Waiting / The Proposal

Nelson wakes up in a waiting room. There is a deadpan secretary to keep her company, and the only reading material is Highlights for Kids. Quickly, she discovers that she’s dead, and this place is a sort of purgatory. She is given a sentence of 822 years in purgatory, after which, she faces clerical errors, miscommunication, and several apathetic employees who are constantly giving her different information. Her sentence continues to grow longer and longer, leaving her to wait in this room for an eternity.

Anton Chekhov's The Proposal (often translated as A Marriage Proposal) is a hilarious, one-act farce that satirizes the institution of 19th-century marriage, where economic convenience frequently took precedence over romance. The play follows Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, a young, landowning hypochondriac, who decides it's time to settle down and get married. HIs eyes are set on Natalya Stepanova, the daughter of an older, neighboring landowner, Stepanovitch Chubukov. Over the course of this extended botched proposal Lomov and Natalya Stepanovna get into two long, spirited arguments.