Anton Chekhov is mostly known for his plays, not for the hundreds of short stories serving as a kind of verbal photo album of his society as he viewed it. Moving Dock Theater Company's page-to-stage adaptations of these sketches formed the basis of their 2015 anthology titled, “The Anton Chekhov Book Club” — a venture that proved so popular as to mandate a sequel, this one appropriately dubbed "The Anton Chekhov Book Club Returns." This year's program encompasses such foible-prone personnel as a misanthropic professor whose excessive caution engineers his own downfall, a forlorn mother who clings to the hope of her daughter marrying well as a means of delivering the family from poverty, and a mischievous youth whose successful ruse to remedy his sweetheart's fear of tobogganing backfires upon him in unforeseen ways. The author at his most pessimistic introduces a farm wife and her estranged husband, the latter pampered to dissolution by their property's overlord, who confront the grim reality of their economic inequalities. Thankfully, this bleak portrait of conditions in Czarist Russia is offset by two purely comic vignettes, one involving a risqué work of decorative art, and the other, a studious bachelor besieged by romantic damsels, one of whom manipulates the reluctant scholar into wedlock, despite his claims to unswerving resistance. Anton isn't the only Chekhov contributing to the evening's enjoyment: The acting techniques formulated by his nephew, Michael Chekhov — chiefly its emphasis on body language as a tool for conveying character — are employed by director Dawn Arnold's ensemble with an expertise rarely seen in our Meisner-dominated theater community, rendering each individual personae immediately recognizable after little more than a change of a vest or a shawl, with any cognitive obstruction arising from the cross-gender casting likewise quickly dissipating. (Careful text interpretation also plays a part in securing our sympathy, even for those we might otherwise consider undeserving of it.) Devotees of such elitist fantasies as “Downton Abbey” are free to cozy down for the 80-minute duration of Chekhov's tour, its nostalgic milieu enhanced by Weston Williams's delightful score of familiar pre-revolution classics, but the thematic link to the disparate segments — as the Book Club members remind us repeatedly — is the readiness with which these eccentric personalities can be seen in our own society today. Look around after you leave the theater and see for yourself.
