Performance History
The Proposal was successful in its first runs in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and quickly became popular in small towns across Russia. Tsar Alexander III liked the play when he had it performed for him. Chekhov himself thought farces were not really worth much as literature; before its success, he called The Proposal a "wretched, boring, vulgar little skit." He advised its director, Leontiev, to "roll cigarettes out of it for all I care."
When Vassar College staged The Proposal in the 1920s, they performed it three times in one evening, each with a very different staging: "as realism, expressionism, and constructivism." In the second version, played closer to tragedy, the actors were masked, and in the third the actors were all dressed in work suits in a playground, tossing a ball between them.
In 1935 in the Soviet Union, the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Vsevolod Meyerhold combined The Proposal with Chekhov's other short plays The Bear and The Anniversary to form a three-act play called 33 Swoons that demonstrated the weakness of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia.
Read more about this topic: A Marriage Proposal
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