ANTOE CHEKHOV AND
AMERISAN THEATER IN THE FIFIIES:
A STUDY IN INFLUENCE

Dissefiation fer the Degree of Ph. D.
IAICHIGAI‘I STATE UNIVERSITY
MARY ANN WALTERS
1975

 
  

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I ABSTRACT

ANTON CHEKHOV AND AMERICAN THEATER IN THE
FIFTIES: A STUDY IN INFLUENCE

 

BY

Mary Ann Walters

Literary influences are usually traced back to
the prime movers--to those several innovators whose
contributions to literature were both new and decisive.
One of the prime movers of the modern theater was Anton
Chekhov. It is the purpose of this study to examine
several ways in which American dramas have been influ-
enced by Chekhov's innovative and complex dramaturgy, and
to suggest, in the process, answers to some of the
questions that cluster around the concept of influence
itself: What was it about Chekhov that seemed imitable?
How was Chekhov himself received by Americans? Why were
most of the plays that were labeled "Chekhovian" written
during the Fifties? Was there more than one way in which
Chekhov's influence could be demonstrated? What happened
to the Russian model when it was deliberately transplanted
in American soil? Is there anything about the American

mind which precludes a Chekhovian vision?

Mary Ann Walters

Chapter I describes what is commonly meant by the

term Chekhovian. By collecting into an integrated scheme

 

the various critical analyses of Chekhov's vision, his
character-drawing, and his plot-making, the chapter
attempts to establish a definition by consensus. But the

term Chekhovian, however it is defined, had little

 

meaning for Americans apart from the actual productions
of Chekhov's plays that were available to them. Chapter II
both qualifies and expands the definition proposed in
Chapter I by reviewing the performances of Chekhov's
plays on the American stage and the reaction to them.
By the mid-Fifties, the prolonged debate over the correct
way to perform Chekhov's plays remained unresolved, but
Chekhov had become a staple on the American stage. He
had also been named a new mentor for American dramatists.
Chapter III explores, through the comments of
critics and playwrights, the extent of such implied
indebtedness. An identifiable new genre--the low-pressure,
reticent Mood Play--emerged on Broadway during the
relatively quiet decade of the Fifties, and it was often
assumed that the Mood Plays had a common genesis in
Chekhov. A comparison of the Mood Plays with Chekhov's
plays, however, reveals that such an assumption was based
on a reductive and limited perception of Chekhov's art.
Although the Mood Plays resembled Chekhov's dramas only

casually and superficially, the decade produced at least

Mary Ann Walters

two plays which may serve as examples of the ways in which
the Chekhovian model proved useful for American playwrights.
Joshua Logan borrowed from Chekhov a plot; Lillian Hellman
garnered from him a thesis. Together, Chapters IV and V

demonstrate contrasting ways in which the term influence

 

may take on concrete meaning.

Joshua Logan's The Wisteria Trees (1950) was

 

 

intended to be an American analogue to Chekhov's The

Cherry Orchard. Despite the deliberate parallels of

 

characters and situations, however, The Wisteria Trees

 

is strangely unlike The Cherry_0rchard. Mr. Logan made

 

several additions and deletions to the plot, he changed
the method of characterization, and he substituted an
alternative means for achieving comic effect. In his
ministrations to the masterpiece, Logan missed the
Chekhovian allusiveness and universality, but he did give
the American public a cherry orchard tailored to their
sensibilities and theatrical expectations.

Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden (1951) reflects

 

a Chekhovian influence that is broader than the dupli-
cation of a specific plot. After establishing a reputation
for writing well-made plays, Miss Hellman came, in middle
age, to share with Chekhov a sobering vision of life.
Although she made into a thesis the vision that Chekhov

had allowed to remain an inconclusive suggestion, the

nature of that thesis demanded that she adjust her

Mary Ann Walters

techniques of plotting and character-drawing in favor of
the more relaxed Chekhovian method. The basic structure

of The Autumn Garden resembles the structure of Uncle

 

Vanya.

No American playwright of the Fifties ever wrote
a truly Chekhovian play. Those who were influenced by
Chekhov were influenced by fragments of his art that they
admired and found useful. There was, however, one quality
that eluded all American playwrights, and that was the

sophistication that remains Chekhov's truest signature.

ANTON CHEKHOV AND AMERICAN THEATER IN THE

FIFTIES: A STUDY IN INFLUENCE

BY

Mary Ann Walters

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1975

C0) COpyright by
MARY ANN WALTERS

1975

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to the members of my research
committee for the guidance and direction they have given
me. I am indebted to Dr. Barry Gross, Chairman, for his
probing questions and helpful suggestions, to Dr. Victor
Howard for his sensible advice and encouragement, and to
Dr. Arthur Athanason for his careful reading and useful
insights. I am also grateful to these gentlemen for their
good will and good humor, without which the preparation of
this study would not have been as pleasant a task as it

has proved to be.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter
I. THE CHEKHOV SIGNATURE. . . . . . . .
II. CHEKHOV ON THE AMERICAN STAGE . . . . .
III. "CHEKHOVITIS" IN THE FIFTIES . . . . .

IV. JOSHUA LOGAN: A CHERRY ORCHARD FOR AMERICANS

V. LILLIAN HELLMAN: THE CHEKHOVIAN GARDEN . .
AFTERWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . .

iii

Page

35
61
86
128
164
170

190

INTRODUCTION

One of the ways of viewing American drama is in
terms of its response to European influences. It is, in
fact, a commonplace of criticism to assume that American
drama borrowed nearly all of its forms and many of its
themes. Thus, in order to understand O'Neill, we look to
Sophocles, to Freud, to German expressionism, and to
Strindberg. We think of Arthur Miller as the disciple
of Ibsen, of Clifford Odets as the legatee of German
agit-prop plays, and of Tennessee Williams as the heir of
D. H. Lawrence.

We rarely Speak of it the other way around. Who
imitates O'Neill? Who is indebted to Odets? Who are the
followers of Miller? There are many, perhaps, but the
fact remains that literary influences are usually traced
back to the prime movers-~to those several innovators
whose contributions were both new and decisive. The prime
movers of the modern stage are relatively few and decidedly
un-American; they include Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Brecht,

Pirandello, Artaud, and Chekhov. It is the purpose of

this study to examine several ways in which American
dramas have been influenced by the unique and complex
dramaturgy of Anton Chekhov.

The first problem one faces in any study of
literary influences is that of establishing a definition

for the term influence. Defined too broadly, the meaning

 

of the term evaporates into woolly speculation or expands
into an unmanageable search for echoes. When the term is
used in a very broad sense, Chekhov may be said to be a
model for a great many British and American writers:
Bernard Shaw, J. B. Priestley, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine
Mansfield, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, James T.
Farrell, Paul Green, Tennessee Williams, Ellen Glasgow,
and Margaret Mitchell come to mind.

This study, however, assumes a more narrow meaning

of the term influence. It assumes two criteria for

 

determining whether or not a drama was influenced by
Chekhov: the dramatist must have been acquainted with
Chekhov's plays, and the drama itself must reveal internal
evidence of demonstrable indebtedness. The first criteria
guards against the logical fallacy of the red herring;

the second against the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter

 

hoc. Both fallacies have already surfaced in the annals
of American dramatists who wished to be associated with

Chekhov.

Take, for example, the case of Clifford Odets.
In publicity releases that preceded the Openings of

Awake and Sing! and of Paradise Lost in 1935, Odets and

 

 

other members of the Group Theatre suggested that his
plays might well be compared with those of Chekhov. In

an interview for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, members of the

 

Group were reported to have declared their colleague "the

l

nearest thing to Tchekov." Odets took up his cue in the

New York Times when he compared the middle-class characters

 

in Paradise Lost with Chekhov's characters.

 

Our confused middle class today--which dares little--

is dangerously similar to Chekhov's people. Which

is why the peOple in "Awake and Sing!" and "Paradise

Lost" (particularly the latter) have what is called

a "Chekhovian quality." Which is why it is sinful

to violate their lives and aspirations with plot

lines.2
Thus alerted, many critics looked at Odets' plays with
Chekhov in mind, and they found the similarities they
sought. The disconnected dialogue, the atmosphere of
discontent, the symbolism--all these surely demonstrated
lessons learned from Chekhov. Stark Young asserted that
"it can do Mr. Odets no harm to say that his plays could
never in the form they are now have existed without
Chekhov."3

The truth is that they did. In a column for the

World-Telegram, Odets admitted that the Chekhov analogy

was a red herring. He had never read Chekhov. "You have

my word for it that I intend to read 'The Cherry Orchard'

tonight for the first time in my life,"4 he offered with
some embarrassment.

The case of John Van Druten was quite different.
There was never any doubt, really, that Van Druten was
thoroughly acquainted with Chekhov. His mother was the
notorious lady who, after seeing the London Stage Society

perform The Cherrnyrchard in 1911, had declared that

 

either the play was completely insane or the entire
audience was. Van Druten took it upon himself to explain
what it was about Chekhov that had so bewildered his
mother, and he declared himself in Chekhov's debt for
revealing to him an entirely new method of writing plays.

I Am a Camera, Van Druten explained, was a Chekhovian

play.5

The play itself, however, belies its author's
assertions. If it is in any way Chekhovian, it is so
only in the most superficial sense. I Am_a Camera fails
to meet the second requirement for indebtedness-~the
testimony of the play itself.

When the concept of influence is defined through
the application of these two criteria--the testimony of
the author and the testimony of the play--the field is

narrowed considerably. Plays like Odets' Awake and Sing!

 

and Van Druten's I Am a Camera are systematically excluded.
It is not the purpose of this study, however, to exhaust

the field, even a field thus narrowed. I have not

attempted to answer questions of statistics or bibliogra-
phy. Rather, I have been interested in broader, more
speculative questions that would seem to cluster around
the concept of influence itself. What was it about
Chekhov that seemed imitable? How was Chekhov himself
received by Americans? Was there more than one way in
which his influence could be demonstrated? What happened
to the Russian model when it was deliberately transplanted
in American soil? Why were most of the plays that were
labeled "Chekhovian" written during the Fifties? Is there
anything about the American mind which precludes a
Chekhovian vision?

Not all of these questions can be answered with
absolute certainty, and I have made no attempt to force
this investigation into the service of tidy conclusions.
I have assumed throughout that negative evidence is as
valid as positive evidence, and have allowed questions
to remain so when the answers I was seeking continued to
be elusive or proved to be untrue.

This study concentrates on and ends with the
American dramas of the mid-Fifties. The influence of
Chekhov did not exhaust itself at that time, of course,
but the decade of the Fifties did seem to be the heyday
for the Chekhovian fashion in American dramaturgy.

Chapter I attempts to describe what is commonly

meant by the term Chekhovian. Because the purpose of the

chapter is that of establishing a definition by con-
sensus, I have advanced no new theories or interpretations.
I have merely tried to collect the explications of

several critics into an integrated scheme, although I
became, in the process, particularly fond of William
Styan's interpretations of Chekhov's plays in Chekhov In

Performance, and of Maurice Valency's insights in The

 

Breaking String.

 

The term Chekhovian, however it is defined, had‘

 

little meaning for American audiences apart from the
actual productions of Chekhov's plays that were available
to them. Chapter II briefly reviews the productions of
Chekhov's plays on the American stage into the decade of
the Fifties, and thus may be considered a companion
chapter to Chapter I. The performances of the plays and
the reactions to those performances sometimes qualify,
sometimes reinforce the definition that is proposed in
Chapter I.

Chapter III is, in some respects, the nexus of
this study. It explores, through the comments of critics
and playwrights, the availability of the Chekhovian model
for American playwrights. It also addresses itself to
the Mood Play, a genre that seemed to be particularly
endemic to the relatively quiet decade of the Fifties.

Out of that decade came at least two plays which

may serve as examples of the ways in which the Chekhovian

model proved useful for American playwrights. Joshua
Logan borrowed from Chekhov a plot; Lillian Hellman
garnered from him a thesis. Together, Chapters IV and V

demonstrate contrasting ways in which the term influence

 

may take on concrete meaning.

CHAPTER I

THE CHEKHOV SIGNATURE

The term Chekhovian entered the lexicon of modern

 

dramatic criticism shortly after Chekhov's four major
plays were made available to European and American
audiences. The plays seemed strange at first; they
bewildered audiences, intrigued directors, and invited
imitators. Since that time, critics, viewing other plays
by other playwrights, have been reminded of Chekhov, and
many of them have noted the resemblances by a rather

loose application of the term Chekhovian to the plays

 

under consideration. It is the purpose of this chapter

to give the term Chekhovian a definition by reviewing

 

the characteristics of Chekhov's dramaturgy.

Chekhov articulated his artistic credo often and
consistently. He thought the most interesting subject
for art was ordinary life; one ought, he felt, to "write
simply--about how Pyotr Semyonovich got married to Mariya

Ivanovna, that's all."1 Elsewhere he elaborated:

In real life, people don't spend every minute shooting
at each other, hanging themselves and making confession
of love. They don't spend all the time saying clever
things. They're more occupied with eating, drinking,
flirting and talking stupidities--and these are the
things which ought to be shown on stage. A play
should be written in which people arrive, go away,
have dinner, talk about the weather and play cards.
Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they
are--not on stilts. . . . Let everything on the stage
be just as complicated and at the same time just as
simple as it is in life. People eat their dinner,
just eat their dinner, and all the time their
happiness is being established or their lives are
being broken up.2

Chekhov's commitment to "life . . . exactly as it is"
sounds very much like that of Zola, who wrote in 1880:

You start from the point that nature is sufficient,
that you must accept it as it is, without modifi-
cation or pruning; it is grand enough, beautiful
enough to supply its own beginning, its middle, and
its end. Instead of imagining an adventure, of
complicating it, of arranging stage effects, which
scene by scene will lead to a final conclusion, you
simply take the life study of a person or a group of
persons, whose actions you faithfully depict. The
work becomes a report, nothing more; it has but the
merit of exact observation, or more or less profound
penetration and analysis, of the logical connection
of facts.3

Because Chekhov's basic assumptions about drama are so
similar to those of Zola, it is useful to think of
Chekhov as a Naturalist. A doctor by vocation and
training (although there is little evidence that Chekhov
spent much time in the practice of medicine), he was wont
to speak of his art in the language of the scientists.

He wrote in 1887:

10

To chemists there is nothing unclean in this world.
A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist;
he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity and realize
that manure piles play a very respectable role in a
landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in
life as good ones.4

One year later he argued that he thought of himself as
"an ordinary reporter," whose job it was merely to record
what he saw and heard.
It seems to me that it is not up to writers to solve
such questions as God, pessimism and so on. The job
of the writer is to depict only who, how and under
what circumstances people have spoken or thought
about God or pessimism. The artist should not be a
judge of his characters or of what they say, but
only an objective observer. I heard a confused,
indecisive talk by two Russians on pessimism and so
must convey this conversation in the same form in
which I heard it, but it is up to the jury, i.e.,
the readers, to give it an evaluation. My job is
only to be talented, i.e., to be able to throw
light upon some figures and speak their language.
Naturalism is a way of looking at reality, but it
does not necessarily provide a method for communicating
that vision. The fact is that Chekhov did not develop a
new method for "throw[ing] light upon some figures and
speak[ing] their language," a method which set him apart
from other Naturalists and other Realists. In order to
arrive at the differentia of Chekhov's art, it is helpful
to take a look at the way in which his plays evolved from
the standard theater fare of the late nineteenth century.
In 1887, when Chekhov wrote his first serious play,

Ivanov, the Russian theater was subsisting on farces, the

realistic comedies of Ostrovsky, and the translations

ll

of Scribe and Sardou.6 Chekhov's early one-act plays are
farces. Ivanov is essentially a well-made melodrama.

But as Chekhov began to rely more and more on his own
vision of "life as it is" and less on life according to
the expectations of the theater, he gradually sloughed
off the theatrical conventions of Scribe and Sardou7 or
converted them almost beyond recognition to his own ends.

By the time he had written The Sea Gull he wrote to his

 

editor Souvorin: "Well, I have finished with the play.

. . . I began it forte and ended it pianissimo--contrary
8

 

to all the rules of dramatic art." By the time he

wrote The Cherry Orchard, he had pretty much purged his

 

craft of all the overtly melodramatic mannerisms that
were his inheritance, and his legacy was a relatively new
form in which to cast his Naturalistic vision. That
legacy may be examined in terms of theme, plot-making,
and character-drawing.

Strictly speaking, Chekhov's plays do not have
themes at all. Chekhov did have ideas, however, and many
of his personal ideas about life and art are put into the
mouths of his characters. In every play, there are

several potential raissoneurs: In The Sea Gull Trepleff

 

articulates Chekhov's exasperation with an outmoded

theater, in The Cherry Orchard Trofimoff echoes his

 

impatience with the useless intelligentsia, in The Three

 

Sisters Virshinin states his hopes for the future, and

12

in Uncle Vanya Astroff, with his love of trees and his

 

medical conscience, seems to be a man much like Chekhov
himself. None of these characters, however, is allowed
to be the authorial mouthpiece, for the plays themselves
forbid such identifications. Chekhov's characters
invariably undercut or qualify the ideas that they
eSpouse. Trepleff may be right about the state of the
Russian stage, but his own contribution to that stage is
dreadful. Virshinin, who believes that "after two or
three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably
beautiful,"9 has urgent domestic reasons for his prophecy.
Trofimoff, who passes judgment on the idle gentry, does
nothing himself; when we first hear of him, he is asleep,
and when we last see him, he is searching helplessly for
his rubbers. And Astroff, perhaps the strongest candidate
for raissoneur in any of the plays, leaves his trees and
his medical practice to flirt with the exquisite Elena.
We cannot find Chekhov the man in any of his
plays. He held no idea so dear that he was willing to
write a play about it or sacrifice a character for its
sake. His plays are not about ideas at all (students of
Chekhov have difficulty finding lines to underline), and
thus they make a clean break with the didacticism that
pervades so much of Western theater. While Chekhov's
most famous contemporaries, Shaw and Ibsen, were pressing

their dramas into the service of intellectual propositions,

l3

and while even the Naturalists were making tacit predi-
catiOns about the scientific nature of reality, Chekhov
refused to enlist us in any cause or summon us to accept
any explicit truth. He also refused to make any moral
judgments.

Readers of Western drama are accustomed to making
moral judgments, as our vocabulary will testify. We
Speak of heroes, villains, tragic flaws, poetic justice,
and satire--terms which assume, to one degree or another,
a dualism of good and evil. Most dramas highlight a
conflict, one side of which is preferable to the other,
or expose a condition which is either good or bad.
Chekhov remained curiously aloof from such assumptions.
His plays contain neither heroes nor villains, and when-
ever we think we may have found a villain, we are uncom-
fortable with Chekhov's treatment of him. How are we to
feel, for example, about Ivanov, a man who brings ruin
to everyone around him? We may be inclined to share
Lvov's harsh, direct condemnation: "Your behavior disgusts

10 But Lvov is not

me, it offends my sense of decency."
entirely trustworthy. Chekhov described him as "the
embodiment of a program, a walking tendency. He looks
through a narrow frame at every person and event, he
judges everything according to preconceived nations."11
Frustrated in our own attempts to "judge [characters]

according to preconceived notions," we must take Chekhov

14

at his word when he said of his play: "I wanted to be
original: I did not portray a single villain, not a
single angel (though I could not refrain when it came to
the clown), did not accuse anyone, or exculpate."12
Later he added, "If the audience will leave the theatre
with the conviction that Ivanovs are scoundrels and that
Doctor Lvovs are great men, then I'll have to give up
and fling my pen to the devil."13
Chekhov was consistent in his refusal to condemn
or condone. Just as there are potential raissoneurs in
every play, there are also potential villains and victims.
All of them, however, are qualified out of our unequivocal
judgment or sympathy. Trigorin, for example, is a
character in the tradition of the melodramatic stage
villain. He seduces Nina, impregnates her, and then
abandons her to go back to his former mistress. Ihg Sea
QEII, however, is not a play about seduction and abandon-
ment; these events never take place on stage at all, but
rather occur sometime between Acts III and IV. Instead
of emphasizing Trigorin's villainy, the play calls
attention to smaller things: he loves fishing, he jots
down all his thoughts in a notebook, he is conscious of
his professional mediocrity, and he has holes in his
shoes.14 Trigorin is too weak, too ordinary, too

recognizable to be a proper villain. And so it is with

Serebriakoff, Natasha, and Lopahin. A stronger case may

15

be made for Natasha's villainy than for the others,
perhaps, but even she is too familiar, too normal to be

wholly evil.15

Chekhov was concerned simply that we
understand his characters, and, as he remarked in his
notebook, "To understand is to forgive, and it would be
strange not to forgive."16

Chekhov made it a point to equivocate his victims
as well as his villains, and in doing so, he departed
from both the melodramatic tradition and from the
Naturalistic bias, which tended to see characters as
helpless victims of deterministic causality. His plays
are full of victims--charming, lovable peOple whose
plights make us sad. But these charming people are also
foolish, idle, extravagant, irresponsible, and short-
sighted. Who, then, is to blame for their fates? That
question is one Chekhov never really asked.

Chekhov's plays are deliberately amoral. They
are also non-political, and the two stances are, of
course, related. Chekhov himself was disinterested in
politics; in 1889 he wrote to a radical friend: "I am
(not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in
gradual politics, not a monk, not an indifferentist.

I would like to be a free artist and nothing more.
"17

. . . There are, however, potentially political

issues in all his plays, and especially in The Cherry

 

Orchard. The Russia of Chekhov's day was unstable and

16

repressive, and though there is little evidence that
Chekhov sensed revolutions around the corner, a majority
of his characters are discontent with the status quo.
Some, like Fiers and the Prozoroff sisters, look back to
happier days in the past. Others--Virshinin, Astroff,
Trofimoff, Anya, Andrei--Speak enthusiastically about a
better life in the future. But no one of these prOphets
of the future has a Specific program in mind; each merely
hOpes that somehow the world will be a happier place in

a few hundred years. In the meantime they resolve,

idly, to work. It would seem that it was not the nature
of their all-too-vague political dreams that interested
18

Chekhov but rather the irony of their having any at all.

Political issues are less vague in The Cherry

 

Orchard. In this play a very real class struggle is
taking place; we see a former peasant rise in economic
and social stature to the point of purchasing the estate
he once worked on, and we see the corresponding dis-
possession of the landed gentry. But even this Situation
is treated ambiguously. In his perceptive study,
Chekhov In Performance, J. L. Styan notes that

Chekhov makes nothing political of this [situation];

rather, it is emphasized that the man who buys it

had no intention of doing so, and Chekhov takes

immense pains to subvert any easy alignment of the

spectator either with the old or the new owner.

If the "action" concerns the sale of the orchard,

its fate is sealed from the start, and.Chekhov denies
his audience the satisfaction of a sensational

17

crisis. In its place the play that Chekhov wrote
allows only an intelligent, objective curiosity
about how the sale of the estate will affect the
individual lives of those who live there. Chekhov
takes no stand on the issues themselves; there is
no triumph, no villainy, no message, no lesson, no
argument.19

By firmly eschewing triumphs, villainy, messages,
lessons, and arguments of all sorts, Chekhov managed to
disengage himself from the mainstream of romantic,
realistic, and naturalistic drama. He did so even more
decisively by his innovative method of plot-making.

The adjective that is applied most frequently to
Chekhov's plays is "plotless." When critics do address
themselves to the problem of Chekhov's plots anyway,
they often do so by way of analogy; they compare Chekhov's
plots not with those of any other playwright but rather
with music, with impressionistic paintings, and with
poetry. It will best serve our purposes to arrive at a
description of the structure of Chekhov's plays by way
of contrast-—by contrasting them with the orthodox
method of plotting.

