Anyone who's had a guest overstay his welcome will be able to relate to "Fortune's Fool," an Ivan Turgenev play being given a dramatic reading at Fairfield University's Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts on Thursday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m.

Written in 1848, this effervescent work deftly captures the sensibility of its own time while remaining resonant, humorous and insightful. As in many of Turgenev's other works, including his better-known "A Month in the Country," this story centers on the peasantry and rising intelligentsia of 19th-century Russia.

After nine years in St. Petersburg, Olga Petrovna, a young newlywed, returns to her country home with her husband Pavel Nikolaitch Yeletsky, a minister of the Czar. In her absence, the neglected estate has been home to a number of servants and a long-term guest, Vassily Semyonitch Kuzovkin, a gentleman who has been cheated out of his own inheritance. Welcomed into the home by Olga's late father, Kuzovkin has stayed on some 30 years, ostensibly waiting for a long-overdue court settlement. "Fortune's Fool" offers a textured study of a man of noble mien floundering in the ignoble world of the provincial Russian gentry, in which the assessment of a man is measured not by his character, but by the weight of his purse.

Tickets are $7. For tickets, call the Quick Center box office at (203) 254-4010 or toll free at 1-877-ARTS-396. For more information, visit the website www.quickcenter.com.

Posted On: 02-23-2004 10:02 AM

Volume: 36 Number: 195