Memory House at Playwrights Horizons. On television she starred as district attorney Nora Lewin on Law & Order from 2000 to 2002 and will soon be seen in the new HBO series In Treatment.
Cumming received the Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as the Emcee in Cabaret. He has also been seen on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera and Design for Living. His film work includes co-producing, co-writing, co-directing and co-starring in The Anniversary Party, which won a National Board of Review Award and two Independent Spirit Award nominations. His latest film as director and star is Suffering Man’s Charity.