A long time ago, Aristotle declared plot the
most important element of drama. He called attention
to the fact that the most effective plots were those
which proceeded, in linear fashion, from a beginning
through a middle toward an end. The relationship between

the events should be that of cause to effect, and the

resolution at the end of a plot was best achieved by

18

means of recognitions, discoveries, and peripetia.
Aristotle's suggestions became assumptions for most
Western dramatists and critics, and tightly linear

plotting became the sine qua non for any well-made play.

 

Chekhov's plays break with this tradition.
They do have plots, but, as he refined his method of
structuring his plays, Chekhov relegated the plots more
and more to the background. Plots are, after all, a
theatrical convention. Life does not come in plots;
lives are usually lived much more piecemeal than
Aristotle's suggestions would imply. When we actually
see when we observe peOple is "eating, drinking, flirting
and talking stupidities." Somewhere underneath these
trivial commonplaces, people's "happiness is being
established or their lives are being broken up." The
establishment of happiness and breaking up of lives
constitute the plots of Chekhov's plays, but only during
his internship did he dramatize these processes on
stage. In his mature plays he hid away the plots and
the usual furniture of plot-making--the obligatory
scene,21 the climactic reversal, and the conclusive
denouement.

Chekhov apparently began writing plays with no

thought of doing anything new. Ivanov and The Wood

 

Demon, his first full-length plays, are fairly con-

ventional melodramas. The plot of Ivanov concerns the

19

results of the unfortunate marriage of the protagonist,
who, after sending his wife to her grave and narrowly
escaping a second marriage with a young girl, shoots
himself in an apprOpriate gesture of remorse. The final
"big scene" is preceded by three dramatic curtain scenes.
Chekhov admitted that each act ended with "a sockdologer.
All my energy was spent on a few really brisk, forceful
"21

climaxes. . . . Two years after he finished Ivanov,

Chekhov wrote The Wood Demon, a romantic comedy which

 

boasted not only a dramatic suicide, but the timely
revelations of a hidden diary and three complete sets of

lovers. With Ivanov and The Wood Demon, Chekhov proved

 

 

himself capable of writing well-made plays. But he was
not particularly good at it.

In the Six-year interval between The Wood Demon

 

and The Sea Gull Chekhov apparently took another look

 

around and noticed that "in real life, peOple don't

Spend every minute Shooting at each other, hanging
themselves and making confessions of love." Consequently,
he deliberately flattened the obligatory scenes. After

The Wood Demon, the climactic moments of the plays

 

barely rise above the level of expository action and, in
the last play, they are dispensed with altogether.
Trepleff kills himself, surely, but his suicide is
mentioned only in the last line of the play, and it is

a throw-away line at that. Vanya shoots twice at

20

Serebriakoff and misses both shots. In The Three Sisters,

 

the shot that signals Tusenbach's death is heard faintly
in the distance, and the fact of his death is muted by

the inconsequential dialogue on stage. In The Cherry

 

Orchard there are no climactic scenes whatever.
Chekhov went further than reducing the climactic
scenes; he suppressed central actions altogether. "Be

22 he wrote his brother Alexander,

awkward and impudent,"
and it was certainly the height of impudence to disquise
as he did the normal theatrical process of development
and crisis. If there is a central action in IE3 Sea
Eflllv it is the rivalry between two artists for the

love of a girl. In the hands of a more conventional
dramatist, the reversal of the play would have been
Trigorin's abandonment of Nina and return to Arkadina.
But none of this is Shown on stage. Nina's degradation
takes place during the two years that lapse between

Acts III and IV and is merely reported by Trepleff in

Act IV. Similarly, the central action of The Cherry

 

Orchard is the sale of the orchard. Everything in the
play leads up to it or down from it. An auction scene
would have made exciting theatrical fare, but Chekhov
chose not to dramatize it. His characteristic method
was to dramatize instead a potpourri of secondary actions,
usually based upon or motivated by the central action,

but sometimes related to it only tangentially. He buried

21

his plots underneath the surface of the plays to con-
centrate on the smaller actions that take place on the
surface. Maurice Valency, in his fine critical biography,
compared Chekhov's plots to "an invisible skeleton, an
indispensable armature which sustains and justifies,
but is not in itself the action of the play."23 Those
secondary actions that do get dramatized on stage seem
to be disciplined only by the frame of the departure-
arrival pattern Chekhov favored. Within that frame,
there is no linear progression of cause—effect relation-
ships between actions. The relationship of one action
to another is that of juxtaposition rather than causality,
a juxtaposition in which one scene:modifies another by
ironic or discordant contrast.

By avoiding big scenes and by burying his plots,
Chekhov was able to "let everything on the stage be
just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple
as it is in life." That complex simplicity has additional
implications for Chekhov's denouements. He was convinced
that in real life people do not change very much. They
make mistakes, they suffer, and they see the world change
around them, but these events do not make much differ-
ence; peOple remain what they always were, and sometimes
that fact is the only thing they learn. Translated into
dramaturgic terms, this means that Chekhov's plays may

contain recognitions, but no peripetia.

22

The time-honored formula for dramatic action is
that a conflict is resolved by means of a peripety,
usually accompanied by a discovery or recognition, and
that peripety leads to a resolution. Chekhov's plays
stOp short of any peripetias. The disturbing visit of
the beautiful Elena changes nothing; it merely makes
Sonia, Astroff, and Vanya more excruciatingly aware of
the waste of their lives. The Prozoroffs are the same
at the end of the play as they were at the beginning--
only more so. Nothing happens to save the cherry
orchard. There is a small, ironic reversal in Ihg

Cherry Orchard, however; Semyonoff-Pishtchik's estate

 

is saved, but it is saved by superfluous chance, and
the gratuitous discovery of white clay on his land
merely highlights the fate of the Gayeff estate. The
kind of recognition that is characteristically Chekhovian
leads to no changes at all; his characters come to the
awareness that what seemed to be so really is so. Eric
Bentley, in In_Search 9; Theatre, contrasts this kind
of recognition with that of Ibsen:
In Ibsen the terrible thing is that the surface of
everyday life is a smooth deception. In Chekhov
the terrible thing is that the surface of everyday
life is itself a kind of tragedy. In Ibsen the
whole surface of life is suddenly burst by volcanic
eruption. In Chekhov the crust is all too firm;

the volcanic energies of men have no chance of
emerging.

23

Chekhov's practice of suspending rather than
resolving his actions goes a long way toward explaining
the strangely disquieting effect of his plays. It would
have been conventionally satisfying for Lopahin to marry
Varya, for Olga to have ousted Natasha, for a dens ex
machina to have saved the cherry orchard. When none of
these things happens, we are forced to realize that
life is not that way, and we feel a sense of loss.
Though an equilibrium of sorts is established at the
end of each play, the pity is that it is so much like
the equilibrium at the beginning.

The waste, the pity, the loss that we feel after
reading all his plays is perhaps the most distinctive
Chekhovian note. No one who has addressed himself to
either Chekhov's plays or his short stories has failed
to mention the particular mood of wistful sadness that
pervades all his works. Russian critics claimed that

Chekhov invented the "literature of nastroenie."25

 

Many critics, failing to find any plot, but reluctant

to say that the plays lacked unity, spoke of their unity
of mood. "Unity of mood" is not a very useful critical
concept, although it is descriptive of the identical
effect evoked by all the plays. But that effect is
difficult even to define and impossible to analyze.

One can only suggest tentatively that the Chekovian

mood is created in part by the beautiful natural settings,

24

in part by the sound effects, in part by the indeterminate

plots, in part by the absence of definite themes, and in
part by the poignant lives of the fragile patricians who
occupy his stage.
When Chekhov looked about him at "life as it is,"
he noticed no plots and no themes. But he did notice
people. The main energy of all of his plays, therefore,
is given to characterization, and, unlike Ibsen's, many
of Chekhov's characters seem to be allowed to exist
quite apart from their specific service to plot or idea.
Chekhov's method of characterization is perhaps his most
important contribution to the modern stage.
First of all, he dispensed with conventional
heroes and stereotypes and protagonists. He dispensed
with heroes for the simple reason that he never saw any.
He explained to a young writer:
I am often reproached--even Tolstoy has reproached
me--with writing about trifles. I'm told I have
no positive heroes; revolutionaries, Alexanders of
Macedon, or even, as in Leskov's stories, honest
police inspectors. But where am I to get them
from? Our life is provincial, our towns are
unpaved, our villages are poor, our people are
Shabby. When we are young, we all chirp raptur-
ously like Sparrows on a heap of muck, but at the
age of forty, we are already old and start thinking
of death. . . . What sort of heroes are we?26

He dispensed with stereotypical characters for the

equally Simple reason that he had seem them too often.

He said,

25

Retired captains in the reserve, with huge, red
noses, newspaper—reporters who drink, starving
authors, consumptive women-toilers, honest young
peOple without a flaw in their make-up, ideal
maidens, good-natured nurses,—-all these have

been described again and again, and should be
avoided as a pitfall.27

The avoidance of heroes and melodramatic stereo-
types made Chekhov modern, but it did not necessarily
distinguish him from Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg. The
dismissal of protagonists did. In each of the plays
after Ivanov, Chekhov distributed the focus of his
attention among members of a group rather than concentra-
ting it on a single character. The concept of ensemble
character-drawing was so new that it was only because of
the happy alliance of Chekhov with the orchestrated
acting techniques of the Moscow Art Theatre that it could
even be understood.

Although Chekhov concentrated on many characters
equally, he slighted none; he saw them all as individuals.
Seeing them as individuals meant that he was not so much
interested in his characters' dramatic functions as in
their essence, or in "life as it is" for characters who
are unaware that they have any dramatic function at all.
And the method he found for expressing the inner lives
or essence of these characters was quite unprecedented.

Stage dialogue typically serves two functions:

it reveals the thoughts of the characters and it moves

26

the action forward. Consider a bit of dialogue from the

second act of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler:

 

HEDDA: Do you find it so very strange that a young
girl-~when she can do so, without anyone
knowing--

LOVBORG: Yes--?

HEDDA: --that she wants to take a peek into a world

which--

LOVBORG: —-which--

HEDDA: --she is not supposed to know anything about?

LOVBORG: So that was it!

HEDDA: That, too. That, too-—I think--

LOVBORG: Companionship in the lust for life. But
why couldn't that at least have continued?

HEDDA: That was your own fault.

LOVBORG: You were the one who broke off.

HEDDA: Yes, when reality threatened to enter our
relationship. Shame on you, Eilert Lovborg!
How could you want to do a thing like that
to your frank and trusting comrade!

LOVBORG: (clenching his hands) Oh, why didn't you
do’it! Why didn't you shoot me down, as
you said you would!

HEDDA: Because I'm scared of scandal.

LOVBORG: Yes, Hedda. You are really a coward.

 

28

The main purpose of this scene is expository.
With admirable economy Ibsen informs us about the nature
of Lovborg and Hedda's past relationship, about Hedda's
cowardice, about Lovborg's latent death wish. He also
points ahead to the gun shots, deaths, and scandals
later in the play. The scene is well made. It is so
well made that we have the impression that Hedda and
Lovborg are collaborating in the making of their scene;
their lines are almost stichomythic in the way they
dovetail into each other, and their words are precisely
the ones that underscore one of the themes of the play.

Lovborg speaks of "companionship in the lust for life,"

27

and Hedda notes how "reality threatened to enter our
relationship." Hedda and Lovborg are proving something
for Ibsen, and thus their words have a direct relation
to their thoughts.

Chekhov was aware that in off-stage conversations,
words may have only an oblique relation to thoughts, and
he allowed his dialogue to reveal this truism. In real
life words serve many different functions. Sometimes we
use words to conceal or camouflage our thoughts. Often
we express our private train of thoughts without regard
for the tOpic at hand and without reference to others.
Sometimes we say nothing, even when there is much that
could be said. Most of us guard very carefully the
hidden depths of our personalities; none of us expresses
everything that he thinks or feels. And so it is with
Chekhov's characters. Chekhov was interested first of
all in the guarded depths of their personalities, and
this he could only reveal indirectly or obliquely by
letting the characters talk out of their hearts willy-
nilly and without apparent regard for the advancement
of action or idea.

In Act III of The Cherry Orchard the central

 

action of the play--the auction--is taking place off
stage. On stage there is a party. In the inner room
there is dancing and music which frequently spills into

the downstage area, where the following dialogue ensues:

28

(TROFIMOFF and LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA dance in the

ballroom and then in the drawingproom. )—

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA: Merci. I'll sit down awhile--
(Sitting down) I mtired.

ANYA (ANYA enters. Agitated): And just now in the
kitchen some man was saying that the cherry
orchard had been sold today.

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA: Sold to whom?

ANYA: He didn't say who to. He's gone.

(Dancing with TROFIMOFF, they pass into the
ballroom.)

YASHA: It was some old man babbling there. A
stranger.

FIERS: And Leonid Andreevich is still not here,
he has not arrived. The overcoat he has on
is light, mid-season--1et's hope he won't
catch cold. Ach, these young things!

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA: I Shall die thismminute. Go,
Yasha, find out who it was sold to.

YASHA: But he's been gone a long time, the old
fellow. (Lau hin .)

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA (W1th some annoyance): Well,
what are you laughing at? What are you so
amused at?

YASHA: Epihodoff is just too funny. An empty-
headed man. Twenty-two misfortunes!

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA: Fiers, if the estate is sold,
where will you go?

FIERS: Wherever you say, there I'll go.

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA: Why do you look like that?
Aren't you well? You know you ought to go
to bed--

FIERS: Yes—-(With a sneer) I go to bed and without
me who's go1ng to serve, who'll take care of
things? I'm the only one in the whole house.

YASHA (To LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA): Lyuboff Andreevna,
let— me ask a favor of you, do be so kind! If
you ever go back to Paris, take me with you,
please do! It's impossible for me to stay
here. (Looking around him, and speaking in a
low voice) Why talk about it? You can see —for
yourself it' S an uncivilized country, an
immoral people and not only that, there's the
boredom of it. The food they give us in that
kitchen is abominable and there's that Fiers,
too, walking about and muttering all kinds of
words that are out of place. Take me with
you, be so kind!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

29

PISHTCHIK (Pishtchik enters): Allow me to ask you--
for a little waltz, most beautiful lady--
(LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA goes with him) Charming
lady, I must borrow a hundred and eighty
roubles from you—-wi11 borrow--(Dancing) a
hundred and eighty roubles-- (They pass into
the ballroom.)

YASHA (Singing low): "Wilt thou know the unrest
in my soul!W__

 

 

 

Here we have no sense at all that the characters
are joining forces to move the play forward or to reveal
to us their characters. Lyuboff is in a state of
nervous anxiety about Gayeff's fortunes at the auction—-
anxiety which She tries to control and which no one
else on stage seems to Share. Anya lets fall the
bombshe11--the news that the orchard has been sold.

But Anya has her mind on other things. Trofimoff has
instructed her that "All Russia is our orchard," and
orchards of any sort are less important to her than the
chance to dance with Trofimoff. Her reply to Lyuboff's
question is hurried and unconcerned. Fiers, preoccupied
as usual with prOpertieS and the specific care of Gayeff,
merely adds to her anxiety and frustration. Yasha is

no help either. He is reflecting patronizingly and
smugly on his unfortunate rival for the favors of
Dunyasha. Pishtchik seizes the opportunity of a dance
with Lyuboff to ask once again for a loan. And so it
goes. The question that hangs over the scene is this:

Who bought the orchard? But nearly every Speech in the

30

scene is irrelevant to that question. Instead, the
speeches reveal the separate preoccupations of each
character.

Sometimes the speeches cover up even that.
Chekhov's characters are reticent people, for the most
part, and they occasionally use language to conceal

rather than to reveal their thoughts. In The Cherry

 

Orchard there is a scene between LOpahin and Varya

which, in the hands of a more conventional dramatist,

would be an obligatory love scene. In Chekhov's hands

the scene is abortive; very few of Chekhov's lovers

find their love reciprocated. Lopahin is expected to

ask Varya to marry him, and She is prepared to say

"yes." But Lopahin talks instead about the weather and

his trip to Harkhoff. Varya mentions a broken thermo-

meter and pretends to be searching for something. The

tension between the trivia that is spoken and the deeper

feelings that remain unspoken is punctuated by painful

pauses. The scene is slow and awkward. Nothing happens.
We do not know why Lopahin does not ask Varya to

marry him. Perhaps he is too embarrassed, perhaps he

is in love with Lyuboff, perhaps he is too self-conscious

of his peasant origins, or perhaps he is not all that

fond of Varya. We can guess, but we can never know for

sure. Chekhov invariably left the question of his

31

characters' motives unanswered, for he was reluctant to
view them as behavioral case studies. Valency observes
that
the result of this resolute objectivity is an
immense gain in the vitality of the character-
ization. Modern drama, with its rigorously
analytic method, often gives the impression of
an autOpsy, an examination of the walking dead.
But Chekhov's characters Spring to life readily,
in all their dimension, intact and self-
contained the moment they are contemplated.
They are neither analyzed nor dissected; their
inner life is their own. They remain mysterious,
and their mystery interests us particularly
because the author does not suggest that he
understands it; and if he understands it, he
makes no move to betray it.29

Nor does Chekhov allow his characters to betray
each other. Much of dramatic dialogue reads like a
debate in which the dramatist uses one character to
unmask or score over an opponent. But when Chekhov's
characters say something banal, insincere, or unkind,
the remark is allowed to pass or to die in a pause,
and the audience is left considering its source.

This is not to say that Chekhov's characters
never say anything incisive or condemning or directly
revelatory. They do. But most often Chekhov under-
cuts the weight of their remarks with a gesture or

disparate action. In a heated moment of truth in The

Cherry Orchard, Trofimoff tells Lyuboff what he thinks

 

of her Parisian lover: "But he is a scoundrel, only you,
you are the only one that doesn't know it. He is a

petty scoundrel, a nonentity--" Stung into anger,

32

Lyuboff retaliates with: "You are not above love,
Petya, you are, as our Fiers would say, just a good-
for—nothing. Imagine, at your age, not having a
mistress--!" Both accusations, true as they are, are
undercut by Trofimoff's stagey over-reaction and
farcical exit.

TROFIMOFF (Horrified): This is terrible! What
is She saying! (Goes quickly into the
ballroom, clutching his head) This is
horr1ble--I can't bear it, I am going-—
(Goes out but immediately returns) All is
over between us. (Goes out into the hall.)

LYUBOFF ANDREEVNA (Shouting after him): Petya,
wait! You funny creature, I was joking!
Petya! (In the hall you hear someone
running np the stairs and suddenly falling
back down with a crash. Inn hear ANYA nng
VARYA scream buE 1mmediate y you hear
laughter) WhaETs that?

ANYA (ANYA runs In. Laughing): Petya fell down
the stairs!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here Chekhov uses a combination of the head-
clutching of old-fashioned melodrama and the pratfalls
of farce to touch a truth that is less theatrical, but
much deeper, than the actual reputation of Lyuboff's
lover or the sex life of Trofimoff. What the characters
think of themselves is more to Chekhov's point than what
is "objectively" true of them, and the ironic fact is
that they sometimes think of themselves theatrically.30
Trofimoff's image of himself is that of misunderstood
visionary. In his love scene with Anya in Act II, he

orates to her a self-portrait which seems at once

rehearsed and aesthetically satisfying to him:

33

Believe me, Anya, believe me! I am not thirty yet,
I am young, I am still a student, but I have already
borne so much! Every winter I am hungry, Sick,
anxious, poor as a beggar, and--where has destiny
not chased me, where haven't I been! And yet, my
soul has always, every minute, day and night, been
full of inexplicable premonitions. I have a
premonition of happiness, Anya, I see it already-—
Such a man--who can speak thus of himself to an in—
fatuated young girl on a moonlit night--would be precisely
the kind of character who would clutch his head and say
the theatrical line: "All is over between us." The line
rings true. It also rings false. Chekhov has undercut
the way Trofimoff sees himself by his own words, by his
actions, by the way the other characters see him, and
by ringing the changes on a traditional theatrical
convention.

This method of undercutting, or of the juxta-
position of line or action, became Chekhov's sharpest
tool for probing the deep and elusive truths of "life
as it is." "Chekhov knows," says Styan,

that by reversing a current of feeling, muting a
climax, toppling a character's dignity, contra-
dicting one statement with another, juxtaposing
one impression with its Opposite, he is training
his audience to see the truth of the total situ-
ation. To be compassionate and yet cool at the
same time is to take a big step nearer this truth,
and Chekhov's final, hard discipline is to prove
that the truth is relative by trying it dia-
lectically on his audience's feelings.3

The "training" of American audiences "to see

the truth of the total situation" was a process that

34

took several decades. But as Americans became more and
more familiar with Chekhov's innovative methods of
plot-making, character-drawing, and undercutting, the

Chekhovian truths also became available to them.

CHAPTER II

CHEKHOV ON THE AMERICAN STAGE

Chekhov was first brought to the American stage
by way of the Little Theatre movement. During the
1915-1916 season, seven years before the Moscow Art
Theatre formally introduced Chekhov to Americans, the
Washington Square Players twice included Chekhov in the
repertory.

A casually organized group of theatrical
amateurs, the Washington Square Players were dedicated
to the production of plays written by their own members
and by unfamiliar foreign playwrights not likely to be
performed on Broadway. Not many foreign playwrights
were familiar to Americans or likely to be performed on

Broadway. The Broadway hits of l9lS--Fair and Warmer,

 

Hit-the-Trail Holiday, Common Clay, Hip-Hip-Hooray, The

 

 

 

 

Boomerang--both reflected and formed American theatrical

 

tastes. But at their tiny Bandbox Theatre on East 57th
St., the Washington Square Players bravely offered

Andreyev, Schnitzler, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov. In

35

36

1915, the first year of their existence, they staged
Chekhov's one-act farce The Bear. At the close of

their first season, they performed The Sea Gull.

 

It is quite possible that the Washington Square

Players chose to perform The Sea Gull as much because

 

it was a play about an artist as because it was a play
by Chekhov. Earnest, young, and self-consciously
artistic, the Players often chose plays about artistic
temperaments, and they chose to end their tenure at
the Bandbox Theater with the death of Trepleff. Inn
Sgn EnII was the first full-length drama the company

had ever attempted, and they were, remarked the New

York Times reviewer, beyond their depth. Moreover, the

 

play itself was peculiar.

It is all most elusive, after the Russian manner,
and while there are no doubt countless hidden
beauties in the play discernible to the Russian
eye, they remained pretty generally hidden to the
untrained Western eye after last night's inter-
pretation.1

The "countless hidden beauties" in Chekhov
remained hidden to nearly everyone, with the exception

of two precocious reviewers for The New Republic.

 

Gertrude Besse King saw Chekhov's plays performed in

Russia, and she sent back rave reviews, calling them

2

"a miracle." Philip Littell Shared her enthusiasm,

and his comments on The Sea Gull are remarkably in-

 

Sightful.

37

The most surprising thing about them [Chekhov's
characters] is just the naturalness of their
behavior, the liberty which Tchekov gives them
to be themselves. He does not seem to interfere
at all, to intrude at any point his will upon
their wills or their will-lessness. And he ends
by making you see this Russian world of his as a
place where self-knowledge deepens boredom, '
though boredom may be as acute without self—
knowledge, where men and women are discouraged,
where success is as futile as failure, were life
is sad, where ennui stretches away on all Sides,
endlessly, like the great Russian plains. But
the picture is not hard or dry; for the painter
has the secret of a quiet, silvery, minor-key
pity, and is often amused by the people he pities.3

Such naturalness of style, however, was not necessarily
satisfying to American audiences, as Littell ruefully
noted at the close of his review: "'The Sea Gull' will
certainly dissatisfy many of us, when we go to the
theatre again in the autumn, with the unlifelike
relevance and orderliness of what we see there."4
Despite the efforts of the few Americans who
reviewed English translations of Chekhov's plays as
they appeared or commented on the performances of his
plays in England and Russia, Chekhov remained, until

the Twenties, a minor curiosity, a theatrical footnote.

