For Nina

Nina Dalton is a major movie star performing in a new play by her older, Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, Brian Bartov. Their world is shaken by the return of Gar Jackson, Nina’s former love, who has spent the past 20 years creating a work of staggering beauty and epic proportions…for Nina.

Playwright Perspective

For Nina, like most of my plays, grew out of a strange stew of ingredients. Foremost is my love of the plays of Anton Chekhov, particularly The Seagull. Just before I started writing For Nina, I had directed a workshop/reading of Chekhov’s play. The more I thought about the characters, the more I felt for the plight of Nina and Kostya, the young couple whose lives are so altered–mostly by their own folly–during the action of the play. Having been young and stupid myself once upon a time, I hated the thought of their youthful mistakes dictating their futures. So I determined to write a play where Nina, later in life, found success, fame, and something resembling happiness. I did not want the play to be bound by any fealty to Chekhov, so I changed the time and place to the Berkshires in contemporary Massachusetts and the high life of the rich and famous world of movie stars, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Broadway, and more to the point: Art versus Commerce.

Some years before, I had acted in a starry production of Canadian playwright Timothy Findley’s play, The Stillborn Lover, at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The production was directed by Martin Rabbett and starred Richard Chamberlain. Martin, Richard and I were friends, so we managed an arrangement with the theater and ended up sharing a beautiful estate on 200 acres in Stockbridge. We had many dinner, cocktail, and pool parties with much discussion about a life in the arts. Out of this–and so much else–For Nina was born.

Who

Where

Set in Stockbridge, MA, in the summer of 2004.