Alan Cumming Joins Dianne Wiest in The Seagull at Classic Stage

Tony Award winner Alan Cumming will join the previously announced Dianne Wiest in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at Classic Stage Company, directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev, Artistic Director of the Moscow New Drama Theatre. The production begins performances on February 20, with opening night set for March 13. The Seagull will play a limited engagement through March 30.

Written in 1896, The Seagull is widely regarded as Chekhov's first masterpiece, subtly dissecting the affairs of the heart and the demands of a life in the arts, while balancing the comic, the lyric and the tragic. Wiest is cast as the magnetic actress Arkadina, with Cumming taking the role of her lover,Trigorin.

In September, news reports indicated that British film star Kristin Scott Thomas would reprise her Royal Court Theatre performance as Arkadina with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Trigorin on Broadway this season, though no further word about the timing of that production has been announced. Ian McKellen played Sorin in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of the play, which ran briefly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The most recent major New York production of the play was a 2001 mounting in Central Park directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline as Arkadina and Trigorin.

Wiest, a two-time Academy Award winner for Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and Her Sisters, most recently starred in on the New York stage in Wendy Wasserstein's Third at Lincoln Center and Kathleen Tolan's Memory House at Playwrights Horizons. On Broadway she has appeared in Salome, Solitaire, Othello, Beyond Therapy and In the Summer House. She won Obie Awards for her performances in The Art of Dining, Other Places and Serenading Louie. On television she starred as district attorney Nora Lewin on Law & Order from 2000 to 2002 and will soon be seen in the new HBO series In Treatment.

Cumming received the Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as the Emcee in Cabaret. He has also been seen on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera and Design for Living. London theater credits include Bent, The Bacchae, Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse for which he won the TMA Best Actor Award, Cabaret, La Bete Olivier Award nomination, Ellle, Conquest of the South Pole Olivier nomination and The Accidental Death of an Anarchist at The Royal National Theatre, for which he received an Olivier Award for his performance. His film work includes co-producing, co-writing, co-directing and co-starring in The Anniversary Party, which won a National Board of Review Award and two Independent Spirit Award nominations. His latest film as director and star is Suffering Man's Charity.

The Seagull will feature with sets by Tony Award winner Santo Loquasto, costumes by Suzy Benzinger, lighting by Tony Award winner Brian MacDevitt, and a translation by Paul Schmidt. Additional casting will be announced in the coming weeks.