It was not until the Moscow Art Theatre took The Cherry

 

Orchard to Broadway that Chekhov made am impact on the
American stage.

The fact that the Moscow Art Theatre came at
all is indicative of a new American attitude toward

EurOpean drama. Many Americans had been abroad during

38

World War I, and when they returned, they helped create
a climate of receptivity toward things foreign.
Although Broadway itself rarely attempted to mount a
EurOpean play in translation, it welcomed foreign
visitors like Fermin Gemier of the Odeon, and it paid
Eleanora Duse $2,500 to perform in Italian.5
The Moscow Art Theatre arrived in New York City
after a flurry of advance publicity. On January 8,

1923, the company opened at the Al Jolson Theater with

a performance of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovitch. After an

 

eight—week engagement they toured Chicago, Boston, and
Philadelphia, and returned to New York in May for two
final weeks of performances. On November 9, 1923, the
company came to the United States for a second season
that lasted until May 11, 1924. Their touring repertoire

included Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor, Gorky's The Lower Depths,

 

 

Turgenev's The Lady from the Provinces, excerpts from

 

 

 

Dostoievsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Chekhov's

 

The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanyn.

 

 

 

It was the first time any of these plays had been per-
formed in America.

Reaction to the Moscow Art Theatre was mixed.
Most of those who came to the sold-out performances
came to see the famous Stanislavsky ensemble in action,
and they were not disappointed. Although the plays

were performed in Russian, the acting was much praised.

39

In The Cherry Orchard, Stanislavsky himself played

 

 

Gayeff, and Olga Knipper-Tchekhova played Mme
Ranevskaya. Special matinees were scheduled on Fridays
to accommodate those New York actors and actresses who
otherwise would not be able to attend the performances.6
The idea of a repertory company--relatively new to
American theater--seemed attractive, and the Theatre
Guild met with Stanislavsky to discuss the possibility
of forming a Guild Acting Company.7 "Here was that
rarest of events in the theatre anywhere," exclaimed

Stark Young in The New Republic, "the combination of

 

acting, producing and dramatic writing, one proceeding
from another and all illuminating one idea. . . ."8
The acting of the plays was praised far more

than the plays themselves, an understandable reaction,

since few critics understood the Russian text. Ludwig

Lewisohn of the Nation confessed to extreme boredom.
To listen to a play in a foreign language, to
realize that the acting is superb and yet to lose
the concrete, human texture of the lines, is an
experience not easily to be risked, not lightly
ever again to be repeated. I go to the theatre
for the play.9

John Corbin, writing for the New York Times, was not

 

so much bored as censorious of the gloomy Slavic tem-
perament he saw portrayed. "What must one think," he

asked rhetorically,

40

of a man of genius who deliberately deals in
pessimism, holding up before his countrymen a
picture of their will and character at its
lowest ebb--of a nation that accepts this image
as true and significant and throws about it the
utmost glamour of artistic representation?

. . . When exploited as a commodity, surely,
Sunny Jim is preferable to Gloomy Ivan, less
pernicious to the national character. . . . It
bodes ill for the Russian nation if it has no
loftier notion of living, no firmer purpose, no
greater power of tragic exultation than is
revealed in these plays.10

Because he seemed to equate praise of the Russians with
a reproach to native American theater, Corbin found
fault with the performances as well. The sets were far
below Broadway standards for realism, he noted, and,
although the acting was very good-—with the exceptions
of Stanislavsky, who was too vigorous and orderly for
the part of Gayeff, and Olga Knipper-Tchekhova, who was
too Junoesque for Mme Ranevskaya-—America's actors and
actresses were equally impressive. Rather resentfully
casting his lot with Sunny Jim and the American theater,

Corbin declared that he liked John Ferguson, Passions

 

 

for Men, and Rain quite as well as The Cherry Orchard.

 

The Russian productions might be fine, but ". . . if
some Moscovite should rise and tell us that in any
season our own stage produces casts as perfect and
ensembles as finely studied in detail, it would be quite
possible to believe him."11

John Corbin's reluctance to appear unpatriotic

by unabashedly enjoying foreign fare was, perhaps,

41

shared by many Americans. It is often difficult to
determine, except by box-office scores, what the average
theater-goer's reaction is to a given play. But John
Van Alstyne Weaver, popular poet of American slang,
suggested one such response in a poem he submitted to

the New York Times. The persona of the poem, in Natty

 

Bumpo tradition, describes an ambivalent experience
that the review for the Times may have understood.
A 100 Per Cent American Speaks:

The wife says, "What you want to see them for?
It's only a bunch of dirty Bolshevicky

That's tryin' to turn the country upside down

The way they done their own. Why don't they stay
In Russia, where they belong?" And so I says,
"Well, I'll go there and give the stuff the razz."

I stands in line for a couple hours or so,

And finely gets a seat in the gallery

In with the foreigners and all the garlic.

The name of the Show was called "The Cherry Orchard,"
And the first two acts was sure the bunk to me--
A lot of people runnin'up and down

In a great big room, carryin' suitcases and trunks,
And whisperin' in the corners. After that

They sat around in a silly—lookin' field,

With hay, and done a whole lot more talkin',

And it sounded like they was talkin' English,
But makin'up words just while they went along.

I couldn't make out nothin' from the program,
And so I ast one of them Bolshevicky

Behind me if he wouldn't put me wise.

And so he says it was a real rich family

That didn't know how to manage property

Because they couldn't keep their minds on it,
And when they tried to talk, got makin' jokes.
And one of the birds that useta be a slave,

Or I guess his old man was, well, anyway,

This bird was tryin' to tell 'em what to do.

He says that they should take the Cherry orchard
And cut it up in little lots-—you know,

Like Pleasant Heighths--suburban subdivision--

42

That sort of thing, and sell 'em. And that way

They could save half the old farm. See? But they

Just wouldn't listen. They was nice enough,

But nit-wits, see? And in the third act, then,

They're havin' a dance, and waitin' for the news

From the auction sale. The brother went to the auction

With money that they borrowed from a aunt,

And just when they're havin' the swellest kind of a time

The brother comes back. And he says the money

Was not enough. And so they lost the place,

And what do you think? The guy that was a slave

He went and bought it! And he comes in soused,

And yells around about how proud he is.

So then the last act's where they got to move,

And packin' up the stuff, and sayin' good-bye,

And--listen, I can't make out yet how it happened,

But when that great big goof looked at the orchard,

And I could hear the axes cuttin' the trees,

And all of a sudden this six-foot bird breaks down,

And stuffed his handerchief right in his mouth,

And real tears in his eyes--can y' imagine?

I just set there and blubbered like a baby.

I sure do hope nobody didn't see me.

Just think of a bunch of low-down Bolshevicky

That can't talk even a word of English, makin'

A hard-boiled egg like me cry like a kid!

And me not understandin' what they said!

I tell you what. It's just like I was watchin'

A movie where somebody told me what

Was goin' on, and not a wild movie, either,

Hardly anything happenin' at all,

But with the best actors that ever was.

Why did it get me? I ain't goin' again.

I don't like things that I can't understand,

And yet can get me like them foreigners did.12
John V. A. Weaver

However mixed the reactions to the Moscow Art
Theatre performances were, there is no doubt that the
Russian visitors changed the complexion of American
theatre. They left in their wake new standards for
acting, a new concept of repertory theater, and at least

one devotee of the plays of Chekhov.

43

That energetic devotee was Eva Le Gallienne,
who, in 1926, organized the Civic Repertory Theatre, an
ensemble company devoted to presenting classic plays at
cheap prices. Among the fourteen permanent members of
the company was Alla Nazimova, a former student at the
Moscow Art Theatre, who had emigrated to America in

1905. The Civic Repertory Theatre presented The Three

 

Sisters as the second play of its first season. It was
the first time the play had ever been performed in
English in America. Eva Le Gallienne both directed the
play and cast herself in the role of Masha. Quite
naturally, the performance was compared with that of
the Moscow Art Theatre, and "naturally, too, that com-
parison is unfavorable," said John Mason Brown.

Obviously Miss Le Gallienne is not yet Madame
Tchekova any more than Egon Brecher is Stanislavsky
or Sayre Crowley is Katchelov. Obviously the ful—
ness of that original production is not to be

found in this one. The amazing thing is that the
comparison Offers no handicap to enjoyment, and
that this present company, but recently assembled,
succeeds so well in mastering so many of the
difficulties that the play presents. Its per-
formance is much more than competent.13

The Three Sisters took a permanent place among the

 

company's offerings, along with The Good Hope, Cradle

 

Song, and The Master Builder. In 1928 the company

 

added The Cherry Orchard to their repertory, with Alla

 

Nazimova in the part Of Mme Ranevskaya and Eva Le
Gallienne playing Varya. In 1929 they Opened their

season with The Sea Gull.

 

44

Eva Le Gallienne's company was not the only one
performing Chekhov in the Twenties. The first English

version Of The Cherry Orchard was staged by James B.

 

Fagan at the Bijou Theater. The play Opened on March 5,
1928, and played for six matinee performances. The
production was a failure; J. Brooks Atkinson spoke for
himself and others when he confessed to being "drenched
14

in boredom" by a "lamentably inadequate performance."

The second production Of The Sea Gull in

 

English was mounted by the Yiddish Art Theatre, a co-
Operative acting company directed by Leo Bulgakov, a
former member Of the Moscow Art Theatre. The company
modeled itself on the Moscow Art Theatre, and in
November 1928 they interrupted their run of Kidush

Hashem to present a few performances of The Cherry

 

Orchard in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of their

Russian prototype.15 Later that season they staged

The Sea Gull, which ran for thirty-three performances

 

at the Comedy Theatre. The performance received modest

praise; the play itself received greater praise. "Even
in a wavering performance," said Atkinson, "'The Sea-
16

Gull' is sheer light."
Although the credit for introducing English

versions Of The Cherry Orchard and The Sea Gull to

 

 

America belonged to others, Eva Le Gallienne clearly

deserved the credit for making Chekhov comprehensible

45

and familiar. The Fagan and Bulgakov productions
received perfunctory critical attention; only after

the Civic Repertory Company's Offerings did the critics
begin to examine the peculiar charm of Eva Le Gallienne's
favorite playwright. Most critics who had commented on
the Moscow Art Theatre performances had assumed that
Chekhov was writing about a very unusual and decadent

l7

society, totally alien to American sensibilities.

The Fagan performance of The Cherry Orchard had not

 

disabused them Of this assumption. Atkinson had reluc-
tantly concluded
that Chekhov was writing so fervently for his
own peculiar times and his own countrymen that
no performance in English so many years later
can capture the beauties Of his play. . . .
Acting "The Cherry Orchard" requires, one
suspects, a personal experience of the same
futilities in politics and living. Spirit shaped
the play; spirit must give it expression.

The Civic Repertory Theatre's productions made
possible critical interpretations that were more universal
and more sympathetic. Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, who
had left the Moscow Art Theatre's performance of The

Three Sisters in bewildered disgust during the third

 

act, announced that Eva Le Gallienne's The Cherry

 

Orchard was "one of the great moments of the season.

. . . The Cherry Orchard is written in a Spirit Of

 

delicate and ironic comedy. The Civic Repertory company

19

has caught and sustained the note." Eight months

46

after Atkinson had sadly assumed that the meaning Of
The Cherry Orchard was forever locked into a former era
and foreign psyche, he was surprised into understanding
by the Civic Repertory Theatre's interpretation of the
play.
Excepting the Moscow Art Theatre's production,
which suffered the handicap of being in a foreign
language, no acted performance here has ever
revealed the compassionate beauties of character
we thought we saw lovingly tucked away in the
text. Now the secret is out. In a limpid,
modulated performance Miss Le Gallienne's troupe
conjures up the serenity of Chekhov's personality.20
Joseph Wood Krutch, too, talked about Chekhov's secret--
"the secret of a charm . . . the charm of a mood gener-
ated by Chekhov's sympathetic and yet amused contemplation

of his passionately futile puppets."21

Critics began tO
analyze Chekhov's sympathetically amused perception of
his characters and to articulate his vision of life.
By the end of the Twenties, their comments had already
become repetitive, and Krutch and others began their
reviews by saying that there was no need to speak
further about Chekhov's charm or melancholy humor.
Stark Young summed up the impact Chekhov had had on
America during the Twenties and suggested what his
influence might be for the future of American drama:
Of the important European dramatists, Chekhov is
at present the one who can be Of most use to us.
The technique Of Ibsen is by now absorbed every-

where into modern playwriting, in SO far as an
insistent technical method, as divorced from the

47

moral seriousness behind it, can be absorbed. At
the other extreme, the poetic method seems far Off
from what is being thought for the stage. Chekhov's
is of them all, the method most profoundly available
to our uses. Without more management or stylization
than we employ, without more removal or traditional
manner than we practice, his realism has the same
world as our realism, the only world our art knows
for the present. What Chekhov can give us is

plain. More delicacy of perception, more deeply
interwoven themes, more subtlety of feeling, more
poignancy, sincerity and truth Of intention. For
our American dramatists of today he Offers the
closest great influence to be had.22

It was not until some years later that Chekhov's
influence on dramatists became clearly discernible. In
the meantime, his dramas became available to larger
audiences. Until 1930, Chekhov had been carefully
nurtured in small, experimental, Off-Broadway theater
groups, groups which existed more for the purpose of
improving the standards Of American drama than for the
purpose Of making money. After 1930, his plays were
performed on Broadway, and the Broadway maxim that it
is impossible to revive a classic without a star was
brought to bear on the productions.

In 1930 Jed Harris produced Uncle Vanya at the

 

Cort Theater. The star was Lillian Gish, brought from
Hollywood to play the part of Elena. It was the first

time Uncle Vanya had been performed since the Moscow

 

Art Theatre had introduced it during their second
season, and most critics agreed that it was the least
entertaining of Chekhov's major plays. But the pro—

duction won high praise. Now that critics had seen

48

English versions of all Chekhov's major plays, they
began to Speak Of a tradition Of Russian theater, and
to imply that Chekhov was becoming the darling of the
cognoscenti. Atkinson wrote,

TO many theatregoers Chekhov is still an enigma

and a bore. In Spite of the ballyhoo of Chekhov

up and down Broadway and the belated recoqnition

of a master hand, the drama Of ellipsis and

inference is still, for many people, completely

undramatic. But to those who have the patience

to listen Chekhov has pith and truth to convey.23

Even Eva Le Gallienne ultimately brought Chekhov

to Broadway. By 1933, her Civic Repertory Theatre had
to be temporarily abandoned because Of financial losses.
In order to keep the company together and in hopes of

raising enough money for another year's repertory

program, Miss Le Gallienne took the season's most

 

successful production, Alice In Wonderland, uptown to
the New Amsterdam Theatre. The original 1928 production

Of The Cherry Orchard was revived and added to the bill.

 

Although Alla Nazimova again played Ranevskaya, the
production contained no glittering stars, and had to be
played as the weaker half of a two-play repertory. The

Cherry Orchard played the first part of every week,

 

while the pOpular Alice In Wonderland packed the theater

 

on weekends.
In 1938 two Of Broadway's favorite stars lent

their lustre to The Sea Gull. Alfred Lunt and Lynn

 

Fontanne played Trigorin and Arkadina in the Theatre

49

Guild's production of the play at the Shubert Theater.
The natural question to be asked of such a production
was this: How do performers who are trained to be
Broadway stars fare in a play deliberately written for
a homogeneous ensemble? The critics' answer was nearly
unanimous-—Lunt fared relatively well, while Fontanne
failed altogether. John Mason Brown Spoke for most of
his colleagues when he Observed that
[Mr. Lunt's] Trigorin fits easily into the ensemble.
He is quiet, unassuming, and co-Operative. . . .
His whole performance is acted not only from within
the character he is creating but well within the
demands of the ensemble.
Miss Fontanne is not so successful in meeting
either need. Her red-wigged Irina does not seem..
to have been approached from within. She is a
totally external creation; a noisy, blatant, road-
company Queen Bess. . . . There is no subtlety
about her Irina. She refuses to let us discover
her faults for ourselves. She wears them with as
much concealment as a sandwich man carries his
ads.
Brooks Atkinson remarked that the play had become
"robustly American," and his final evaluation illuminated
what he meant: ". . . only half of the plays is to be
found on the stage Of the Shubert just now. It is the
literal half. The other half is the genius of Chekhov's

'The Sea Gull.'"25

Whatever the Theatre Guild's production missed
in the way of insightful interpretation was largely
compensated for by Stark Young's new translation of

the play. Until this time, the recognized translator

50

of Chekhov's plays had been Constance Garnett, "whose
admirable zeal and indefatigable perseverance was only
equalled by her inadequate knowledge Of Russian which

26 There had

never rose above the dictionary level."
been other translators, among them Rose Caylor, who
adapted the original text for the Jed Harris production

of Uncle Vanya, and George Calderon, who provided the

 

translation used in the James B. Fagan production of

The Cherry Orchard. But the clarity and unaffected

 

Simplicity of the new translation was a happy improve-
ment over all predecessors. Stark Young himself wrote
at some length about his endeavor.

. . . the idea holds that Chekhov is something

smokey as to the lines, moody, complex, soulful

perhaps, certainly very often vague. I once

shared this notion. And lately I have been

looking into some of those translations with

which I began my Chekhov acquaintance, and have

searched for instances that might easily excuse

or justify such a conception of his style. It

is no wonder that we all thought what we did.27
Elsewhere, Young demonstrated how Chekhov had been
blurred, flattened, and complicated in other trans-
lations. Nearly everyone who commented on the pro-
duction noted that the vagueness that they had previously
thought to be a part Of Chekhov's style proved instead

to belong to the styles of earlier translations.

The Sea Gull ran for forty-one performances, a

 

moderate success for a revival. Chekhov was in the air

and everyone, guessed Brooks Atkinson, was planning to

51

stage The Three Sisters the next season. The group

 

that actually did so was the Surry Players, a relatively
young group Of actors and actresses, who Opened the play
on October 14, 1939, at the Longacre Theater. The Surry
Players were the first performers who tried to present
Chekhov in a new way. Until this time, it seemed,
Chekhov done in a traditional manner had been innovative
enough, but the Longacre production tried to break away
from the detailed realism that had normally been the
setting for Chekhovian productions. Instead, the play
was staged on multi—leveled platforms with roofless,
airy expanses above the scattered prOperties. The
experimental staging illuminated nothing, for nearly
all the values and subtleties of the play were left
unexplained. Theantors, said John Mason Brown, "were

28

playing a hOpeless game of blind man's bluff." The

Three Sisters closed at the Longacre after only nine

 

performances.
The Longacre debacle was followed, two years

later, by another production Of The Three Sisters,

 

this one an assemblage of the most glamorous stars the
theater had ever seen in a single cast. During Christmas
week of 1942, Katherine Cornell, the American theater's
sole actress-manager, Opened the play at the Ethel
Barrymore Theater. Her husband, Guthrie McClintic,

directed it, and the roles Of Olga, Masha, Irina, and

52

Natasha were played by Judith Anderson, Katherine
Cornell, Gertrude Musgrove, and Ruth Gordon. The
collection Of so many celebrated actresses elicited

a great deal of publicity and curiosity. The three
sisters appeared on the cover Of the December 21

issue of IIne_magazine, and feature articles addressed
themselves to such questions as which star was assigned
to which dressing room, and whether or not the actresses
got on with each other. Guthrie McClintic assured

readers of Theatre Arts that the ladies were a "con-

 

genial threesome," and described rehearsal schedules

and techniques.29

30

It was, raved IIne, a "dream pro—
duction."
It was also a somewhat peculiar choice for

Christmas week of 1942. America was in the throes Of a
war, the nation was caught up in a frenzy of patriotism,
and Broadway was anxiously and self-consciously con-
cerned about justifying its existence in terms of the
turbulent reality outside itself. The industry found
two ways of doing SO: one might view the theater as a
place Of escape, "the shortest distance between two

hours,"31

Or one might see it as a vehicle for prOpa-
ganda, a means of bringing the war home to the people.
The first justification was the easier, Of course,

since Broadway had been providing escapist entertainment

all along. During the early days of the war, particularly,

53

Broadway brought out its gayest wares--vaudeville,
musicals, light comedies, and farces--as anodyne to

the battlefront headlines that lit up Times Square.
Most critics, however, seemed uncomfortable with the
escapist theory, feeling that the function of a war—
time theater should be reminder, not escape, and they
periodically measured the theater's self—respect by
counting the number of war plays on the boards. Though
few of those war plays were ones that would live beyond
the duration, they did allow the theater industry some
relief from the uneasiness that came from its inti-
mations of irrelevancy.

The Three Sisters fit neither category; it was

 

not escape entertainment, nor was it a war play. It
did reflect the national interest in Russia, but the
Russia Of World War II was nothing like the Russia of

Chekhov. Newsweek commented that current events in

 

Russia sadly dated The Three Sisters. "Remembering

 

the Red Sniper Ludmila Pavlichenko makes it even harder

to understand the futility Of the three Prozorov girls.

."32 John Gassner contrasted The Three Sisters

 

with The Russian Peqple, a new Soviet war play, in

 

 

order to demonstrate the fact that Chekhov's Old order

had thoroughly disappeared.33

54

Although nearly all the critics praised the

production of The Three Sisters, their praise was

 

equivocated by a new impatience with the Chekhovian
vision that they had heretofore found charming, sensi-
tive, profound, or poignantly truthful. Several
critics gave Chekhov a new label--that of minor play-
wright. Joseph Wood Krutch found it "hard to imagine
a better production," but he added that

one may, I think, just as well confess that there
is a real sense in which Chekhov, like most
modern writers, is minor, and that however grate-
ful we may be for his virtues we would gladly,

if we could, exchange them for major ones. NO
one who cares for the modern theater Should miss
this production. Nevertheless, passion is

better than wistful charm, strong people are
more interesting than weak ones, and an author
who has some kind Of faith in human nature is
better than one who, however regretfully, gives
it up. Moreover, a writer who can successfully
handle a story by the normal method is even more
impressive than one who can escape bathos and
banality only by inverting it.34

Lewis Nichols, Atkinson's war-time replacement for the

New York Times, found the play

 

remote. The descendants of Olga and Masha and
Irina, writing another page in Russian history
this morning, make the history of the static
efforts of the sisters to return to Moscow
appear a bit out of the present world.35

And Mary McCarthy, summarizing the critical consensus,
judged that the great talents gathered together for

the all-star production were

55

wasted on an inferior play by a dramatist whom

we all revere but who, it must be confessed,

seems dull and bookish in these stirring times.36
The "stirring times" Of 1942 clearly precluded the

play's striking a responsive chord in the hearts of

war-time American patriots. The Three Sisters was

 

"not for everybody," warned Wolcott Gibbs, and he went
on to describe the complex, atypical American who
might be considered the ideal spectator.

