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Resident Artists and Theater Companies: Michigan Classical Repertory Theatre Some of our friends and colleagues: Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority Ypsilanti Convention and Visitors Bureau Ann Arbor Area
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Riverside Arts Center, Winter, 2007, Newsletter MorrisCo Art Theatre resurrected with Chekhov’s The Seagull The MorrisCo Art Theatre is a group of local actors, musicians, directors, designers, and technicians committed to excellence in theatre. Their mission is to present the best works of the theatrical literature, emphasizing thorough and precise preparation, assiduous attention to detail, and adherence to the intentions of the authors as they understand them. Organized in the fall of 1995 as a group who had recently created a performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters , the group came together out of passion for that playwright and an ardent desire to prepare more of his plays. Because of that influence, they chose their name primarily in homage to the Moscow Arts Theatre, where Chekhov’s plays first achieved great success. Anton Chekhov was an important Russian playwright and short story writer. His work is being produced by MorrisCo Art Theatre at the Riverside Arts Center. The son of a provincial grocer, Chekhov moved to Moscow with his family and trained there as a doctor. He supported himself and his family by writing comic stories for local publications and by the age of twenty-six had become a well-known writer. But at that time, he still considered his writing to be a sideline, and he saw his medical work as his main career. Even though he was a well-known and highly-admired writer during his lifetime, he always thought of himself first as a doctor. Chekhov wrote hundreds of short stories and a novel, The Shooting Party (1885). He began to write plays while still a medical student, but the four plays which have become part of the standard repertoire ( The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters , and The Cherry Orchard ) are all from the last eight years of his life (1896 to 1904). Always successful in Russia, Chekhov did not achieve international fame until the 1920s, long after his death, thanks to Constance Garnett’s translations of his work into English. When he was still in his twenties, Chekhov caught tuberculosis from a patient and went into a long decline, spending more and more of his time away from Moscow, on his doctors’ orders. He died of the disease at a clinic in Germany at the age of forty-four. In 1901, he had married Olga Leonardovna Knipper, a well-known actress. His widow outlived him by 58 years, dying in 1959.
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In their first incarnation, MorrisCo ArtTheatre produced I Do! I Do!, The Cherry Orchard, Summer and Smoke, Uncle Vanya, Agnes of God, The Importance of Being Earnest, Arcadia, Bye-bye Love (a review), The Lady’s Not for Burning, The Rimers of Eldritch, Hedda Gabler, The Odd Couple, I Remember Mama, and The Real Inspector Hound . After A Month in The Country in 2003, they closed their company––until now. During their first run, MorrisCo received numerous awards and honorable mentions by Ann Arbor News theatre critic Christopher Potter: Best Musical for I Do! I Do! , Best Comedy for Arcadia , and runner-up for Best Comedy for The Importance of Being Earnest , among numerous others. 
Susan H. Morris, artistic director, saw her first Chekhov play, The Three Sisters , at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre when she came to UM from Omaha, Nebraska to major in music. “It changed my life,” she remembers. She went on to teach voice and music history at EMU, then to Indiana University to study, then returned to Ann Arbor and worked in administrative posts at UM for ten years. Since 1980, Morris has been a computer programmer/analyst. She is currently employed at Libbey Glass in Toledo. Even with all that work experience, her emotional response to Chekhov’s work remains unchanged. Now Chekhov loyalists are preparing the return of the MorrisCo at the Riverside in November. See the preview of their production at right. MorrisCo anticipates a full season coming up and will be announcing it here soon.