Picking Up Chekhov is a picaresque black comedy about a two-bit repo-man, his angry ex-wife and their smart-alec teenaged daughter whose lives collide with an enigmatic hitchhiker named Chekhov and a kid with a serious grudge.
News & Reviews
“… Robinson steers his story with crazy confidence, keeping us in suspense with a mystery plot and in stitches with his oddball characters and witty, acerbic dialogue… his final message of understanding and reconciliation comes poignantly seeping through… exuberantly theatrical… ” —ffwd Weekly
“Robinson knows how to write like a fiend with no shortage of scorching lines, snippets of the sharpest dialogue I’ve heard since George F. Walker and a deep understanding of, among other dynamics, the father-daughter relationship.” —The Globe & Mail
“A sharp and tightly written work… quirky and inspired black comedy… a steadily darkening combination of mystery and modern morality play.” —Calgary Herald
About the Author
Mansel Robinson’s plays include Picking Up Chekhov, Two Rooms, Colonial Tongues, Collateral Damage, The Heart As It Lived, Downsizing Democracy, Spitting Slag, Ghost Trains, Street Wheat, and Scorched Ice. He has been nominated twice for Saskatchewan Book of the Year and is the winner of the John V. Hicks Award and Geist Magazine’s Award for Distance Writing. Robinson has been writer–in–residence at the Pierre Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon; Northern Light Theatre in Edmonton; at the University of Windsor; and at the Regina Public Library. Originally from Chapleau, Ontario, Robinson was based in Saskatoon for twenty years. He now lives in northern Ontario.