[He] should have his own share of the paradoxes
that make up the Russian character--an outlook
on life both childlike and worldly, a sense of
humor that derives almost equally from the
graveyard and the nursery, and a mind in dubious
balance between hilarity and rich gloom. Such
peOple are almost sure to enjoy the absurd,
tragic, long-drawn-Out, and practically defi-
nitive study in frustration at the Ethel Barry—
more. All others, with the exception of earnest
scholars and theatrical technicians, are warned
to think twice.37

Many Americans, apparently, did think twice,
though perhaps they were drawn more by their favorite

actresses than by the play itself. The Three Sisters

 

ran for a record 123 performances, and was a financial
success. It was also a popular success, as measured
by the specialized war-time criteria of the reSponse
of the men in uniform. Guthrie McClintic reported
that
Both Kit and I are impressed by the tremendous
amount of young people that come to see The
Three Sisters and their enthusiasm is more than
graEifying. Many soldiers and sailors have

written keenly appreciative letters about it
and one of our most treasured experiences was

 

56

the performance we gave for the soldiers at Fort
Meade one Sunday afternoon before we Opened in
New York. Their rapt attention and sensitive
reaction to the play plus their cheers at the
conclusion of the performance evoked from Miss
Cornell her one and only curtain Speech.

The war years yielded one other Chekhov pro-

duction. On January 25, 1944, The Cherry Orchard

 

Opened at the National Theater under the joint direction
of Margaret Webster and the indefatigable Eva Le
Gallienne, who also played Ranevskaya. The most notable
feature of the production was that it was played for
laughs, and, though most critics acknowledged that the
play was, in a way, a comedy, they found the 1944

comedy excessive, wrenched out Of prOportion into
burlesque and vaudeville. Kappo Phelan attempted to
explain the directorial instinct that elicited such

an interpretation.

I think it is safe to say that Chekhov has made
both the hero and the villain of the piece what
we can only call progress; and that he has made
its victim what we can only call beauty. And
possibly it is true that for the average
American audience, this contravention may lack
point and importance; that any Opposition Of
personality to competence, of grace to effi-
ciency can, to the average American mind, make
neither sense nor music . . . it is obviously
in support of some such contention as this that
the directors published their determination to
produce the piece purely for comedy; and here
for every reason (Of craft as well as Of heart)
I know they have been wrong. For to present
Chekhov as an excuse for a number of out-loud
laughs is to abuse him. . . . Certainly to
laugh en this play rather than with its

57

characters is to find these people merely queer,
stupid, capricious; it is to leave the theater
long before the end.39
Although Phelan's contention that Chekhov's
assumed priorities made "neither sense nor music" to

most Americans was largely true, at least during the

war years, it was equally true that The Cherry

 

Orchard made more sense to Americans than did Chekhov's.

other plays. The Cherry Orchard had not been performed

 

more often than the other plays, but it seemed, some-
how, to make easier contact with the public. Many
Americans persisted in identifying Chekhov with a

single play. The greater ease with which The Cherry

 

Orchard assumed a generic dimension may explain, in
part, why the sense of estrangement that suffused
nearly every critical response to the 1942 production

of The Three Sisters was largely missing from the

 

reSponse to the 1944 Cherry Orchard.

 

The decade of the Forties saw one more
Chekhov production on Broadway, this one imported
from England. The Old Vic company, on a six-week
engagement in America, included five performances of

Uncle Vanya in a repertory completed by Shakespeare's

 

Henry I!_and Oedipus Rex, and Sheridan's The Critic.

 

 

It had been sixteen years since American audiences

had seen a performance of Uncle Vanya, and, for that

 

reason alone, the play was welcomed by the critics.

58

The Laurence Olivier—Ralph Richardson production was
lugubrious and overly conscientious, and it led
critics once again to the conclusion that Chekhov
was a difficult assignment for English-speaking
actors. "'Uncle Vanya,’ in this Spring of 1946,"

said the New York Times,

 

has the reputation something like Dr. Johnson's

woman preacher--the marvel is not that it mayO

not be done well but that 1t 15 done at all.

It was not until the Fifties that Chekhov

"done well" became both a marvel and a reality. The
three productions Of the Forties had been star-studded
and lavishly mounted, but they had not done much to
illuminate Chekhov. In the Fifties, however, a
young director took the plays Off Broadway, chose
Stark Young's translations, and proceeded to dis-
encumber the plays Of the accumulated assumptions of

two previous decades.

On February 25, 1955, The Three Sisters Opened

 

at the Fourth St. Theater. The theater was a long,
narrow loft, divided in the center by an Open stage.
Half the audience sat on either side of the Stage,
and the public aisles served as stage exists and
entrances. In this austere setting, David Ross

mounted a cycle of Chekhov plays: The Three Sisters

 

was followed, eight months later, by The Cherry

 

59

Orchard; Uncle Vanya and The Sea Gull Opened during

 

 

the 1956 season.

David ROSS'S productions were consistently
based on Stark Young's translations of the plays.
These translations had appeared regularly over the

previous decade: The Sea Gull in 1938, The Three

 

 

Sisters in 1941, The Cherry Orchard in 1947, and

 

Uncle Vanya in 1950. Of these, The Sea Gull was the

 

 

only one that had ever been performed, and those who
saw the David Ross productions marvelled at the over-

sight. Commonweal stated that

 

The voice of Chekhov has been so clouded and

obscured in our theatre—-thickened with cant

or a false gentility--that Mr. Young's trans-

lations, which release its potency through

their own vibrant, exact and accessible

language, stand uniquely as creative and

reconstitutive acts of the highest fidelity

and love.41

"Fidelity and love" were key words in the

reSponse to the productions as well as to the trans-
lations. Suddenly, David Magarshack's insistence, in
Chekhov the Dramatist, that Chekhov was a humorous
playwright, made sense. The insight came as a surprise,
not because Chekhov had never before been played as
comedy, but because the Fourth St. productions did
not seem to reach for comedy. Rather, the humor in
the plays seemed natural. It seemed an intrinsic

result of Chekhov's love for his characters, a love

which was everywhere noted and often contrasted with

60

the harsher vision of other playwrights. Harold
Clurman observed that Chekhov came out on the long
end of a contrast with "recent writers [who] have

42 Eric

been long on hysteria and Short on love."
Bentley was more specific:

It may be said of Chekhov himself as of Shakespeare

that he was "of an Open and free nature," a phrase

no one would apply to our minor playwrights, nor

even to Ibsen and Strindberg. Chekhov seems to

me the only democrat among the major modern dra-

matists, or perhaps I mean the only Christian.

At any rate, he seems to be the only one who can

depict the "little" peOple around him with a

deeply romantic and passionate love and hence

without direct contempt on the one hand or, on

the other, the indirect contempt of abstract,

doctrinaire admiration.43

By the mid-Fifties, Chekhov had become a staple

on the American stage. Bach revival had re-kindled the
hot debate over the right way to produce his plays, a
debate that was never quite settled. Chekhov had been
labeled both gloomy Slavic soul and the only modern
Christian. His plays had been variously described as
dismal and hilarious, boring and entertaining, incom-
prehensible and truthful, pessimistic and Optimistic.
Productions of those plays had been acknowledged as a
minor curiosity, a cause célébre, a holy terror, and
an act of piety. The prolonged debate had involved

directors, actors, critics, and audiences. It was

bound to affect American dramatists as well.

CHAPTER III

"CHEKHOVITIS" IN THE FIFTIES

When Stark Young concluded his review of the

1929 performance of The Sea Gull, he named a new

 

mentor for American dramatists. The technical lessons
of Ibsen, the old mentor, having been thoroughly
absorbed, American playwrights were now ready for
lessons more advanced and more sophisticated, and they
would do well to look to Chekhov. "What Chekhov can
give us is plain," Young said, and he Specified:
"More delicacy Of perception, more deeply interwoven
themes, more subtlety of feeling, more poignancy,
sincerity and truth of intention."1
Stark Young's announcement that "Chekhov is
at present the [EurOpean dramatist] who can be of most
use to us,"2 coming as it did at the end of the Twenties,
was somewhat premature. The climate of American life
during the socially conscious Thirties and the

patriotic Forties was such that "delicacy of per-

ception" and "subtlety of feelings" remained values

61

62

that were less than urgent. Nor was there any par—
ticular reason why "more sincerity and truth of
intention" could no longer be communicated by the
standard Ibsenesque formula. As the decade of the
Fifties approached, however, the mood of the nation
shifted. The Ibsenesque piece a these, which had
served so well for the issues of the depression and
the war years, lost its universal appeal. In a
quieter decade, several American dramatists responded
to their sense of contemporary life by abandoning the
well-made play formula in favor of a style that, some
felt, had been endorsed by Chekhov.

Theearly Fifties were not especially inSpiring
years, by anyone's reckoning. Deadened by the
Eisenhower administration, intimidated by the McCarthy
hearings, and confused by the Korean War, America
offered little to inspire its dramatists. "During
this timorous, confused, and apathetic decade," wrote
Emory Lewis in his history of the American stage,

the arts took a sharp turn away from content to
an inwardness, a preoccupation with self, a
frenzied interest in form for its own sake.

It was a full-scale retreat from the political

struggle and social commitment. The tranquilized
fifties, poet Robert Lowell neatly labeled them.
In retrospect, the salient feature of
Broadway in the fifties was the dismal quality
of its productions. It was the worst decade of
theatre since the birth of the American dramatic
arts back in the teens. . . . The theatre served

63

up pallid pulp, and it had virtually nothing to
do with the world outside or with art.3

John Gassner, in Theatre 2E the Crossroads, lumped

 

several of the plays of the Fifties into a chapter
entitled "Ebb Tide," and reluctantly suggested that
"a law of entropy [was] Operative in a period of
uncertainty and disillusionment."4 Brooks Atkinson,
writing in 1953, looked around him and noticed that

It is a difficult time because everything seems
to be temporary. The great decisions have not
been made--whether it is to be war or peace,
whether Western freedoms are going to survive
in the world. When such fundamental issues as
these remain unresolved, it is difficult for
writers to settle down to work with a fixed

set of values. The workaday themes seem so
petty in comparison with the classic themes of
freedom and survival.5

Arthur Miller agreed. The year before, he

had offered to the New York Times his speculations

 

why "a lizardic dormancy seems to be upon us, the
creative mind seems to have lost its heat."6 But
whereas Atkinson took comfort from the truism that

"AS long as there are peOple . . . there is plenty

of material to write about,"7 Miller refused such
comfort. The "classic themes of freedom and survival"
were still available to American dramatists, he in-
sisted, if they would only summon up the moral energy
to pursue them. But he saw no indications of such

energy. Instead, artists were timid, shy of bringing

on stage "the plays that reflect the soul-wracking,

64

deeply unseating questions that are being inwardly

asked on the street, in the living room, on the

8

subways." That timidity was a natural response to

the age, but the artists were nevertheless responsible
for their reactions. Miller asked,

Is the knuckle-headedness of McCarthyism behind
it all? The Congressional investigations of
political unorthodoxy? Yes. But is that all?
Can an artist be paralyzed except he be somewhat
willing? . . .

IS it quixotic to say that a time comes for
an artist--and for all those who want and love
theatre--when the world must be left behind?
When, like some Pilgrim, he must consult only
his own heart and cleave to the truth it utters?
For out of the hectoring of columnists, the
compulsions of patriotic gangs, the suspicions
of the honest and the corrupt alike, art never
will and never has found soil.9

In 1958, in a speech given for his colleagues
entitled "The Shadows of the Gods," Miller pressed

his point.10

He severely criticized American dra-
matists for failing to bring down on their materials
the ultimate questions concerning the survival of the
human race. Unless they did so, he warned, the
American theater was doomed to remain in a protracted
state of adolescence. In contrast to the timid,
superficial American vision he saw about him, Miller
offered up a few touchstones for greatness. The
writers he most valued for their daring to probe the

hidden laws Of the universe were Dostoievski, Ibsen,

Aeschylus, O'Neill, and Chekhov.

65

Miller's choice Of Chekhov is curious. Few
playwrights seem farther removed from Miller's own
stance and style; it was Ibsen, not Chekhov, from

whom Miller had learned his lessons.11 "I connected

12

with Ibsen," he said, and that connection has been

much documented and demonstrated. But Miller also
admired Chekhov, and some of the reasons for his
admiration were familiar reasons.

It is hard to imagine any playwright reading
Chekhov without envying one quality of his plays.
It is his balance. In this, I think he is closer
to Shakespeare than any dramatist I know. There
is less distortion by the exigencies Of the
teleSOOping of time in the theater, there is
less stacking of the cards, there is less fear
of the ridiculous, there is less fear of the
heroic. His touch is tender, his eye is warm,
so warm that the Chekhovian legend in our theatre
has become that of an almost sentimental man and
writer whose plays are elegies, postscripts to a
dying age. In passing, it must be said that he
was not the only Russian writer who seemed to be
dealing with all his characters as though he was
related to them. It is a quality not of Chekhov
alone but of much of Russian literature, and I
mention it both to relate him to this mood and
to separate him from it.1

What separated Chekhov from the general Russian mode
of warm, intimate characterizations was what Miller
admired most, and that was Chekhov's overview of the
social conditions in which his plays were set. Miller
saw Chekhov's plays as social comments, and he cited
Virshinin's farewell speech to Olga in Act IV of The

Three Sisters as evidence:

 

66

What else am I to say to you at parting? What am
I to theorize about? (Laughs) Life is hard. It
seems to many of us blank and hopeless; but yet
we must admit that it goes on getting clearer and
easier, and it looks as though the time were not
far Off when it will be full of happiness. (Looks
at his watch.) It's time for me to go! In the
516 days men were absorbed in wars, filling all
their existence with marches, raids, victories,
but now all that is a thing of the past, leaving
behind it a great void which there is so far
nothing to fill; humanity is searching for it
passionately, and of course will find it. Ah,

if only it could be quickly. If, don't you know,
industry were united with culture and culture with
industry. . . . (Looks n5 his watch.) But, I say,
it's time for me to go. . . .

 

 

"In other words," Miller explicated,

these plays are not mere exercises in psychology.
They are woven around a very critical point of

view, a point of view not only toward the characters,
but toward the social context in which they live,

a point of view which-—far from being some arbitrary
angle, as we have come to call such things--is their
informing principle. . . . When Chekhov, that almost
legendary subjectivist, has Vershinin--and many
others in his plays--objectifying the social questions
which his play has raised, he is merely placing
himself within the great tradition which set its
works fully in view of the question of the survival
of the race.14

Miller's reading of Vershinin's speech as
"objectifying the social questions which [the] play
has raised" is a somewhat Singular interpretation. The
speech occurs as Vershinin is waiting for Masha to
appear so he can say a final good-bye. He is nervous,
sad, and hurried, for he will be called away momentarily,
and if Masha does not appear soon, he will have no chance
at all to see her before he leaves. In the awkward,

agonizing meantime, he carries on a perfunctory

67

conversation with Olga, making farewell pleasantries.
"What am I to theorize about?" he asks her, mocking
himself, and then he lapses into a brief repetition
of his theme of the state of human existence in the
future. Olga had never taken Vershinin's philoSOphizing
very seriously, nor had anyone else, not even Vershinin
himself. He usually delivered himself of his social
prOphecies when he had other, more pressing, consider—
ations on his mind, and this time his mind is very far
away from what he is saying. He keeps looking at his
watch, talking out of habit, merely to fill up the
time and to cover the pain of the moment. Vershinin's
comments about society, here and elsewhere in the
play, are more in the nature of a linguistic tic than
of serious social comment.
Miller misread Chekhov. He was not alone.
But few others shared his particular kind of misreading.
Miller found Chekhov useful because his example demanded
more of playwrights than was their wont; others found
him useful because they felt his example demanded less.
John Van Druten was one playwright who was
grateful to Chekhov for relieving him of the burden
of finding and develOping a plot. In an article in

the New York Times, printed a few days in advance of

 

the Opening of I An_n Camera on November 28, 1951,

Van Druten outlined in some detail his debt to Chekhov.

68

His forthcoming play was to be a mood play, he said,
and the originator of that genre was Chekhov.

Where did the mood play come in? I think that
I caught one of the earliest glimpses of it in
the description of a play which my parents saw
at the London Stage Society around 1911. My
mother told me--and she was an intelligent woman,
well grounded in Ibsen and all the classics--
that it was either completely insane, or else
the whole audience was. It was by a Russian
playwright, and it was called "The Cherry
Orchard."

Why was that play so different that it must
have seemed as though it were written on a totally
different tone-scale, so that neither form nor
melody was apparent then, just as the music of
Wagner, followed by Strauss, Debussy and Stra-
vinsky, seemed incomprehensible to ears familiar
with Handel, Gounod and Verdi? I can only think
it was in the absence of plot or definitive
message, of star parts or organized build, a
conception of people seen only in their personal
relationships, just as such and not for what
theatrically emerged from them. . . .

I can remember reading the first act of "The
Cherry Orchard" many years later, and also the
first act of Barker's "Madras House," and of
their reminding me of the arrival at my London
home of my smart and fascinating aunt from New
York, and of the Sunday mornings at my grand-
mother's house in the London suburbs, and thinking
that if that were all that was needed, maybe I
could do it too.15

Maybe so. The test would seem to lie in the
play that was prefaced by the apologia in the Times.
I nn_n Camera is an adaptation of Christopher

Isherwood's Berlin Stories, a collection of short

 

stories about Germany during Hitler's rise to power.
If the play is Chekhovian, it is so only in a super-

ficial and negative sense. There is, to be sure, no

69

tight, well-defined plot. The setting is another
twilight era, this time the twilight of an amoral era
for Germany. And the play dramatizes no particular
theme, despite its setting. But £.§E.E Camera does
not remind one very much of Chekhov, whatever Van
Druten's claims. Those claims did invite a comparison,
however, and John Gassner accepted the invitation by
pointing out the difference between Chekhov's own
plays and those of this followers. He wrote, apropos
of l.§fl.2 Camera,

In Chekhov, we find either a distinct development,
as in The Sea Gull and The Cherry Orchard, in
which a stalemate leads to a catastrophe, and one
way of life is diSplaced by another; or we observe
characters staging an intense struggle against an
impasse before suffering defeat, as in Uncle Vanya
and The Three Sisters. Stanislavsky was quite
correct in Opposing the notion that Chekhov's
characters were utterly passive, and absolutely
right in attributing an invigorating quality to
their discontent, their explosions of rage at
their torpid way of life, and their dreams of a
better world. The pseudo-Chekhovians make much

of the possibility of writing plotless plays

. . ., but they tend to overlook the presence of
essential conflict and progression in Chekhov's
dramaturgy. They try to be artfully passive; he
succeeded in being artfully active. 5

 

 

 

 

Chekhov was, suggested Gassner, much more complex a
playwright than Van Druten realized.

Gassner's point was well taken, for Van Druten
had reduced Chekhov's dramaturgy to a Single character-
istic--the evocation of mood. Much of Van Druten's

Playwright nn Work, a handbook for dramatists, was a

 

7O

defense of the Mood Play, and Van Druten suggested to
young playwrights that there lay the new frontier of
dramatic writing.

The author who is telling me the basis of
the play he wants to write may well have learned
from Chekhov and from the newer imitations. He
may not have a plot or a story, or if he has,
those will seem unimportant to him. He may have
only a mood, a thing of all most hard to describe
or communicate other than through his actual
writing. But if it has excited him, if he him-
self is deeply moved by it, then that will be
apparent. He has in many ways the most difficult
of all tasks, because the field is almost too
clear for him. Working within limits is an
easier thing than working with none. Sonnets,
as G. K. Chesterton has said, are easier to write
than other verse because they are more restricted;
there is a severe framework to hold one in.
Earlier playwrights have set the general mold,
but the mood playwright is largely on his own.
Yet he is moving the theater forward, where it
needs to go, away from the story and plot play,
altering and widening the shape of the proscenium
arch. And that is all to the good.17

Because mood is "a thing of all most hard to describe
or commuhicate other than through . . . actual
writing,"18 Van Druten could offer no guidelines for
writers of Mood Plays other than the advice that they
be sincere about what they were doing. "This is
perhaps the beginning of a new kind of drama. Its
rules are not yet formed. They depend on the depth
and inner sincerity of the author's intention."19
Van Druten also seemed to assume that strength of

mood in a play existed in inverse prOportion to

strength of plot. Given the two alternatives, his

71

own choice was clear: "A play that was all atmOSphere,

with no plot at all, would be my preference; in any

case, the smallest modicum of plot that can be thrown

in to hold the play together."20
Although Van Druten viewed the Mood Play as

"a new-born creature in the theater of the past thirty

21

years," he Offered, besides Chekhov, only two

examples of the genre--Carson McCuller's The Member gI

 

the Wedding and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie.

 

 

Walter Kerr provided a much longer list.

In 1955, in his lively book nnn_ngn Ig_WrIne n
PIny, Walter Kerr reviewed the state of American
theater. There were, he announced, two methods of
playwriting that ought to be avoided: the method of
Ibsen and the method of Chekhov. Mr. Kerr's warning
was based on the premise that "America is, at the
moment, in possession of a highly unpopular theater."22
The reason for the theater's unpOpularity was simple:
neither Ibsen nor Chekhov, the two models fOr American
playwrights, were ever popular themselves. Both were
high-brow intellectuals, whose plays were deliberately
designed to please only minority tastes. Ibsen's.
plays were calculated to engender irritation and
resistance, and Chekhov had never been popular outside

the narrow confines of a prestige art theater. And

deSpite a small, devoted following in America, Chekhov

72

"is almost without peer in his power to chill American

23

audiences." Nevertheless, "after Ibsen, Chekhov is

the most widely imitated playwright in the contemporary
theater, 'Chekhovities' the commonest complaint in the
nation's playwriting courses."24 The most conspicuous
symptom of "Chekhovitis," Kerr went on to explain, was
calculated inertia.

We have made ennui almost a point of honor.
The ennui originates, naturally enough, in our
model. Chekhov was specifically concerned, as
he clearly announced, with "disappointment,
apathy, nervous limpness and exhaustion." What
we forget is that these special characteristics
were derived from, and intended to mirror, a
given time, place, and state of mind; the
moribund Russia of the nineteenth century.

Russia itself has long Since thrown off Russian
inertia; only we continue to cling to it. . . .

We are now embarrassed by the dramatic
gesture. We do not wish to be thought capable
of so gross and unliterary a lapse. Since
event is suSpect, our plays must be cautiously
uneventful.

We make our chaste intention clear at the
beginning of the evening. Our plays--of the
Chekhovian tradition--Open in a timeless twilight,
announcing at the outset that nothing will change.
Characters move in longing, recoil in inhibition,
freeze into paralysis. They dart at the universe
in feeble exploration, make fainthearted protest,
resign themselves to final frustration. The
curtain falls on the twilight we knew at the
first, on a world in which the promise of action
has never existed, a world of perpetually sus—
pended animation.25

Mr. Kerr proceeded to list the plays he had in mind:

Arthur Laurent's The Time gI the Cuckoo, Elmer Rice's

 

The Grand Tour, Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden,

 

 

William Inge's Picnic, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud

73

D'Usseau's Ladies gI the Corridor, Terence Rattigan's

 

The Deep Blue Sea, Robert Anderson's All Summer Long,

 

 

Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, Horton Foote's n Trip

 

In Bountiful, John Van Druten's I_An 3 Camera, and

 

Carson McCuller's The Member 9: the Wedding. "Stand

 

 

close to these plays," said Kerr,

and they seem remarkably varied in style and
background and feeling. Move back just a bit

and you can begin to detect their common ancestry,
their common inspiration.

What binds them together is their commitment
to stasis. To observe life carefully, you must
make it stand still. To make life stand still,
you must deal in the stillborn--in characters
who are unable to change themselves, their
relationships, or the world about them. You
must, perforce, deal with Chekhov's disappointed,
apathetic, or nervously limp.26

John Van Druten and Walter Kerr were basically
agreed in their description of the newly fashionable
Mood Play. Van Druten rejoiced that the new form was
engendered by the famous Chekhov. Kerr grumbled that
the new form was engendered by the unpOpular Chekhov.
Others discussed the new form quite apart from Chekhov.

