An Angler in the Lake of Darkness

In this funny and moving play about Leo Tolstoy and his struggles with his wife, we see the Tolstoys in their old age, when Tolstoy is attempting to renounce both art and all worldly goods, while his wife, the Countess, is desperately trying to preserve her husband's manuscripts and diaries for the benefit of her family. In counterpoint to this life or death conflict is the parallel story of the couple in their youth, when they were first married and deeply in love, Tolstoy writing one masterpiece after another but also consumed by lust and unhappy about himself, and Sonya horrified to learn about her husband's carnal desires. Their three remarkable daughters, the writers Turgenev and Chekhov, and others help tell this darkly funny love story. Part of Nigro's ongoing investigation of Russian history as reflected in the lives of its writers and mystics that also includes the plays Gogol, A Russian Play, Emotion Memory, Rasputin, and Mandelstam.