“Neva” may be set in a Russia on the verge of explosion, but the Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón still calls it “my American play” because “it was born here.” As a graduate student in film at the City University of New York a decade ago he prowled Manhattan’s bookstores, where he found Janet Malcolm’s “Reading Chekhov,” which stimulated an interest in Russian culture and politics that led him to “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924” by Orlando Figes.

“I’m delighted by the idea of writing from history — by the idea of opening a history book and inside is a theatrical work,” Mr. Calderón said during a break in rehearsals for “Neva,” which opens Monday at the Public Theater in its English-language debut.

In the play, which Mr. Calderón is also directing, Chekhov’s widow, the actress Olga Knipper, and two fictional characters, also actors, meet one Sunday in January 1905 for rehearsals in St. Petersburg as the opening act of the Russian Revolution is taking place outside their door. With the czar’s police gunning down protesters, Knipper (Bianca Amato) seems detached from reality, her focus remaining on opening night and getting her monologue in “The Cherry Orchard” right. By contrast Aleko (Luke Robertson) is a familiar Chekhovian type, an idealist like Dr. Astrov in “Uncle Vanya,” while Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is more a firebrand than her namesake in “Three Sisters.”

The play’s central question, according to Mr. Calderón, is this: “What’s the point of seeing a theatrical work when, because of politics, people are dying every day?”