In 1954 William Becker, writing for The Hudson

 

Review, generalized about the spate of new plays that
had recently run on Broadway. He was irritated. He
had recently seen five productions: Horton Foote's 5

Trip In Bountiful, Calder Willingham's End nn n Man,

 

Louis Peterson's Take 3 Giant Step, Nathaniel Benchley's

 

The Frogs gI Spring, and Robert Anderson's Tea and

 

74

Sympathy. All of the plays were bad ones. What
interested Mr. Becker was the fact that they were
bad in such similar ways.

It has become increasingly evident over the
past three or four seasons that a wholly new
set of formal dramatic values is in the process
of being established on Broadway. . . . From
the vieWpoint of traditional dramatic criticism,
the new values are largely negative: they imply
a reduction of the medium, and not, for the
most part, a reduction to fundamentals, but to
an egregious preoccupation with what has seldom
been anything but the most subsidiary or
peripheral of dramatic values, namely, the
"mood." The Mood Play is the first really
identifiable new genre to emerge on Broadway
since the demise of what used to be called
"agit-prOp" toward the end of the thirties; and
if the new formula is unmistakably a Sign of
decadence, it is nonetheless worth Observing,
if only because it is a strictly indigenous
product. It has as yet no relation whatever to
anything in the current EurOpean theatre, and
only the most accidental relations with the dra-
matic past anywhere.2

Pursuing the genesis of the Mood Play, Becker added,

. . . It seems . . . likely that the new manner
has come more by way of default than of anything
so positive as conscious imitation. Partly the
mood play reflects that general failure of nerve
which now characterizes Broadway as a whole.

But more importantly, it seems to reflect the
absolute isolation of our writers from the past
masters of dramaturgy. There is quite literally
no place in New York (or anywhere in America for
that matter) where a playwright can learn his
craft by watching and absorbing over a long
period of time the principles inherent in the
great examples of it. The result is that would-
be American playwrights--and producers, and even
actors--scarcely know what plays have been in
the past, what modes and devices they have relied
on, what myriad formal possibilities exist for
the drama, and perhaps most crucially, what the
demands and limitations of the form are.28

75

The Mood Play, then, was not the result of any new
attention paid to Chekhov; it was rather the result of
an inattention paid to any playwright whatever.

Becker, Kerr, Van Druten and Miller——all
were agreed on one thing. A relatively large percent—
age of the plays of the early Fifties were of a piece;
they had similarly slender plots, static characteri-
zations, and wistful moods. But while there was
agreement on a common genre, there was none on a
common genesis. Kerr and Van Druten assumed that
Chekhov's example had effected the Mood Play. Miller
saw Chekhov's example as a remedy to the Mood Play.
Becker implied that a Chekhovian example would have
precluded a Mood Play.

A closer look at one of the Mood Plays might
help to illuminate the diSpute, and Horton Foote's 5

Trip In Bountiful will serve as well as any because

 

it bears the distinctive onus of appearing on the
lists of both Mr. Kerr and Mr. Becker. The play was
originally written as a television script for the NBC
Television Playhouse. It was later revised for stage
production, and Opened at the Henry Miller Theater on
November 3, 1953, where it sustained a modest run of

thirty-nine performances.

76

The plot of inrip In Bountiful is slender.

 

In the first act we are introduced to the members of
a small household in Houston, Texas. Jessie Mae Watts,
the wife, is a vain, purposeless, frustrated woman who
occupies her days by going to the hairdresser, reading
movie magazines, drinking coca-colas, and nagging her
mother-in—law. The elder Mrs. Watts finds herself in
a trap that is both spiritual and physical; she cannot
bear her daughter—in-law's continuous bickering any
more than she can bear the confines of a small city
apartment. Her one wish is to escape to the town of
Bountiful and the family homestead where She once
lived. At the end of the act, She manages to keep her
pension check away from Jessie Mae's preemption and
sneaks off to the bus station when the coast is clear.
Act II records Mrs. Watts' trip to Bountiful
and the attempts of Ludie Watts and Jessie Mae to head
her Off. Much of the act takes place on the bus, where
Mrs. Watts and Thelma, her nice young travelling
companion, exchange sentimental and tearful life stories.
Mrs. Watts' resolve to return to her birthplace is
nearly foiled at the end of the act when Ludie and
Jessie Mae enlist the police in their search, but a
kind sheriff agrees to escort her to Bountiful, now a

ghost town.

77

Act III is Short and inconclusive. Ludie and
Jessie Mae fetch Mrs. Watts away from the ruined
homstead. She declares herself resigned, and returns
with them to their city apartment.

There is, on the surface, much about 5 IrIp

In Bountiful that reminds us of Chekhov's plays. The

 

action of the play returns, in the end, to the status
quo. The mood is wistful and nostalgic. The plot

is far less important than the characterizations.

But the play seems, somehow, thin and wan when it is
compared with Chekhov's plays.

The fact is that Chekhov's plays are not
actually plotless. Things do happen to Chekhov's
characters--suicides, duels, murder attempts, illegiti-
mate pregnancies, and extra-marital affairs, to name
a few. When Chekhov chose to push the large dramatic
scenes into the wings, he did so not because he was
abdicating all plots, but because he wanted the center
of the stage to dramatize the emotions and behavior
of peOple who lived through, or in Spite of, rather
than for the sake of, their plots. Mme Ranevskaya's
behavior at her party is interesting because we know
and she knows that an auction is taking place at the
same time Off stage. Her conversation, her silences,
her attempts to remain true to her image of herself

during those anxious hours of waiting are dramatic

78

because of the tension that exists between what is
happening on stage and what is happening Off stage.
That kind of tension is not possible in n Trip En

Bountiful, where nothing more happens Off stage than

 

on stage. The play does not extend itself into the
wings.

Another, and perhaps the most important,
difference between Chekhov's plays and n IrIp En

Bountiful lies in the complexity of characterization.

 

Chekhov's characters are emotionally complicated
peOple, and Chekhov was primarily interested in the
way in which their emotions intertwined and fluctuated
between harmony and discord. Sometimes a character
needs from another a response or emotional reinforce-
ment that is not forthcoming; sometimes a character
perceives that another is blocking the fulfillment of
his desires; sometimes several characters are united
for a moment in shared excitement or common grief.
The tension of characterization on Chekhov's stage is
not a tension of sympathetic characters versus un-
sympathetic ones, but rather the more complex tensions
that exist between peOple who are all somewhat sym-
pathetic.

Horton Foote's characters are not complex enough
for such emotional tensions to take place. The conflict

in n Trip In Bountiful exists between Jessie Mae,

 

79

villain, and Mrs. Watts, heroine. Both have a single
goal; Jessie Mae wants to keep the convenience of her
mother-in-law's maid service and the bonus of her
pension check, and Mrs. Watts wants to escape to

Bountiful before she dies. Ludie Watts wants to

 

avoid trouble, but whatever emotional conflicts his
dilemma might entail are no part of the play. All
the characters are thinly drawn, their conflicts one-
dimensional. Horton Foote did try for a bit of irony
in the characterization of Jessie Mae, who says to
her husband at one point,

Then why does she [Mrs. Watts] keep running off

from a perfectly good home to try and get to

some old swamp? Don't you call that crazy? I

mean, she doesn't have to turn her hand.

Hardly. We only have a bedroom and a living

room and a kitchen. We're all certainly very

light eaters, so cooking three meals a day

isn't killing her.29
But the irony here is heavy-handed, and it reminds
us very little of the irony of Chekhov's characters,
whose inner lives are rich and fully drawn. Jessie
Mae is a shrill termagant, nothing more, and her
bewilderment over her mother—in—law's plight sounds

dishonest and contrived.

n Trip In Bountiful seems most like a Chekhovian

 

play in its evocation of a mood of nostalgia. Like the
Prozoroff sisters, Mme Ranevskaya, and Gayeff, Mrs.

Watts longs for a time long past, when life was happier

80

and more purposeful. Her longing is the one sustaining
note throughout the play. It would seem that Horton
Foote took very seriously John Van Druten's advice
about beginning a play with only a mood in mind and
nothing more.

It would be difficult, however, to imagine
Chekhov's beginning a play in such a fashion. Perhaps
the entire idea of Chekhov as the writer of Mood Plays
is misleading. Nothing in Chekhov's notebooks or in
his letters suggests that it was ever his intention to
set down a single mood. Instead, he noticed the
people around him. He jotted down gestures, names,
phrases. He noted how people behaved under stress,
how they accommodated themselves to boredom, how their
imaginations fought with their circumstances. And he
suggested in his letters to playwrights and actors that
they not only develop a similar sensitivity, but that
they learn how to make that sensitivity stageworthy.
He said:

People who carry grief in their hearts a long
time and are used to it only whistle and often
sink into thought.30

When a men Spends the least possible number of
movements over some definite action, that is
grace.3l

The father is without a weakness, without a
distinct appearance; he does not drink, or smoke,
or gamble, or fall ill. You must stitch on to

him some attribute or other, so that the actor
can have something to grasp.32

81

Depict a lonely man, and represent him as nervous
only to the extent indicated by the text. Do not
treat this nervousness as a separate phenomenon.
Remember that in our day every cultured man, even
the most healthy, is most irritable in his own
home and among his own family, because the
discord between the present and the past is first
Of all apparent in the family.33

The immense majority of peOple are nervous, you
know: the greater number suffer, and a small
prOportion feel acute pain; but where--in streets
and in houses--do you see people tearing about,
leaping up, and clutching at their heads?
Suffering ought to be expressed as it is expressed
in life--that is, not by the arms and legs, but by
the tone and expression; not by gesticulation, but
by grace. Subtle emotions of the soul in educated
peOple must be subtly expressed in an external
way.34

Only he has no grief who is indifferent; and
people who are indifferent and aloof are either
philOSOphers or petty, egotistical natures. The
latter should be treated negatively, the former,—-
positively.35

In the sphere of psychology, details are also the
thing. God preserve us from commonplaces. Best
of all is it to avoid depicting the hero's state
of mind; you ought to try to make it clear from
the hero's actions.36

Do not invent sufferings that you never experi-
enced, and do not paint pictures you never saw,
for a lie is even more annoying in a story than
in a conversation. . . .37

You want to see more, to know more, to have a
wider range. Your imagination is quick to seize
and hold, but it is like a big oven which is not
provided with fuel enough. One feels this in
general, and in particular in the stories: you
present two or three figures in a story, but
these figures stand apart, outside the mass; one
sees that these figures are living in your
imagination, but only these figures--the mass is
notgrasped.38

82

Playwrights who wished to learn from Chekhov
might have done well to have looked to his notes and
letters. Had they done so, they might have seen his
plays as more than plotless mood pieces. They might
have joined Walter Kerr in a re—appraisal of Chekhov's
plays.

Although he had declared Chekhov "almost
without peer in his power to chill American audiences,"39
Walter Kerr's own reactions thawed considerably as he

began to suSpect what Chekhov was really about. In

Thirty Plays Hath November, Kerr traced the process Of

 

his revised judgment. "When I was very young," he
recalled,

I understood Chekhov, as indeed everyone did.

He was a long neurasthenic sigh, accompanied by
the flutter Of falling leaves and rattled hands,
by the night-music of imminent tears. His
element was mood, and the mood was languid, an
evocation of the inertia that suffocates. Poetic,
of course, in the dapple Of light from the trees
that were doomed and in the ripple of unfocused
conversation. But a still life, with everything
in it already in the first faint brown stages of
decay. If someone or something provoked a
beginning smile now and again, it was not a smile
that could delay the coroner; one knew that the
servants were already storing the funeral baked
meats in the ha11.40

But Mr. Kerr's early understanding was jarred somewhat
by two performances of Chekhov. In the 1942 production

of The Three Sisters, Ruth Gordon's Natasha was dis-

 

 

turbingly funny. 80 was Joseph Schildkraut's Gayeff,

83

in the 1944 production of The Cherry Orchard. Walter

 

Kerr was unsettled. "That could not have been
Chekhov's voice I thought I heard pleading to be

41

released from such responsible sobriety." But it

was. Biographers David Magarshack and Earnest Simmons42
and director David Ross confirmed Kerr's suspicion
that Chekhov was to be believed when he said that his
plays were comedies, and that the comic element Of his
plays lay in Chekhov's vision of his characters. Kerr
began to realize that

Chekhov does, very frequently, make it perfectly

clear that nothing his characters say can really

be taken at face value. As a rule, what they

say can almost be taken at reverse value.43
Even when subsequent productions of Chekhov returned
to the traditional assumption that the plays were
solemn and gloomy, a wistful Mr. Kerr refused to
recant,

For I should still, in my bafflement and in the

derangement of mind which overtakes me whenever

those unbidden voices begin intruding upon the

lachrymose night, like to see Chekhov plain, if

only to discover whether or not he knew what he

was doing. If he wrote tragedies, or somber

mood pieces, he didn't know what he was doing.

And I refuse to believe that.44

Nearly two decades after Mr. Kerr's first

hesitant intimations Of Chekhov's intentions, he was
able to "see Chekhov plain." What he saw was Chekhov's

ability to portray characters who were self-deluded.

That, and not moody inertia, was Chekhov's secret.

84

Now, if the self-deluded are bound to be amusing,
Chekhov's amusement is always considerate.
Chekhov pays his peOple the compliment of not
exaggerating them--much. He does like them, and
so tries to be faithful to them. He does, in
his rueful and detached way, feel for them, idiots
that they are; and so he does not throw them
downstairs or beat them with sticks or make them
moo too often. He suggests, perhaps, that there
is very little he needs to do to them to accent
their follies. If he simply lets them loose and
keeps close to the truth, they will take care of
themselves, making their own comedy as they rush
or drift or Skitter from mood to mood.

Most comedy, nearly all that we are familiar
with, arrives at its effect through exaggeration.
A miser becomes monstrously greedy; a drinker
becomes roaringly drunk; a hesitant man stammers
and sputters until we can hear nothing else. Each
of these things is, deep down, somewhat tragic or
pathetic. But we are not permitted to see what
is deep down because the surface is wrenched so
wildly out of Shape; the disporportion at the tOp
is so emphatic that it seems, in its fantastic
grossness, only funny.

Chekhov's comedy is too considerate, too
kindly, too honest in a way, for this sort of
grossness. Chekhov has deflated the comic balloon
somewhat and brought it back to a Shape that is
almost normal. Because he has done this, it is
easy for us to mistake what he has done, to confuse
a very delicate and controlled comic highlighting
with the lifelike and somewhat more serious subject
matter he means to be comic about. He has narrowed
the gap between the preposterous and the pathetic;
but he has made it perfectly clear to us which Side
of the gap he stands on.

Standing there and smiling all the while, he
reminds us of a truth; if you do not exaggerate
comedy, you will see how sad it is.45

That truth remained elusive to mose American

dramatists. Some, like Horton Foote, John Van Druten,

and the other writers of low-pressure, reticent Mood

Plays, wrote plays that resembled Chekhov's only

casually and superficially.

That resemblance was

85

based on a reductive and limited perception of
Chekhov's art. Other American playwrights, like
Joshua Logan and Lillian Hellman, were more directly
indebted to Chekhov, and for different reasons.
Despite all the talk about Chekhov's plotlessness,
Joshua Logan borrowed from Chekhov the plot of Inn

Cherry Orchard. And Lillian Hellman, who studied

 

Chekhov's letters as well as his plays, borrowed a
dramatic model for expressing some assumptions about

life that she came to Share with Chekhov.

CHAPTER IV
JOSHUA LOGAN: A CHERRY ORCHARD

FOR AMERICANS

AS early as 1930, Robert Littell, writing for

Theatre Magazine, thought that "disguising The Cherry

 

 

Orchard as a sterling American product" would be a
"good joke" on the provincial American audience.

Change the names, hire a soft-spoken negro for
the old servant who dies so pathetically in

the end, switch the cherry orchard to a magnolia
grove, make the successful peasant Lopakhin over
into a self-made poor white, bring in a few
references to the Wa'h, hire actors who spoke
pure Charleston, S. C., and you have a grand
heart-breaking old play about the ruined South.
The play itself is solid, natural, universal,
irresistible, if you can wear down people's
prejudice about all artistic products from the
land of the Tsar, the beard, the soul, and the
ikon.l

Robert Littell was one of several who noted the Obvious
analogy between Chekhov's Russia and the American
South.2 A play about the decay of a cultured,

leisured aristocracy was usually assumed to be Chekhov's

Special property, and the concept of an American Cherry

Orchard was one that festered for many years.

86

87

The play which was most clearly intended to

be an analogue to The Cherry Orchard was The Wisteria

 

 

Trees,3 both written and first directed by Joshua

Logan. In 1950, the year The Wisteria Trees Opened

 

on Broadway, Logan was at the peak of his directing
career, but he was a relative novice as a playwright.
And it was as director rather than as playwright
that he was first exposed to Russia and Chekhov.
Logan was fond of recalling his youthful
apprenticeship at the Opera Studio of the Moscow Art
Theatre, where he observed the great Stanislavsky at
work. In 1931 he left Princeton in his senior year
to accompany a fellow student, Charles Leatherbee, on
a "genuine pilgrimage" to Moscow.4 For six months,
the two young students watched, rapt with admiration,
as Stanislavsky painstakingly rehearsed his singers
and actors. Evenings they attended performances of
the Moscow Art Theatre. Logan especially remembered

a performance of The Cherry Orchard, played by

 

 

nearly all the members of the original cast of 1904:
[It] was not only still full of tender,
heartbreaking compassion but also to my
surprise a wonderful earthy humor, which
in most productions of the play is so muffled
that all of its lustiness is gone.

Their hopes and enthusiasms running high, Logan and

Leatherbee informed Stanislavsky of their intention

to establish a permanent repertory theater in America

88

which would duplicate the Moscow Art Theatre.
Stanislavsky was not pleased. "You must not duplicate
the Moscow Art Theatre," he cautioned.

You must create something of your own. If you
try to duplicate, that means that you merely
follow tradition. You are not going forward.
. . . Our methods suit us because we are this
particular group of Russians here. We have
learned by experiment, by change, by taking
any concept Of reality that has become worn
and substituting something fresh, something
always nearer and nearer the truth. You must
do the same. But in your own way, not ours.

. . . You are here to study, to Observe, not
to copy. Artists must learn to think and

feel for themselves and find new forms. They
must never be content with what someone else
has done. You are American, you have a differ-
ent economic system. You work at different
times of day. You eat different food and your
ears are pleased by different music. You have
different rhythms in your speech and in your
dancing. And if you want to create a great
theatre, all these things must be taken into
consideration. They must be used to create
your own method, and it can be as true and as
great as any method yet discovered.6

Logan's efforts toward an American Art Theater
were dampened as much by the Depression as by
Stanislavsky's words of caution, and he became instead
a successful director on Broadway. Logan seemed to
feel in this no betrayal of his former teacher.

Eighteen years after he sat at the feet of Stanislavsky,
he wrote in his introduction to the American publication

of Building 3 Character:

 

 

89

Today Stanislavski has been dead for over ten
years. . . .

I wish that I could have taken Stanislavski
to see, for instance, Carmen Jones, and Death
gr a Salesman, Carousel, n Streetcar Named
Desire, Born Yesterday, Oklahoma!, Victoria
Regina, gnr Town. I am sure he would have enjoyed
them all, and marvelled that they could have been
produced in such a short time. I believe he
would approve of the vitality, enthusiasm and
talent which our theatre peOple have today. And
although he might sneer at the few purely com-
mercial attempts that slip through and become
successful, he would feel that New York is now
producing much that is new and outrageously
experimental. I think he would like us.7

 

 

 

 

 

It may have been modesty that prevented Logan
from listing any of his own productions among those
he was sure Stanislavsky would have enjoyed. It may
also have been widsom. By 1950, Logan had an impressive

number of hits to his credit: 9n Borrowed Time (1938),

 

I Married an Angel (1938), Knickerbocker Holiday (1938),

 

Mornings an Seven (1939), Stars In Your Eyes (1939),

 

Two for the Show (1940), Higher and Higher (1940),

 

 

Charley's Aunt (1940), ny Jupiter (1942), Annie Get

 

 

Your Gun (1946), Happy Birthday (1946), John Loves

 

Mary (1947), Mister Roberts (1948), and South Pacific

 

 

(1949). With the possible exception of Mister Roberts

 

and South Pacific, all of these productions fall into

 

the category of the "few purely commercial attempts
that Slip through and become successful," and although
they all possessed the qualities that Logan cited as

virtues--vitality, enthusiasm, and speed of production——

90

there is no indication in any Of Stanislavsky's writings
that he shared Logan's priorities. Harold Clurman, a
student of a student of Stanislavsky, considered it
ironic that Logan had been chosen to introduce their
mutual mentor to the American public. "It is charac-
teristic of the times," he grumbled, "that . . .

[Building a Character] is presented to us now with an

 

 

introduction by Joshua ("South Pacific") Logan, an
extremely able director, whose work, however amiable
and successful, cannot be said to exemplify the
Stanislavsky tradition."8
Although Logan's direction did not seem to be
much inspired by the spirit of Stanislavsky, his play-

writing attempt was inspired by his trip to Moscow.

Three factors coalesced into the making of The Wisteria

 

Trees--Logan's desire to turn playwright, a Moscow
memory, and a personal tragedy for Helen Hayes.

Shortly after launching South Pacific on Broad-

 

way for what promised to be a long and successful run,
Logan looked around for new worlds to conquer. It was
then, he said, that "I decided to do something I had

wanted to do for a long time-—write a play on my own."9

Logan had, in fact, written two plays before The

Wisteria Trees, but he wrote neither of them by himself.

 

He had collaborated with Thomas Heggen, author of the

novel Mister Roberts, in adapting it for the stage.

 

91

He had also collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein in
forging the libretto for South Pacific from James

Michener's Tales gr the South Pacific. By experience

 

and apparently by inclination, Joshua Logan was an
adaptor and a collaborator, and he remained true to
his bent, even when writing "a play on my own." The

Wisteria Trees is an adaptation of Chekhov's The

 

Cherry Orchard, written by Logan in collaboration

 

with his audience, with Helen Hayes, and with Chekhov
himself.

The term adaptation is a variously defined

 

term. Something more than a translation, something
less than an original play, an adaptation may involve
the paraphrase of a script, a search for equivalent
effects from one dramatic idiom to another, or the
re-working of an old plot within a contemporary system.
Adaptations had become fashionable by the Fifties, and
few Of the classics remained untouched. The French
playwrights, particularly, fancied novel interpretations
given to ancient stories. American adaptors were
inclined to find their sources elsewhere. "During the
last five years," noted Kappo Phelan,

we have had the "adaptation" stretched, it would

seem, to the farthest limit. We have had plays

based gn_the novel, the biography, the report,

the magazine article, and the "idea of;" we have

had plays "suggested by;" and we have had plays
from plays and plays from movies and plays from the

 

92

radio cereal. [sic.] I don't think however that
any of these strange adjustments out of the
immediate past can possibly tOp Joshua Logan's
program explanation concerning his present piece
starring Helen Hayes.lo ‘

The subtitle Logan had chosen for his new play
was indeed a "strange adjustment": "An American Play

. . . Based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard."

 

Although the subtitle avoids a genre label, it does
emphasize Logan's intention to Americanize the Russian

prototype. In an advance notice for the New York

 

Times, Logan explained the progress of his idea and its
connection with one of his favorite actresses:

One day two years ago, she [Helen Hayes] said to
me, "I'd like to do 'The Cherry Orchard.'" I
had always thought that Chekhov's play is as
much the story of Louisiana's plantation life as
it was that of the great Russian estates.

