Who is this Anita Gates you speak of?

A.G.’s journalistic triumphs over 25 years at The New York Times include drinking with Bea Arthur (at a Trump hotel), Wendy Wasserstein (at an Italian restaurant) and Peter O’Toole (in his trailer on a mini-series set near Dublin). It is sheer coincidence that these people are now dead.

At The New York Times, she has been Arts & Leisure television editor and co-film editor, a theater reviewer on WQXR Radio, a film columnist for the Times TV Book and an editor in the Culture, Book Review, Travel, National, Foreign and Metro sections. Her first theater review for The Times appeared in 1997, assessing “Mrs. Cage,” a one-act about a housewife suspected of shooting her favorite supermarket box boy. The review was mixed.

Outside The Times, A.G. has been the author of four nonfiction books; a longtime writer for travel magazines, women's magazines and travel guidebooks; a lecturer at universities and for women’s groups; and a moderator for theater, book, film and television panels at the 92nd Street Y and the Paley Center for Media.

If she were a character on “Mad Men,” she’d be Peggy.

A Play About Gorbachev in Russia -- Oh, That's Where the Theater News Is

METHOD SWEETHEARTS Yevgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova, who star as the last first couple of the Soviet Union in Alvis Hermanis’s “Gorbachev,” at a charity event.

ANTON CHEKHOV WOULD BE proud. This week, the biggest theater news in the world was from Moscow, Moscow, Moscow. Apologies to Halley Feiffer.

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“Gorbachev,” a romantic drama — political developments stay in the background — about Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa Gorbacheva, is the biggest hit in town at the Theater of Nations. The play is “a breath of fresh air,” evoking both nostalgia and timelessness, according to Ivan Nechepurenko, a reporter in The New York Times’s Moscow bureau.

The key action in the play is a decision made by Gorbachev, played by Yevgeny Mironov, 54. In 1991, after his release from house arrest in Crimea, while thousands gathered, Mr. Gorbachev chose to go to the hospital with his wife, to hold her hand. Mironov played Dostoyevsky in the 2011 mini-series of the same name and played Lenin in “Demon Revolyutsii” in 2017.

Who knew that Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999, was “among the most hated figures in late Soviet times”? (And presumably, among the most loved by the other side.) She is played by Chulpan Khamatova, 45, who was also in “Dostoyevsky” and played Lara in Russia’s 2006 “Dr. Zhivago” mini-series.,

Theater productions have continued in Russia during the Covid-19 pandemic but with limited seating, and tickets for “Gorbachev” are selling out. Mr. Gorbachev, 90, attended one of the final rehearsals himself.

The play is done in the Russian style known as psychological realism; American actors know it as the Stanislavsky method. Or just “the method.”

“Gorbachev,” written and directed by Alvis Hermanis. Running time; 3 hours. theaterofnations.ru

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