We agreed that I was to try to transpose the
Russian play to my home state. Parallels were
Obvious. In both countries slavery had been
abolished at about the same time. The decline
of power in the landed gentry of both countries
took place during the same years. The agonies
of change are universal, we felt.11

Elsewhere he added:

I remembered a beautiful production of Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard that I had seen when I was

in Russia, and I had always wanted to adapt it
to a similar American background-~the South
after the Civil War. SO I wrote The Wisteria
Trees, drawing heavily on my own childhood in
Lou1siana.12

 

 

The final writing of the play was spurred by
Miss Hayes's domestic tragedy. On September 22, 1949,

her nineteen-year—Old daughter died. Her many friends

93

mourned with her, and Logan was asked to provide a play
as therapy. He explained,

I always had had Helen Hayes in mind for the leading
role, but at first she wasn't interested. Then,
with tragic suddenness, her daughter Mary died of
polio. Nedda [Mrs. Logan] and I went to see her
that night. We found her sitting alone, and we
stayed with her until she was able to go to bed.

A few weeks later, I got a call from her husband,
playwright Charles MacArthur, who said, "It's
important for Helen to work. Do you think you

can get Inn Wisteria Trees ready for production
this year?" I drove myself to do it, and we opened
it on Broadway that Spring.13

 

If there was any irony about adapting a vehicle
for ensemble acting into a starring vehicle for a
leading lady, Logan did not seem to be aware of it.
Almost from the beginning, the play was a joint project
between author and star.

At first glance, The Wisteria Trees seems an

 

ingenious duplication of The Cherry Orchard, for the

 

characters and Situations are fairly accurate approxi—
mations of their originals. The setting throughout
the play is the children's parlor of the once elegant
Andree estate on Wisteria plantation, now fallen into
disrepair. The French windows of the parlor Open onto
a grove of wisteria vines that have grown across the
gallery outside and have entered the room. The action
begins just before dawn on an April morning near the
turn of the century. Illuminated by lamplight on the

darkened stage, Dolly May, the black maid who duplicates

94

Dunyasha, discusses with Martha, the Varya of the play,
the anticipated arrival of the train bearing Lucy
Andree Ransdell and her seventeen-year-old daughter,
Antoinette, from Paris. Gradually the stage fills up
with other parallel characters. Yancy LOper is a poor
white who, like his prototype LOpahin, has become rich.
He too carries with him a fond childhood memory of the
kindness of the lady of the house:

My daddy threw an empty corn-whisky bottle at me

and smashed me in the face--give me a nose bleed.

Miss Lucy dragged me in here . . . right here

. . . used to be a washstand there . . . and She

bathed my face with rose water. "Don't cry,

little poor one," she said, "you're gonna live."14
Epihodoff, the Andreev family retainer whose life is
a self-fulfilling prophecy of misfortune, is replaced
by Henry Arthur Henry, the black house servant who is
nicknamed "Mister Misery." And Trofimoff, the perpetual
student and former tutor of little Grisha, who speaks
loftily of a golden future, is replaced by Peter
Whitfield from Tulane University, writer of protest

poetry, and former tutor of Lucy's son, Lee. Semyonoff—

Pishtchik, the neighboring landowner in The Cherry

 

Orchard, finds his parallel in Bowman Witherspoon,
whose estate is also saved at the end of the play.
Chekhov's Charlotta, androgynous ventriloquist and
governess of Anya and Varya, becomes black Cassie,

Antoinette's nurse and travelling companion to Paris.

95

The Frenchified Yasha is duplicated by Jacques, who
wishes to be back in Paris, and with reason. Antoinette
explains:

Mama took him over there to fetch for her and he

had the French people fetchin' for him. The

French peOple think Negroes are-—exotic.
Finally, old Fiers becomes old Scott, the faithful
slave who looks after his "little white nuisance,"
Gavin Leon Andree, and "couldn't take time Off to get
'mancipated."

The duplication of characters in the two plays
is thus complete. Impoverished Russian landowners
become post-bellum Southern plantation owners, peasant
merchants become rich "turkeynecks," and emancipated
serfs become emancipated blacks.

The exposition and central action of the two
plays are also parallel. Like her Russian counterpart,
Lucy Andree Ransdell had married a ne'er—do-well who
died from drinking. She then fell in love with another
man, with whom she fled to Paris in an agony of guilt
after her young son drowned. There She lived with him
until he left her for another woman. When the play
opens, She is returning to the family estate, fetched
home by Antoinette and Cassie to face the impending
crisis of bankruptcy. The play involves the family's
ineffectual, unrealistic attempts to avert the crisis,

and, at the end of Act II, Yancy LOper announces that

96

he has purchased the estate at auction. He echoes
LOpahin when he exults:

Tell me I'm drunk--tell me I'm crazy! Little

Yancy, who had to run around nekkid over there

'till he was eight years old, owns the place

where his pappy wasn't even allowed in the

kitchen with the blacks!

Act III takes place in the empty children's

parlor in winter, as the displaced family prepares
to leave the old homestead. Gavin Andree has taken
a position in a bank, Cassie has found another home
in need of a nurse, Martha will become housekeeper for
another family, and Lucy will go back to Paris to "tie
that stone around my neck and go down for the last
time." Their leavetakings are accompanied by the sound

of axes cutting down the wisteria vines.

For all its deliberate parallels, The Wisteria

 

Trees is strangely unlike The Cherry Orchard. Some of

 

the differences between the two plays are differences
in plot, for Logan saw fit to make several deletions
and additions. The most important of these involve the
love relationships in the play.

Chekhov rarely wrote of requited love, and his
potential lovers--Nina and Trepleff, Sonia and Astroff,
Lopahin and Varya--remain just that. Logan preferred
to honor the stage tradition requiring nice young men
and pretty young girls to marry, and thus he sends

Peter and Antoinette off together at the end of the

97

play. He even provides them with an income. In a
triumph of hope over doubt, Antoinette has secretly
sent one of Peter's poems to a newspaper, which has
agreed to print it. She confesses:
You were paddlin' the boat and I was reading
William Blake's poetry to you. You suddenly said
he was expressing what had been the matter with
you all your life . . . doubting everything. You
even doubted that your dinner-table jingles were
any good. And I suddenly doubted that you were
actually there in front of me. And there we were
--both sittin' in the boat, riddled with doubt--
us, not the boat--so I read the poem again. It
said:
He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne'er believe. Do what you please.
So I decided to send your jingles to the Times-

Picayune.
She adds confidently,

They'll want as many more as you'll write--as
long as they're funny.

Such facile confidence is voiced by some of
Chekhov's characters too, but it is always undercut by
Chekhov's gently ironic portrayal of them. Here,
however, no authorial vision undercuts or reverses
Antoinette's belief that confidence conquers all, for
that belief was Logan's as well. He recalled for the
readers of I995 magazine that he had helped Mary Martin
regain her self-confidence when she appeared in the

London production of South Pacific without her original

 

co-star, Ezio Pinza:

98

She was frightened--and it showed in our rehearsals.
I knew that if we Opened with Mary in this state
there would be trouble.

Although she was avoiding me, I went to her
dressing room and forced her to listen. I told
her she was the best actress in the world for this
role. I told her of similar doubts that had nearly
destroyed my own creative work in the past.
Suddenly, some lines by William Blake surged up
from my memory. I recited them to her:

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne'er Believe, do what you Please.
If the Sun & Moon should doubt,

They'd immediately Go out.

Mary turned the words over in her mind for a
moment. Then, she half smiled. She said quietly,
"Let's rehearse." In a matter of minutes, She
was Mary Martin again. The following Christmas,
she sent me the pillow with the Blake poem on it.
She had Spent hours in her dressing room embroidering
it for me.

Those lines of Blake's have helped me many
times in my life. I learned them as a boy in the
little Louisiana town of Mansfield, where I was
raised. I had plenty of reason to doubt myself in
those days.15

NO Blake poem surfaces to rescue Martha and
Yancy. Martha desperately wishes to marry Yancy, and
Lucy Ransdell sets the stage for Yancy to prOpose marriage.
The Short, abortive scene between Martha and Yancy is
almost an exact translation of Chekhov; the difference
comes later. Chekhov did not explain LOpahin's failure
to prOpose marriage to Varya. It is possible that
LOpahin himself did not know why he could not act, and
Chekhov never betrayed his reticence or analyzed his
inhibitions. Logan, in contrast, chose to make explicit
what Chekhov had allowed to remain one of several
implicit possibilities: Yancy LOper does not marry

Martha because he is in love with Lucy.

99

LOPER

Miss Lucy, I couldn't do what I promised because
LUCY
Why, Yancy, why?
LOPER
Well, you see I got all stirred up--SO I went
outside. I saw somethin' out there I never saw
before in my life. I saw them trees covered with
long purple blossoms. And, Miss Lucy, they was
the most beautiful things in the world.
LUCY
What are you talkin' about, Yancy? This is
December. They won't have blossoms 'til April.
LOPER
Miss Lucy, I was lookin' at 'em in April, I
reckon, because--they'll still be standin' there.
I'm not going to cut 'em down. You can have 'em.
You can have 'em forever.

LUCY
Yancy!
LOPER
And you can live in this house forever.
LUCY
But it's your house, Yancy.
LOPER

That's right. But it can be our house, Miss Lucy.
Our trees.

(n3 looks an her pleadingly, deeperate.

LUCY looks back, seeing that ne means In ann

that possibly it could all come true. She

cannot Speak.)—_ ___
We'll prune 'em back like they was when you was a
little girl and we'll spread white oyster shells
thick along that driveway--all the way down to
the river. We'll paint these Old Corinthian columns
white--'til they're gleamin'. This'll be one of
the greatest places that ever was. I'll even make
it better than it was before. (LUCY still looks at
him) I'll make the money to do it, Miss Lucy. —_
That's easy for me, makin' money. And with you
here still, as the lady of this house, as my . . .
(ne In overcome ny the picture of what might happen)
Good God Alm1ghty, Miss Lucy, ITIl own this state!
Everybody will fight to get asked to dinner with
us, and to meet you . . . and me. We'll have 'em
all workin' for us, Miss Lucy. That's what I saw
when I looked at them trees. That's why they was

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

100

covered with purple flowers in December. Do you

want 'em, Miss Lucy? Do you want them . . . and
me? 'Cause I go with 'em, you see.
LUCY

Yancy, oh, Yancy . . . if I'm hearin' what I hear,
thank you. But aren't you bein' sentimental? I'm
not right for you, Yancy.

LOPER
You're the only one that's ever been right for me.
That's been the trouble. I didn't know it. I
didn't even know why I bought this place--but I
knew just now. I bought it for you. You're what
I need. And this old place needs you, too. The
only chance it's got is with you in it.

Lucy refuses. She tells LOper to cut down the wisteria
vines. He replies:

I wish you hadn't washed away that nosebleed. It
would have been easier for me if you'd let it go

on bleedin'. (He strides out into the gallery and
calls In the wofkmen) Come on, everybody, let‘s cut
'em down. Let's go, you turkeynecks. Give me one
of them axes. Here, you men, give me one of them
axes and follow me.

 

 

Thus the axing of the vines becomes psychologi—
cally motivated; it becomes a gesture of Loper's
retaliation for the hurt he has received. The sound
that, for Chekhov, had embraced the pathos and the
irony of the entire play has been reduced to a single
meaning.

Logan's habit of reduction, of pinning down to
a single gesture what Chekhov had left implied or
mysteriously allusive, goes a long way toward explaining

the disappointingly prosaic quality Of The Wisteria

 

Trees. A few additional examples may suffice. In

101

Act I of The Cherry Orchard, Fiers is serving coffee

 

 

to Lyuboff before She retires for the night. She
says,
Thank you, Fiers, thank you, my dear
Old friend. I'm so glad you're still
alive.
FIERS: Day before yesterday.
GAYEFF: He doesn't hear well.
LOPAHIN: And I must leave right now.
Fier's inapprOpriate response to Lyuboff's somewhat
blunt but well-meaning remark kills its potential
sentiment, and then is allowed to die itself. The
conversation glances off one consciousness, then
another. Chekhov let it happen and then let it be.
Logan changed the scene slightly in The

Wisteria Trees.

 

LUCY
Where's my coffee? Thank you, Scott. Thank you,
my sweet old rock of Gibraltar. I'm so glad
you're still alive.
SCOTT
Day before yesterday.
' LUCY (39 GAVIN)

What?
GAVIN

He doesn't hear well.
LUCY

Oh. (In SCOTT) Day before yesterday.
SCOTT

Dat's right.

LUCY (Turning EB MARTHA)
I wonder what we're talkin' about.

LOPER
Miss Lucy, you did something for me once. Now
you're in trouble and I'm going to do something
for you.

102

LUCY
My troubles are over, Yancy. I'm back in this
house.
(SCOTT places a taboret for LUCY'S coffee
g_p. She pats his arm)
SCOTT

 

 

Day before yesterday.

In Logan's hands, Scott's remark is noted, mimicked,
labeled as a joke, and then repeated. Lucy's line "I
wonder what we're talking about" insures the laugh
that Logan felt the line deserved. Scott's repetition
of "Day before yesterday" gives the line the Specific
function of signalling a habitual, senile, linguistic
reflex. Logan's changes in this scene are character—
istic of his changes throughout the play; he is heavy-
handed and specific where Chekhov is light-handed and
allusive.

LOgan was equally heavy-handed and specific
when he replaced Chekhov's cherry orchard with his

wisteria vines.16

Chekhov's cherry orchard, as symbol,
embraces the entire play. It symbolizes a way of life
that is passing, and it has a different meaning and
worth for each of the characters in the play. Logan's
wisteria vines have a more specific and didactic
symbolic function. The vines do more than prettily
exist; they are also destructive. Yancy LOper exclaims:
Trees! StOp callin' 'em trees! They're just old
vines that climbed up around young live oaks and

choked 'em to death. They couldn't stand up for
themselves if they didn't have those live oaks

103

inside of them. Last year one of them grew right
through the side of the carriage house, and now
one's wrapped itself around one of your famous
Corinthian columns like a bo' constrictor and
squashed it--so stop callin' 'em trees! StOp
treatin' 'em with respect! They certainly ain't
treatin' you with any!

Thus the wisteria trees are not only symbols of an old
order, but they impose a negative judgment about that
old order as well--a judgment that Chekhov never made.

Some of the differences between The Wisteria

 

Trees and The Cherry Orchard arise not so much from

 

plot changes and from the heavy-handed prosaic realism
as from contrasting methods of characterization.
Whereas Chekhov had written his play for a group of
actors, Logan's play was intended to be a starring
vehicle for Helen Hayes. Accordingly, Logan plumped
the role of Lucy Andree Ransdell and reduced the roles
of the other characters. His singular focus is apparent
from the very beginning. Chekhov brings nearly all his
characters--Lyuboff, Anya, Charlotta, Varya, Gayeff,
Semyonoff—Pishtchik, Lopahin, Dunyasha--on stage at
once. The stage directions accompanying Lyuboff's
first entrance indicate that "all pass through the
room." in the clamor and confusion of their arrival,
no one is singled out; in fact, we cannot immediately
distinguish one character from another. The focus is

on the entire household.

104

Conventionally, stage characters enter one by
one or in pairs, and are, in one way or another,
introduced as they enter. Logan eschewed Chekhov's
helter-skelter staging in favor of the more conventional
method of getting his characters on stage. Lucy enters
alone. The stage directions read: "Lucy Andree Ransdell
enters. She is dressed in a smart traveling costume.
She is elated by her return but deeply moved by various
familiar objects in the room." After her solo moment
in the spotlight, Lucy proceeds to introduce the other
characters as she greets them. The technique is not
forced; it seems natural that Lucy, after an absence
of five years, Should repeat each name as she connects
it with the face before her. But it is a technique
far more contrived than Chekhov's.

The spotlight never leaves Lucy for very long.
In the ballroom scene that occurs simultaneously with
the auction off stage, Chekhov gave some of the ironic
stage business to Charlotta, who entertains the guests
with card tricks, ventriloquism, and sleight-of—hand
performances. While these divertissements are taking
place, Lyuboff is increasingly silent, and her silence
eloquently speaks for her growing anxiety. Logan gave
the corresponding divertissements to Lucy. In an
impromptu performance for two little visiting children,

she entertains them with a song about Froggie and

105

Miss Mouse. The song is charming, but its chief dra-
matic function seems calculated to highlight the
winsome talents of Miss Hayes.

The roles of the other characters are reduced
in inverse proportion to the role of Lucy Andree
Ransdell. That process of reduction was achieved
largely by eliminating the rambling soliloquies and
surface chatter that revealed to us the pretensions
and self-conceptions of Chekhov's characters. AS far
as we can tell, Logan's minor characters have no inner
lives; they exist for their service to the plot.

John Mason Brown, in an interesting comparison between
the Russian and the American psyche, suggested that
Logan's inattention to the inner lives of his characters
was not so much an oversight as a requirement of his

subject matter.

Although Southerners were then, as they are now,
capable of strong emotions, they did not share
the Russians' passion for introspection. If
they fed their minds on memories and dreams,

they were, I suspect, Anglo-Saxon enough to be
reticent about life with a capital "L." Climate
may have made them languid. Cheap labor, which
had once been slave, may have made them indolent.
Living on the bitter diet of defeat may have left
them maladjusted and contributed to their
melancholy. But, unless present-day Southerners
are a totally different breed, which I doubt,

and unless my memories of the older generation
mislead me, the South's men and women who corre-
spond to Madame Ranevsky and her intimates did
not plunge into metaphysical depths. Wisely,
gaily, or ruefully, they prattled on about the
surface of subjects. They were happier when

106

discussing people, clothes, food, or events than
abstract ideas. Theirs was a fierce family or
sectional pride. It was the conditions of their
life, past or presentq‘which interested them
more than the exploration of their psyches.
Their troubles were many, but the "soul" in the
Russian sense was not one of them.

Chekhov's people were different. Passive
as their outward lethargy may have been, their
inward activity was unceasing. A critic such
as Matthew Josephson may, in current fashion,
dismiss "the mysterious Slavic soul" as a form
of blague, but to Chekhov's characters this same
"soul was a matter of constant concern. Their
preoccupation with it supplies a Special energy
to the most becalmed of Chekhov's Speeches.

His plays substitute interior action for
outward happenings. Although his people may be
trivial, life in its largest sense speaks through
them. Gay as they can be, and gay as they must
be to preserve the comedic richness of Chekhov's
sorrowful scripts, at heart (more accurately, in
those "Slavic souls" of theirs) his characters
are sad. In oversimplified terms, the intensity
which distinguishes their sadness from that of
their Southern counterparts can perhaps be
suggested by comparing the sheer sorrow of
"Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground" (which is
accepted as being Southern) with the fateful,
almost electric melancholy of "The Volga Boat
Song."

The vibrancy which underlies the seeming
languor of Chekhov's Russians is missing in "The
Wisteria Trees." Mr. Logan cannot be blamed for
this. His Southerners, as I have come to realize,
would be Russians if they possessed it. Yet the
lack of it is sorely felt. All the fine talents
involved in the production cannot compensate for
its absence.17

The absence of Chekhov's special method of
characterization helps to explain yet another major
difference between the two plays--the difference in

the way the two authors achieve their comic effect.

107

Chekhov had great difficulty trying to convince
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko that his play was
comic. Even though he firmly labeled it "A Comedy in
Four Acts," they insisted upon reading it as a grnne.
No matter how the play is produced, however, even in
the melancholy productions that persisted long after
Chekhov's protestations were forgotten, there is much
about it that makes us laugh. In fact, much of the
play is farce. "Farce," says Styan,

which prohibits compassion for human weakness,
and tragedy, which demands it, are close kin.
The truth is that The Cherry Orchard is a play
which treads the tightrOpe between them, and

results in the ultimate form of that Special
dramatic balance we know as Chekhovian comedy.13

 

"That special dramatic balance" is achieved by Chekhov's
superb control over the flux of mood in the play. A
rising sentiment is smothered by a neat inconsequence,
and a farcical bit is offset by a glancing irony. The
play continuously hovers between farce and pathos,
caricature and tragedy, whim and phiIOSOphy, irony and
parody.

More specifically, however, "Chekhovian
comedy" is a matter of another kind of balance--the
balance between Chekhov's vision of his characters
and their vision of themselves.19 Much of the humor
of The Cherry Orchard is contained in the portraits of

the servants. Dunyasha and Yasha, for example, both

108

conceive of themselves as urbane SOphisticates. Dunyasha
calls attention to her white hands and her delicacy.

She has developed nerves and a fastidious distaste of
cigars. Yasha, the Object of her infatuation, behaves

according to his idea of swashbuckling bon vivant.

 

Both ape their social superiors in vulgar, ludicrous
parody, and their clandestine trysts are broadly comic
caricatures. Epihodoff, the suitor Dunyasha has
abandoned, thinks of himself as a tragic hero. But
his melancholy laments and tentative offers to commit
suicide are offset by his clumsy pratfalls and
pathetic displays of learning.

The other characters in the play, though less
broadly comic than the servants, are nevertheless comic
in the same way--they are equally self-deceived.
Gayeff, like the perpetually astonished Pishtchik, is
a great innocent child, and his efforts to save the
orchard are all the more ridiculous for his complete
sincerity and trust in them. "We'll pay the interest.
I am convinced of that--" he swears, as he pOpS a
hard candy into his mouth. That the urgent and
practical matter of the fate of the orchard should
be entrusted to a man who sucks candy, plays imaginary
games of billiards, apostrophizes bookcases, and
submits passively to the fussy attentions of old

Fiers, is funny indeed. During the course of the play,

109

Gayeff learns nothing, either about himself or about
the world around him, and the irony of his future is
lost on him. He gaily announces in Act IV:
Yes, indeed, everything is fine now. Before
the sale of the cherry orchard, we all were
troubled, distressed, then when the question
was settled definitely, irrevocably, we all
calmed down and were even cheerful--I'm a
bank Official. I am a financier now—-Yellow
ball into the Side pocket, anyway, Lyuba,
you look better, no doubt about that.

Lyuboff Andreevna is no more perceptive than
her brother. She conceives of herself as feminine
and charming, and that she is. But her situation
requires more of her, and she is not equal to those
requirements. She does have moments of self-
revelation, but these moments never add up to any
total revelations or any reversals. "The musicians
came at an unfortunate moment and we planned the ball
at an unfortunate moment--" she admits in Act III,
but adds, "Well, it doesn't matter."

Trofimoff, the young visionary who carries on
his thin shoulders the burden of the social comment
of the play, speaks much that is true. In another
play, Trofimoff might be the norm against which the
other characters might be judged. But Trofimoff is
forbidden that stature, for he too has pretensions,

and, like Alceste, his truisms sound more like bombast

than like reasoned discourse. Coming as they do from

110

a squeaky-voiced young man who has never worked in his
life, Trofimoff's arguments for social progress through
labor merely evoke indulgent smiles from stage audience
and theater audience alike.

LOpahin is the best candidate for the normative
character in the play. He, after all, does the work
that Trofimoff merely talks about, and he has fewer
pretensions than the other characters, for he is neither
introspective nor self-indulgent. Chekhov emphasized
to Stanislavsky that LOpahin was to be played sym-
pathetically:

Lopakhin is a merchant, of course, but he is a
very decent person in every sense. He must
behave with perfect decorum, like an educated
man, with no petty ways or tricks of any sort.
. . . In choosing an actor for the part you
must remember that Varya, a serious and
religious girl, is in love with Lopakhin; she
wouldnat be in love with a mere money-grubber.
It is only as a lover that LOpahin is comic, and his
excruciating discomfiture in the presence of Varya is
both pathetic and amusing.21

Each of Chekhov's characters, then, approaches
his situation from a limited moral and philosophical
perspective. The naive, the innocent, the foolish,
and the earnest--all address themselves to a potentially

tragic situation, but we smile because our vision of

them is so different from their own. The comedy of

111

The Cherry Orchard stems from the diSparity of those

 

visions.

That source of humor was not available to
Mr. Logan, who took his characters at their own value.
Peter Whitfield, for example, like Trofimoff, articu—
lates the social criticism in the play. But Peter is
no poseur whose overly earnest idea of himself as
visionary undercuts the vision itself. Trofimoff
launches into the rhetorical idiom of a Speechmaker
the moment he approaches his favorite topic; Peter
Speaks directly and personally. He even admits to
confusion, which immediately makes him uncomic. We
laugh at rigidity or obtuseness, not at honest con-
fusion. Peter Speaks for himself and for his author
when he says,

We're changing, like some lazy, prehistoric
animal shedding its old skin. The only trouble
is, there's no new one grown yet, and we don't
even know what kind we need. And if anybody asks
questions, that's treason. I could be tarred and
feathered for just what I'm saying now. The
Negroes do our singing. It's all right for a man
to breed dogs, but he better not play the piano
or he might be called a sissy, which means among
other things a hermaphrodite. And you know
we're lazy. We've stuffed ourselves with
delicious food prepared by strong, black hands,
and it's made us Sleepy. And who wants to listen
to all this? That little magaEiHe of mine was
fifty cents, and I reduced it to a quarter, but
if anybody would have bought it I would have sold
it for a penny. It wasn't any good because--you're
right, Mister Gay--I don't know what I think. I
hardly ever saw my father or my mother. We were
all brought up in the kitchen, weren't we? How's
this for the dinner table?

112

(Quoting)
Lucky little Southern chillun

Have Eng mothers, white and black.

While Mummy's in the parlor

They're with Mammy in the back!
I had one. Her name was Amy Lane. She weaned me
at the kitchen table, picked me up when I fell
down, slapped me when I was bad. I didn't even
know She was black. I thought her skin was made
out of purple velvet, and there was a place
between her shoulder and her arm that was soft
and warm and aromatic, and I could sleep there
better than anywhere. Then they stopped me from
eating in the kitchen. I don't know what's right
or wrong--or good or bad. Do you?

There is no double vision here; Peter's confusion is
LOgan's as well. "I was raised in the Deep South,
and I never quite comprehended my feelings about
Negroes," Logan confessed.
I was reared by a Negro nurse, Amy Lane. She
was my second mother, the queen who ruled the
back areas of the house, those permissive places
where I was happiest. She loved me and nurtured
me. Then, one day, I was told she couldn't eat
with me or ride in the same railroad car with
me. This is a guilty agony that all decent
Southerners carry inside of them.

The double vision is lacking from Logan's
portrayal of his other characters as well. In most
cases, it is lacking first of all because Logan spent
no time attending to the inner lives of the characters,
so that we have no sense of their self-concepts against
which to measure their objective "reality." But even
Lucy Ransdell looks at herself in precisely the same

way that Logan would have us see her. Her expository

speech about her past sins, for example, is far more

113

honest and self—reproachful than is Lyuboff's corre-
sponding speech. Lyuboff Andreevna says:

Oh, my sins--I've always thrown money around like
mad, recklessly, and I married a man who accumulated
nothing but debts. My husband died from champagne
--he drank fearfully--and to my misfortune I fell
in love with another man. I lived with him, and
just at that time--it was my first punishment--a
blow over the head: right here in the river my boy
was drowned and I went abroad—-went away for good,
never to return, never to see this river again--I
shut my eyes, ran away, beside myself, and he

after me-—mercilessly, brutally. I bought a villa
near Mentone, because he fell ill there, and for
three years I knew no rest day or night, the sick
man exhausted me, my soul dried up. And last year
when the villa was sold for debts, I sent to Paris
and there he robbed me of everything, threw me
over, took up with another woman; I tried to poison
myself--so stupid, so shameful--And suddenly I was
seized with longing for Russia, for my own country,
for my little gir1--(Wiping away her tears) Lord,
Lord, have mercy, forgive me my sins! Don't punish
me any more! (Getting a telegram out of her

ocket) I got this today from Paris, hE—aSES for-
giveness, begs me to return--(Tears np the telegram)
That sounds like music somewhere.

 

 

 

Lucy says:

I'm being punished. Not Gay--me! I've been willful.
When it came to gettin' married, I defied every-
body. Our blood was runnin' thin so I decided to
change it. I married an up-and-coming lawyer, and
then found his one ambition was to be lord of a
plantation and drink all the whiskey in the world.
SO . . . I filled his glass 'til it runnethed over.
Before he died he used to bring some strange, crude
men around for poker. There was an arrogant one
that . . . well, after my lawyer husband died,
those times I went to New Orleans to see the Opera,
I didn't see the opera . . .
GAVIN
Lucy, honey, that's all over.
LUCY
Gay, please! Even you'll admit I was punished
then, Yancy. While my little son was showin' me
how well he could swim, the river swallowed him up

114

in front of my eyes. These trees turned yellow,
the river turned black. I flew the COOp! I
took a boat for Europe, but not too fast for him.
He was standin' in my cabin with a big, white
smile. "Not so fast, Honey--you need someone to

take care of you." God save me, it sounded good!
SO I gave him some money and he bought me a villa
near a place he knew called . . . Monte Carlo.
Then he got sick and I nursed him for three years.
GAVIN
Why didn't you send for me, Lucy?
LUCY

Oh, Gay, darling! The villa was sold to pay
for the doctors, and he was well, so we went to
Paris--a beautiful city, Yancy, with great, wide
boulevards--and the most exguisite punishment of
all. One morning while I was asleep he unlocked
my dresser drawer and took Mama's diamonds--and
then he went to live with a lady we'd met. A few
days later he came knockin' at my door, but I had
a new strength. My daughter was there. I'd
almost forgotten I had one. She brought me back
home where I thought I'd be safe. And you say
I've never committed a sin--that I've never been
punished? (She breaks down. TO cover her tears
she takes her handkerchief from—her purse and
realiEes that she has a cablegram. She holds it
np) He's Sittin1 at ouf Iittle cafe under the _-
chestnut tree. (Music can pg heard faintly) He's
sick again. He needs me. Do I hear music playin'?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The content of the two speeches is virtually the same,
but the tone is different. Lyuboff's remorse is
sincere enough, but it seems a sincerity that is self-
indulgent. "Lord, Lord, have mercy, forgive me my
sins!" has a rhetorical ring to it. Lyuboff's speech
is effective characterization before it is effective
exposition. Lucy's confessions, in contrast, are more
straightforward, neither blurred nor compromised by
any feeling that she is sentimental about her own

misgivings. Her speech is effective exposition before

115

it is effective characterization. Later in the play,
Lucy reinforces for us the clarity of her own per-
ception. "Antoinette," she says, "you work out a way
to live, do you hear me? Figure out what I did, and
then for the love of God, do something else." And
still later:
I'm going to tie that stone around my neck and
go down for the last time.
GAVIN
Are you doing it because Antoinette doesn't
need you any more and I. . . .
LUCY
Gay . . . that's just an excuse! I'm what

old Scott says . . . I'm shiftless. I would have
gone anyway. I can't help it. Oh, God, save me.

Lucy, unlike Lyuboff, is not self-deceived. None of
Logan's characters is; they are all just as perceptive
about themselves as their author is. And no more so.
Because Logan failed to catch the comedy that
is inherent in the double layer of perception Operative
in Chekhov's play, he had to find his humor elsewhere.
He did so by giving his characters lines calculated to
make the audience laugh. These lines are not an
intrinsic part of characterization, but rather are
imposed on the characters from outside themselves, in
the manner of stand-up comedians. In Act I, when Lucy

first sees her old neighbor, she exclaims,

116

And Bowman Witherspoon, you Old Methodist!
WITHERSPOON

Baptist!
LUCY

What's the difference?

In the same scene, Cassie delivers her set speech:

WITHERSPOON
Cassie, what did you think of Paris?

CASSIE
Oh, it got a lot of parks, but they all too laid
out for me. And there's marble statues of nekkid
men all over the place--most of 'em's called
Apollo! Miss Lucy says, "Isn't they beautiful
statues, Cassie!" (In ANTOINETTE) Didn't She?
(ANTOINETTE nods) And I says, "Miss Lucy, I
dressed and undressed your little son Lee before
he got drowned in the river, and afore that I
dressed your little boy cousins--all ages! Honey,
these here Apollos ain't no recreation for me!"

Similar jokes and comic bits are scattered
throughout the play. The characters often seem to be
feeding one another lines, with one eye on the audience's
reaction. It is the same kind of humor that worked so

well in Mister Roberts and South Pacific--the set-

 

 

pieces of situation comedy-—and it is the kind of
comedy that is created in exactly the Opposite way
from Chekhovian comedy. Logan figured out what lines
would make people laugh and then created characters
to Speak those lines. Chekhov created characters first,
allowed them to talk out of their own self-concepts,
and the comedy resulted naturally.

Logan's comments about the writing of his play

help to illuminate many of the differences between The

117

Wisteria Trees and The Cherry Orchard. It was Logan's

 

 

habit to write with his mind on his audience, putting
things together during rehearsals and trial runs.

The initial writing of The Wisteria Trees was hurried

 

and the re-writing process was hectic. Before its

New York Opening, the play was taken on a pre-Broadway
tour where each new audience presented Logan with new
problems. In Boston, for example,

except for polite applause, there was no reaction
whatsoever from the audience. We could have
expected the same silence from peOple listening

to a two-hour funeral oration. What had happened?

We were confused by the reaction of the
audiences. The audiences were confused, too. The
play tried to follow the exact form of Chekhov's
play and the audience did not accept it as an
American story for today's audience.

After talking to Helen, I decided to re-do
the whole thing, keep all of the material and
tell the same story, but find a form easier for
an American audience to follow emotionally. Leland
[Hayward] booked an extra three weeks out of town
and we got to work.

Practically every line in the play that Helen
and the cast had to say was transposed or turned
backward, and each night she faced an audience
with visions of pages pasted together, lines
scratched out, scenes reversed in order. They
had to keep two plays in their minds: the one they
were playing that night and the one they were re—
creating during the day. . . .

By the last three performances in Boston, all
the major changes had been made, but the play was
too long and the new version had not had enough
rehearsal, so that on the Opening night in New
Haven it faced another confused and dissatisfied
audience.

By the end of the week in New Haven we had a
chance to cut a bit and the play was beginning to
take shape, but at this point the friends who had
seen the play in Princeton arrived. The hardest
blow of all came from them. We somehow expected

118

peOple to be angry that "The Cherry Orchard" had

been changed, but these friends became enemies

because I had changed "The Wisteria Trees."23
In Philadelphia it was Helen Hayes who made the changes.
Sensing something wrong in the first act, she and
Logan went over the script line by line until she
singled out a speech that she found difficult to perform.
Logan promptly cut the speech from the first act and
re-instated it later in the play. The next day, he
reported, there was new life and new confidence in the
members of the cast.24

Logan's method of playwriting contrasts sharply

with Chekhov's method later in his life. "Three years
I spent writing 'The Cherry Orchard' . . ."25 Chekhov
wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1903, and his letters
during that three-year period document the slow,
measured, thoughtful process of gestation that took
place until "the play was completed in my head."26
Once the play was completed, it was not to be changed.
When actors asked Chekhov how certain lines were to be
interpreted, Chekhov reSponded with some astonishment,
"Why, I have written it all down."27

Logan had a totally different set of priorities.

In his essay "The Art in Yourself" he stated that

119

the author may . . . have to make a lifesaving
sacrifice. Certain lines are dear to him; the
actor has tried them in various ways; something
is still wrong. Perhaps it's the actor's voice
or face or personality which doesn't fit with
the lines. At this point the author must be per-
suaded to cut or rewrite the lines in order to
make it easier for the actor to project the
author's scene. Any agreement is worth while if
it is made for the sake of clarifying the play
for the audience. All really great authors are
ruthless with their work. No word is sacred.
Every second of every line must be heard, seen,
understood, felt, shared by the audience.
Confusion may seem artistic but it is fatal.28

Unfortunately, Logan's own mix—and-match method of
playwriting only guaranteed the fatal confusion he

thought to avoid. The Wisteria Trees is, in the words

 

of one critic,

a vast vulgarization of a great play in which
nothing matches. . . . One example of the mish-
mash will suffice. In the "Cherry Orchard" the
character of the heroine's brother is that of
an ineffectual, endearing, but pompous man given
to delivering speeches on every score. In the
"Wisteria Trees" Mr. Logan's version of this
figure has no speeches at all, although his
effect remains the same. While he wanders in
practical silence through Jo Mielziner's mar-
velously lighted set, he is everywhere lovingly,
laughingly greeted with the fact that he talks
too much. 9

 

Other examples might be added. The judgment against
the landowners implied by the symbol of the wisteria
vines is suppored nowhere else in the play. In fact,
Logan's less-than-sympathetic characterization of

Yancy LOper argues against that judgment. And through-
out the play, the narrative Logan borrowed from

Chekhov fails to bolster his more limited vision.

120

The people whom Logan was accustomed to pleasing
were the people who filled the musical theater, and it

was with them in mind that he wrote The Wisteria Trees.

 

But the audience that came to see The Wisteria Trees

 

was not always comprised of the same peOple who

applauded Mister Roberts and Charley's Aunt, and Logan

 

 

was candid in recording his dismay over the new per-
centage of critical intelligences who awaited each
opening curtain. His advice to anyone else who might
try to adapt a beloved classic for popular consumption
was simple:

If you decide to base a play of your own on a
masterpiece, try and find some tryout towns in
America that are not also centers of learning
where that masterpiece is taught in classrooms
and its strong, young converts are being turned
out by the hundreds. Don't go to Princeton,
Boston or New Haven, and if you do, remember I
warned you. Masterpiece lovers of the world
are lying in wait for you there.30

At the end of the pre—Broadway run, Logan was appre-
hensive, hOping that New York audiences would contain
no "masterpiece lovers."
The Chekhov scholars seem to have dwindled, I am
happy to say. Where did they go? Maybe the
University of Pennsylvania and Haverford and
Bryn Mawr spend more time on Ibsen. Maybe they
can't be seen in the shadows because of the glow
that comes from Helen Hayes. Maybe they're
moved to New York and are waiting for me there.31
They were. It was too much to expect that the New

York theater should be unaware of Chekhov.

121

The Wisteria Trees Opened at the Martin Beck

 

Theater on March 29, 1950, in the wake of a flurry of
advance publicity. Almost from its inception, the
play had been inextricably linked with Helen Hayes
and also with her late daughter, Mary MacArthur.
Shortly after Mary's death, her theater friends had
initiated the Mary MacArthur Fund for Polio, and on
February 6 an intensive campaign was launched by the
fund-raisers to sell tickets and get donations for

the preview performance of The Wisteria Trees,

 

originally scheduled for March 7. Tickets for the
regular performances were first sold by a private sale

to some 8,000 people who had been mail-order patrons

32

for Mister Roberts. Before long, the Martin Beck

 

Theater had to construct a second box office to handle
the orders for tickets,33 and when the Opening of the
play was delayed from March 8 to March 29 so that

Logan could finish polishing the script, the box office

34

had to exchange $90,000 worth of tickets. By the

time The Wisteria Trees finally arrived on Broadway,

 

it was, from a commercial point of view, an assured
hit.

It was not so from a critical point of View.
Most critics were wary. Those who praised the play

did so faintly, and for one of three reasons: many

122

were pleased to see Helen Hayes restored to the theater
after a two-year absence, some felt the play was not

as bad as it might have been, and a few--those who
interpreted The Cherry Orchard as a brutally hOpeless

drama--found The Wisteria Trees pleasant and wholesome

 

by comparison. Brooks Atkinson was one of the critics
in the latter category, and his remarks about The

Wisteria Trees seem predicated on a singularly harsh

 

reading of The Cherry Orchard. Though he acknowledged

 

that "Mr. LOgan's drama is no masterpiece," it was,
he felt, "one of the most absorbing plays of the season
in its own right and by comparison with its renowned

predecessor."35

Its renowned predecessor, according
to Atkinson, was a hopeless play, full of cruelty and
spite, and peopled by lonely, temperamental egoists.

The Wisteria Trees, on the other hand, was pretty,

 

gentle, and disarming. For example,

In that casual but horrifying scene [the
last scene in which Fiers is left behind]
Chekhov epitomized the barbaric egotism and
shiftlessness of the cultivated people he
was writing about. Mr. Logan has conSpicu-
ously departed from "The Cherry Orchard"
formula by not attempting to write a counter-
part to that scene. On the basis of the
nature of his characters in "The Wisteria
Trees," it would be unthinkable. Doubtless
there is a streak of cruelty in all aristo-
cracies, and for that matter in every group
culture, but Mr. Logan's amiable futilitarians
are not insensible in their personal relations.

123

Atkinson concluded: "Chekhov is hopeless. Mr. Logan
is not. And that is the fundamental reason why 'The
Wisteria Trees' is a new American play and not an

American version of 'The Cherry Orchard.'"36

Relatively few other critics were able to

see The Wisteria Trees as "'a new American play' and

 

not an American version of 'The Cherry Orchard.'"
John Mason Brown called it

a work haunted by a masterpiece. It not only
has to live up to "The Cherry Orchard" but to
live it down. In other words, it starts off
its supposedly independent life as handicapped
as the son of a great father.37

Accordingly, most critics concentrated on comparing
the two plays. The natural place to begin such a
comparison was, of course, with the point of com-
parison within the plays themselves--the analogy
between Russia and the American South. Many critics
seemed surprised to find that the analogy proved to
be less pointed than they might have expected.
Atkinson Observed:
The analogies between Russia and the deep South
at the end of the last century are startling—-
including the liberation of the Russian slaves
in 1961 and the American slaves in 1963. But
now that we have "The Wisteria Trees" for exact
comparison, it is evident that the analogies are
factual only. In Spirit, old Russia and the old

South are about as unlike as possible, and
Spirit is the animating force of a society.38

124

Joseph Wood Krutch found the analogy not so much false
as redundant:

I see no very compelling reason why "The
Cherry Orchard" should be re-written, since
Chekhov wrote it pretty well to begin with.
Shifting the scene to a Southern plantation
is dangerously close to what Hollywood calls
a "gimmick," and if it be argued that the
transition is easily made, that means only
that the original play had a certain univer-
sality which ought to be as evident in one
version as the other.3

That universality, however, was not especially
evident in Logan's version. Whatever it was that made

The Cherry Orchard ring true sounded hollow in The

 

Wisteria Trees, and nearly every critic articulated

 

some degree of disappointment. Harold Clurman called

"40

the play "a memory of a memory of a memory, Robert

Garland wrote in the Journal American that the char-

 

acters "do not break my heart as they broke my heart

«41

as Russians, and the reviewer for Time sadly judged

that "what is heard at the end is the sound of the ax

hacking the heart out of The Cherry Orchard."42

 

 

Richard Watts of the New York Post spoke for the

 

majority Of critics when he pronounced The Wisteria
43

 

Irene "neither good Logan nor good Chekhov."

The Often bewildered disappointment with which
most critics received the play may perhaps be explained
by noting the two assumptions that Mr. Logan brought

to his enterprise. The first was that The Cherry

 

125

Orchard is a play about the dispossession of an estate.
Such an assumption is far too mere. It is like saying

that Oedeus Rex is a play about a plague. Chekhov's

 

talent lies in his ability to project his realistic
situation beyond itself into poetic symbol and uni-

versal meaning. The subject of The Cherry Orchard,

 

therefore, reaches far beyond the selling of an orchard;
it is no less comprehensive than

time and change, and their effects wrought on a
representative group of people. . . . But in
feeling for this, Chekhov knows that the
realism Of the chosen convention can dangerously
narrow his meaning until it seems too parti-
cular and finally irrelevant. He thus works
hard to ensure that his play projects a uni-
versal image, giving his audience some sense
that this microcosm of the cherry orchard
family stands, by breadth of allusion and a
seemingly inexhaustible patterning of characters,
for a wider orchard beyond.

The cherry orchard is a particular place
and yet it is more. It represents an inextri-
cable tangle of sentiments, which together
comprise a way of life and an attitude to live.
. . . An audience finds that the orchard grows
from a painted backcloth to an ambiguous,
living, poetic symbol of human life, any human
life, in a state of change.44

When he tranSplanted the Russian orchard to
American soil, Mr. Logan duplicated the frame of
the play, but he missed the universal rumblings and
the poetic overtones. Thus his duplication is
disappointing not so much because the analogy is
false, but because Logan's reading of the original

was superficial.

126

Logan's second assumption concerned the nature
of his American audience. One irate patron asked the

obvious question in a letter to the New York Times:

 

"The reason for doing 'The Wisteria Trees' is that
both Helen Hayes and Mr. Logan have always wanted to
do 'The Cherry Orchard.‘ Well, why didn't they?"45

Logan's implied answer seemed to be that Americans

would have too much difficulty with The Cherry

 

Orchard; when writing the play he confessed he was
looking for a "form easier for an American audience

to follow emotionally."46

The presumption behind

any adaptation is that peOple understand only what

is immediately recognizable to them; the presumption
behind Logan's particular adaptation is that Americans
also need their reality served up in a familiar, con—
ventional fashion. And so, in his ministrations to
the masterpiece, Logan gave the American public a
cherry orchard tailored to their sensibilities and
theatrical expectations.

Logan was not altogether wrong in his esti-

mation of his audience. The Wisteria Trees ran for

 

165 performances and was briefly revived five years

later. NO production of The Cherry Orchard in

 

America had ever lasted beyond 96 performances.

DeSpite its modest success, however, The Wisteria

 

Trees seems a curious response to the advice Logan

127

had received from Stanislavsky nineteen years earlier:
"You must create something Of your own. If you try
to duplicate, that means that you merely follow

tradition. You are not going forward."

CHAPTER V

LILLIAN HELLMAN: THE CHEKHOVIAN GARDEN

Until 1951, there was nothing very Chekhovian
about any of Lillian Hellman's plays. Quite the
contrary. Her first six plays had earned for her the
reputation of a vigorous, uncompromising moralist
whose plots were so well made and decisive they leaned
dangerously toward melodrama. Ever since little
Mary's lie led inexorably to a suicide and a damaged

life in The Children's Hour, Miss Hellman pointed a

 

stern finger at depravity and compromise. Her
specialty was evil. She was, said John Gassner,
"our hanging judge of the American theatre."l

When The Autumn Garden Opened at the Coronet

 

Theater on March 7, 1951, the critics had every right
to expect an exposé of yet another category of evil-
doers. But the play did not fulfill their expectations,
and the reviews reflected their surprise. The advance

notice in the New York Times of February 25, 1951,

 

128

129

alerted the public with its headline: "Lillian Hellman

Drama Foregoes a Villain."2 Shortly after the play

Opened, John Mason Brown spoke for a majority of

critics when he noted that

was

was

the

the

in many ways "The Autumn Garden" is unlike any of
Lillian Hellman's previous works. The same
muscularity of mind, the same command of authentic
dialogue, the same willingness to face unpleasant
people as they are, the same instinctive awareness
of the theatre's needs which have always animated
her writing are present. But the mood, the tone,
the flavor, the point of view and hence the means
employed are so different from those of "The
Children's Hour," "The Little Foxes," "Watch on
the Rhine," and "Another Part of the Forest" that
it is no overstatement to say that a new Miss
Hellman has emerged.3

Critical reaction to the "new Miss Hellman"
mixed. Although most agreed that the new play
a fine one, many reviewers were sorry to lose
old Miss Hellman. The opening-night review in

New York Post was nostalgic:

 

Gone is the tremendous dramatic vigor that has
made Lillian Hellman's plays among the most
emotionally and intellectually dynamic in the
history of the American theater, and in its
place is a quiet introspection that is almost
bleak in its cold disregard of melodramatic
excitement. To a certain extent this brooding
contemplation marks an advance in the author's
writing, substituting a new quality of mature
deliberation for the sometimes febrile inten-
sity of her earlier plays. But I suspect that
the cost she pays for that maturity is a little
excessive. Her new play needs some of her Old-
time bite.4

130

The New York Times echoed this ambivalence. Brooks

 

Atkinson acknowledged that

in most respects this is Miss Hellman at the
peak of her talents--observant, sympathetic,
honest and alert. Nothing is forced. Every-
thing is lucid. In the circumstances, it
seems ungrateful to add that "The Autumn
Garden" is a little platitudinous. Like the
characters whom it admirably describes, it

is boneless and torpid.5

Several months after the Opening—night flurry, John
Gassner Spoke retrospectively for all the critics:
"We did not feel at ease with [the play], as if it
called for self-appraisals we are usually reluctant
to make."6

When the critics cast about for ways to

describe the unfamiliar Hellman play, several of them
compared it with Chekhov. Some qualified this com-
parison by suggesting that the similarity was accidental.
Brooks Atkinson wrote that "'The Autumn Garden' is
perhaps unintentionally in the Chekhov tradition,"7
and John Gassner was even more tentative:

It has been suggested that Miss Hellman
tried to write like Chekhov and failed. If this
is true at all, it is so only very superficially.
It is true that she attempted a more contrapuntal
and unplotty technique than had been her wont.

But the style was Hellman's, not Chekhov's in
the least.
John Mason Brown, however, found the new Hellman style

less a matter of accidental echoes than of a deliberate

switch in dramaturgic mentors:

131

For the first time in her distinguished
career she has, so to speak, turned her back on
Ibsen and moved into the camp of Chekhov. To
the casual reader such a shift in allegiance
may seem unimportant. To the theatre-minded,
however, it represents a change in attitude,
method, and purpose of the utmost significance.
Were an Old-guard Republican to become a New
Dealer or vice versa; were a Catholic to turn
Campbellite or a Campbellite to make the trip
to Rome, the about-face could not be more com-
plete.

Ibsen and Chekhov were irreconcilables in
their approaches to the drama. Their differ—
ences were sufficiently fundamental to be
described as a schism rather than a disagree-
ment. Yet their influences have been so far-
reaching that, though Chekhov in recent years
has proved to be the more beckoning, each still
has his following and the two of them can be
said to divide serious rose dramatists into
Montagues and Capulets.

Whether or not Miss Hellman's defection into
the camp of the Chekhovites was deliberate remains a
matter for speculation; she herself was silent on the
matter.10 There is, however, ample, albeit indirect,
evidence that she had Chekhov somewhere in mind when
she wrote the play. She had on occasion expressed
her awareness of the limitations of the well-made-
play formula, limitations which she had learned to
work within and now, for the first time, virtually
abandoned in favor of the looser Chekhovian form.
She had also studied Chekhov, and She articulated her

admiration for the man and his plays in 1954 in her

edition of The Selected Letters gr Anton Chekhov.

 

 

Finally, and most importantly, The Autumn Garden itself

 

132

attests to an indebtedness. The dramatic techniques
of the play are similar to those of Chekhov, and the

play's basic structure parallels that of Uncle Vanya.

 

In 1942, in the Introduction to the publication
of her first four plays, Miss Hellman sought to answer
the charges leveled against her that her plays were
too well-made and that they were melodramas. Part of
her defense consisted of a description of playwriting
according to Ibsen:

The theatre has limitations: it is a tight,
unbending, unfluid, meager form in which to
write. And for these reasons, compared to the
novel, it is a second-rate form. (I speak of
the form, not the content.) Let us admit that.
Having admitted it--a step forward, since most
of us are anxious to claim the medium by which
we earn a living is a fine and fancy thing--we
can stOp the pretentious lie that the stage is
unhampered. What the author has to say is
unhampered: his means of saying it are not.11

By the time she wrote The Autumn Garden, Miss Hellman

 

seemed to have modified her views about the limitations
of the theater. In an interview with Richard G. Stern
in 1959 she discussed the ideas for her new play,

Toys In the Attic. During the course of the interview,

 

Stern recalled that

the other day you were talking about Autumn
Garden and, in one sense, you summed up that
play very briefly. At least you gave its
technical source: you said you wanted to write
a novel in theater form, and then you talked
about the subject matter of the play as if it
were a sort of after-effect of the technique.12

133

In many respects, The Autumn Garden is a "novel in

 

theater form"; certainly there is nothing "tight,
unbending, unfluid or meager" about the play. Rather,
it is loose in structure, it bends easily, it is fluid,
and it is diffuse and dense. For Miss Hellman, such
qualities were entirely new, and they reflected a
second look at the inherent limitations of the theater.
They may also have reflected a second look at the
world. She said in 1965:

You write as you write, in your time, as you see

your world. One form is as good as another.

There are a thousand ways to write, and each is

as good as the other if it fits you, if you are

any good. If you can break into a new pattern

along the way, and it Opens things up, and

allows you more freedom, that's something.13

In the light of her work just after the completion

of The Autumn Garden, it is logical to assume that

 

the "new pattern along the way" was, for her, the
pattern of Chekhov.

Miss Hellman's edition of Chekhov's letters
both reflected and contributed to the spate of Chekhov
scholarship that was taking place in the Fifties.

Much of the impetus for this scholarship was the
publication of the twenty-volume complete works of
Chekhov, published between 1944 and 1951 in Moscow.
The last eight volumes of the Soviet edition were
devoted to Chekhov's letters, and their publication

was promptly followed by several smaller editions of

134

selected letters. In 1953 Louis Kronenberger, general
editor of a "Great Letters Series" for Farrar, Strauss
and Company, asked his old friend Lillian Hellman to
edit a new collection of Chekhov's letters. Her task
was to select and arrange the letters, which had been
translated by Sidonie Lederer, to write an introduction,
and to write biographical notes between the chron-
ologically arranged sections.
Miss Hellman's introduction and biographical
notes are interesting for two reasons: they tell us a
great deal about Chekhov, and nearly as much about
Miss Hellman's feeling of affinity between herself and
Chekhov, for her own preferences prejudiced her inter-
pretations of the man and his works. In 1953 there
were enough interpretations of Chekhov to warrant her
acknowledgment of "the Chekhov controversy, the
Chekhov legend":
PeOple see in him what they wish to see; even if
they have to ignore his words; or, more fre-
quently, they ignore the dates on which the words
were written. Some critics see Chekhov as a
political radical, a man who desired the over-
throw of a rotting society. Other critics see
him as a non-political man, an Observer of the
scene, a writer who presented the problem but
refused to give the answer. Still others see a
man who, far from criticizing anything or any-
body, was only saddened by a world that destroyed
the delicate and punished the finely made. None

of these points of view is the truth, although
each has in it something of the truth.14

135

The truth that Lillian Hellman saw was a man
who suited her own tastes. A severe, uncompromising
Observer of life herself, she found and admired the
same qualities in Chekhov. She admired him for his
"tough, unsentimental . . . mind" and for his refusal
to articulate the reality he saw in euphemistic terms.

Intelligence for Chekhov meant that you called

a Spade a spake: laziness was simply not working;
too much drink was drunkenness; whoring had
nothing to do with love; health was when you
felt good and brocaded words could not cover
emtpiness or pretensions or waste. He was
determined to we life as it was.

Such a man as this, a man tailored after Miss
Hellman's own fashion, would not have written pale,
wispy dramas. Nor, in her Opinion, did he. Miss
Hellman took strong issue with what she considered
to be the irreSponsible interpretations of his plays
that began with Stanislavsky.

Until now we seldom see a Chekhov play that is
pure Chekhov. Most of us, therefore, do not
know the plays. We know only something that
we call "Chekhovian," and by that we mean a
stage filled with sweet, soupy, frustrated
people, created by a man who wept for their
fate. . . .

Chekhov fought long and hard against this
interpretation of his plays. He lost the battle
and he knew it, but, fortunately, he could not
have known that it would still be lost fifty
years later.16

Although Miss Hellman did not propose an alternate

interpretation of Chekhov's plays, she did set down

136

certain guidelines. The plays, she felt, were not
to be viewed as pessimistic.

I do not understand the pessimistic theory. I
know of no writer who ever made it more clear
that he believed in the future. There is every
difference between sadness and despair. . . .
It has been forgotten that Chekhov said The
Seagull and The Cherry Orchard were comedies.

. . . The Cherry Orchard is sharp comedy.l7

 

 

 

She also held to the minority Opinion that Chekhov
did judge his characters. She felt that "Chekhov
makes it very clear that the lovable fools in The

Cherry Orchard are not even worth the trees that are
18

 

the symbols of their end." Miss Hellman's assumption
says more about herself than it does about Chekhov; it
was by no means clear to most Chekhov critics that
Chekhov felt thus about his characters, but it is not
surprising that it would seem so to the "hanging judge
of the American theatre."

Miss Hellman also made judgments about the
comparative merits of the plays. Ivanov "is not a
good play, but it is a remarkable picture of upper-

19

class nineteenth century society." The Three Sisters,

 

on the other hand, "is a great play. It is a greater

play than Uncle Vanya which, to me, is a greater play

 

than The Cherry Orchard. But all three plays are of

 

such importance that no easy and quick summary should

be made of them."20

137

The importance of the three plays for Hellman
herself can be inferred from her admiring, even
wistful, description of Chekhov's craftsmanship.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain
has been up five minutes we have a sense Of being
able to settle back in the arms of the playwright.
Instinctively we know that the playwright knows
his business. Neatness in design and execution
is, after all, only the proper use of material,
but it has a beauty of its own. It is exhilarating
to watch a good workman at work, to see each detail
fall into useful place, to know that the shortest
line, the smallest stage movement, has an end in
view and is not being used to trick us or deceive
or pull fashionable wool over our eyes. It is
then that we say to ourselves, this writer knows
what he is doing, he has paid us the compliment
of learning his trade. To such writers, in what-
ever field they be, we give our full attention and
they deserve it.

It is that way with Chekhov.21

From a playwright whose own forte was "neatness in

design and execution," this was high praise indeed.

It is no wonder that the Chekhov according to Hellman

is very much like the Hellman influenced by Chekhov.
There are several ways in which the Chekhovian

influence can be evinced. For many critics and play-

wrights, Chekhov was inextricably associated with his

most pOpular play, The Cherry Orchard, and the term

 

Chekhovian with a specific dramatic conflict--the

 

replacement of an established aristocracy by a burgeoning

bourgeoisie. Shaw assumed this when he wrote Heartbreak

 

House. So did the critic of the New York Journal

 

American, who responded to the Opening performance of

 

138

The Autumn Garden by noting that "there was a distinct

 

note of Chekhov sounding through the proceedings.

. . . In fact I would not have been surprised to hear
those woodsmen hacking at the cherry trees as the
final curtain fell."22 It would, in fact, have been
most surprising to hear hacking of any sort, for the
play has nothing whatever to do with orchards or with

changes in any social order. Miss Hellman made no

attempt to write an American Cherry Orchard, for she

 

did not feel that any clear analogy could be made
between the American South and the Russian situation.
"It is not easy," she said,

to understand nineteenth century Russia. Few of
us know the language or have roots in it. . . .
Even late in the century--a period close to us
everywhere else in the Western world--Russian
life and Russian thought seem to spring from
sources more mysterious than seventeenth century
England or France or Italy. Hamlet is closer to
us than Papa Karamazov. We walk through the
doors of Elsinore, but we have to be shoved into
the Karamazov house, even though the doors were
put into place by a man no older than our own
grandfather. The agony of Othello could be our
agony, but the agony of Raskolnikov is not ours
and we give ourselves over to it with an effort.
The space between America-Europe and Russia has
always been wide.23

Miss Hellman's reluctance to make analogies was unusual.
Matthew Josephson, for example, had introduced The

Personal Papers gI Anton Chekhov by observing that

 

 

139

the Russian soul is no more mysterious than the
soul of a dweller in the suburbs of London or
Brooklyn. . . . [Chekhov's] world was predominantly
that of the middle-class in late nineteenth

century Russia; and how much alike are the middle-
classes in all lands.24

It is likely that Miss Hellman's extensive visits to
Russia in 1944 and 1945 had cautioned her against such
easy assumptions. "Russians puzzle us, we puzzle

25

them," she wrote from Moscow in her 1944 diary.

The Autumn Garden, then, reflects a Chekhovian

 

influence that is far broader than the duplication Of

a specific situation found in The Cherry Orchard. It

 

reflects instead a middle-aged, Chekhovian vision of
life. (Chekhov was always middle-aged.) It embodies
a loose, free handling of plot and character. And if
it resembles any of Chekhov's plays in basic structure,

that play is Uncle Vanya. The critic who expected to

 

hear the sound of the woodsman's ax at the close of

The Autumn Garden had more reason to expect the curtain

 

line, "We shall rest."

The structure of Uncle Vanya is relatively

 

simple: at the beginning of the play some rather
ordinary people who are gathered in the Voinitsky
country home engage in domestic rituals and articulate
from time to time their intimations of the waste of
their lives. Vanya, the resident manager and uncle

of the heir to the estate, cries:

140

I don't sleep nights because of disappointment,
and anger that I so stupidly let time slip by,
when now I could have had everything that my
old age denies me!
Astroff, a neighboring landowner and doctor, complains:
And life itself is boring, stupid, dirty . . .
it strangles you, this life. . . . My feelings
somehow have grown numb. There's nothing I
want, nothing I need, nobody I love. . . .
And Sonia, hopelessly in love with Astroff and aware
of her own plainness, comforts herself with hard work
and with the hope that one day Astroff will notice
her.

Into this situation have come Sonia's father,
Professor Serebriakoff, and his beautiful young wife,
Elena. Their presence serves as a catalyst for the
others; between the time of their arrival and departure,
the other characters are energized to take slight risks
that test their original analyses of their conditions.
They discover that what they had thought was true, but
had hOped was only a rationalization or a temporary
deferral of their desires, really In true. The con-
trolling dramatic question of the play, then, is this:
What effect does the visit of Serebriakoff and Elena
have upon the visited? The answer to that question
is the typically Chekhovian kind of recognition.27
For each of the major characters, illusion and intimation

harden into reality. Nothing changes; the status quo

is merely clarified and reinforced.

141

As catalytic agents, Serebriakoff and Elena
are passive, indolent characters. They do very little,
but the little they do is enough to shock the people
around them into a brief surge of hope and desire, and
to motivate them to summon up enough energy to risk
the consummation of their desires. Elena's mere
presence is disturbing. Her exquisite beauty unsettles
Astroff and Vanya and reminds Sonia of her own plain-
ness, but she also tampers slightly, idly, with the
status quo. With curiously ambivalent motives, she
offers to ask Astroff about his intentions concerning
Sonia. Sonia has qualms.

SONIA: . . No, uncertainty is better. . . .

After all, there is hope--

ELENA: What is it?

SONIA: Nothing.
Elena's confrontation with Astroff brutally quells
Sonia's uncertainty and precludes any chance that
Astroff will change his mind in the future. Sonia's
fate is sealed.

Elena also contributes to the sealing of
Astroff's fate. He had declared himself incapable of
love, and had hOped it was not so. But after his
abortive attempt at passion with Elena, he resigns

himself to his former, loveless life. His parting

kiss with her is quite without passion. "Finita!" he

142

says, as he prepares to take up once more the life he
had led before his brief infatuation.

Vanya is also infatuated with Elena, but it
is his brother-in-law Serebriakoff who energizes him
into action. It is Serebriakoff's crotchety presence
that leads Vanya to the realization that he has been
exploited, and it is Serebriakoff's outrageous proposal
to sell the estate that turns Vanya into would-be
assassin. But both shots he fires at the professor
miss their mark, and Vanya crumples in frustration.

His attempt at retribution ends in farce.

At play's end, the equilibrium Of the beginning
is recomposed. Serebriakoff and Elena have not changed;
the professor's life will continue as it has always
been, and Elena never had any intention of changing
anything about herself. And though the other characters
have been sufficiently aroused by their presence to
hope that something about their lives could be changed--
Sonia had allowed Elena to force Astroff's hand,

Astroff had dared an attempt at love, and Vanya had
dared to assert his rights--all of these tentative
risks are abortive. Their energy unequal to their
hOpes, they return, a bit more soberly and conclusively,
to the anodynes that have always sustained them--
Astroff to his vodka, his trees, and his rhetorical

hopes for the future; Sonia to her work and her

143

rhetorical faith in a contentment beyond the grave;

and Vanya to his neglected accounts. To Vanya's
question "What am I to do?" Astroff answers, "Nothing."
His answer articulates the recognition of the play.

The Autumn Garden repeats the basic pattern

 

 

of Uncle Vanya. The play takes place in the Tuckerman

 

boarding house, a hundred miles from New Orleans.
"The house serves a symbolic function," observes
Marvin Felheim in his discussion of the play,

just as do the houses of Madame Ranevsky in Inn
Cherry Orchard, of Sorin in The Seagull and of
the Prosorovs in The Three Sisters. It is the
Old house to which cling many memories but
which has grown somewhat shabby with the passage
of time; it is the autumn garden where flashes
of brightness only emphasize the proximity of
wintery sterility.28

 

 

 

Assembled in this house at summer's end are a collection
of guests and friends of the owner, Constance Tuckerman.
Nearly all of them are middle-aged. The kind of
recognition that Chekhov had all his life associated
with the human condition was one that occurred to Miss
Hellman later in life, and her characters reflect her
own discovery. She explained to an interviewer,

These people I've created are, you will Observe,
my own age. . . . Here is what I think happens
to many people at this time of life. . . . You
come to a place in your life when what you've
been is going to form what you will be. If
you've wasted what you had in you. it's too
late to do much about it. . . . [However] If
you are inwardly a serious person . . . in the
middle years it will pay off.29

144

With one exception, the characters in the play have
wasted what was in them, and the play dramatizes their
discovery that "it's too late to do much about it."
The play begins with an uneasy Chekhovian
stasis. Each character has a sense that his life is
not all it might be, but has a tentative plan or a
vague hOpe that it might be changed. General Griggs
does not like his wife, and he believes that he intends
to leave her to begin his life over again. Rose Griggs
understands her husband even less then he understands
her, and she hOpes that by her refusal to acknowledge
his weary discontent, their problems will disappear.
Frederick Ellis and his mother, Carrie, are involved
in a cloying relationship of emotional dependence,
temporarily threatened by Frederick's disprOportionate
admiration for a mysterious writer, Mr. Payson. They
have sensible plans, however; they will leave together
on a six-month tour of Europe, after which Frederick
will marry SOphie, Constance Tuckerman's niece.
Constance Tuckerman has been living for twenty years
on the romantic, idealized memories of her old beau,
Nick Denery, memories which have aestheticized her
loneliness, and have prevented her from finding a more
tangible substitute in her old friend and annual guest,
Edward Crossman. Crossman, the Astroff of the play,

has responded to the disappointment he believes he

145

feels by settling himself into a posture of cynicism
and alcoholic withdrawal. All the characters assume
that either their plans will change their lives or
that the compromises they have made in their lives
are temporary.

Into this situation come the anticipated
guests, Nick and Nina Denery, who function as the
catalytic agents in the play. Like Professor Sere-
briakoff and Elena, the Denerys are emotionally
bankrupt. Nick is a second-rate artist and a second-
rate man who buttresses his sense of worth by a
repetitive series of extra-marital affairs. These
affairs hurt Nina, but she has a neurotic need to
loathe as well as to love her husband. Both recognize
the inadequacies of their relationship, but neither
has sufficient energy to change it. Their function in
the play is similar to that of Serebriakoff and Elena:
their problems are not central to the play; they merely
serve to bring into focus the illusions of the others.

Like Elena, Nick tampers with the status quO.
But Nick is a professional meddler. His own image of
himself as a charming fellow and his need to bolster
his ego make his disinterested dabbling with the lives
of others a psychological requirement. Nick touches
everyone. He tells Sophie that She is "cute" and tries

to encourage her to flirt with him. He tells

146

Constance that Crossman has confessed an undying love
for her. He informs Carrie Ellis about the unsavory
reputation of Mr. Payson. And he advises Rose about
how to handle her husband's request for a divorce.
"Oh, you are enjoying yourself so much here," remarks
Nina, who has observed his machinations many times
before. "I've seldom seen it this hog-wild. . . .
You're on a rampage of good will."30

The dramatic question of the play is essentially

the same as that of Uncle Vanya: What effect do the

 

visitors have upon the visited? And the answer is also
the same. Each character, during the course of Nick's

visit, recognizes that the life he had been living but

had hoped might be changed, will never change.

Not all the characters are capable of making
their own recognitions; some have it done for them.
Both Carrie and Frederick Ellis believe that they have
only temporarily postponed Frederick's marriage to
SOphie, but old Mrs. Ellis knows better. She tells
SOphie:

Frederick meant what he said to you [that he will
come back for SOphie]. But I know them both and
I would guess that in a week, or two or three, he
will agree to go to EurOpe with his mother and he
will tell you that it is only a postponement.

And he will believe what he says. Time and
decisions melt and merge for him and ten years
from now he will be convinced that you refused

to marry him. And he will always be a little
sad about what could have been.

147

SOPHIE: Yes. Of course.
MRS. ELLIS: Carrie never will want him to
marry. And she will never know it.

General Griggs is capable of articulating his
own recognition. Early in the play he had confided
to Crossman,

There are so many things I want to do that I
don't know which to do first. Have you ever
thought about starting a new life? . . . I
want to go somewhere now and study for a few
years, or--. . . . Anyway, sit down by myself
and think. . . . I'll start tame enough:

I've written my sister that I'd like to stay
with her for a month or two.

All of his modest plans are predicated upon his leaving
Rose. But when, at the end of the play, he is told

that Rose's medical condition precludes an immediate
divorce, he is relieved: "I am not any too sure I didn't
partly welcome the medical opinion that made it easier
for me to give up." For Griggs, there will be no
reversals, no peripetia, and he devotes a long, weary !
speech (written by Dashiell Hammett) to his recognition
of this fact.

So at any given moment you're only the sum of
your life up to then. There are no big moments
you can reach unless you've a pile Of smaller
moments to stand on. That big hour of decision,
the turning point in your life, the someday
you've counted on when you'd suddenly wipe out
your past mistakes, do the work you'd never
done, think the way you'd never thought, have
what you'd never had--it just doesn't come
suddenly. You've trained yourself for it while
you waited--or you've let it all run past you
and frittered yourself away. . . . I've
frittered myself away, Crossman.

 

148

Crossman understands. He, too, has frittered
himself away, and when the chance he had been waiting
for actually comes, he is forced to realize that he
does not have the energy to seize it. His temporary
escapes have become reality. Constance, after con-
fronting for the first time in her life the fact that
Nick Denery is a "shabby fool," asks Crossman to
marry her. He replies:

I live in a room and I go to work and I play a
game called getting through the day while you
wait for night. The night's for me--just me--
and I can do anything with it I want. There
used to be a lot of things to do with it,-good
things, but now there's a bar and another bar
and the same people in each bar. When I've
had enough I go back to my room--or somebody
else's room--and that never means much one way
or the other. A few years ago I'd have weeks
of reading--night after night--just me. But
I don't do that much anymore. Just read, all
night long. You can feel good that way.

CONSTANCE: I never did that. I'm not a
reader.

CROSSMAN (An II ne hadn't heard her): And
a few years ago I'd go on the wagon twice a
year. Now I don't do that anymore. And I
don't care. (Smiles) And all these years I
told myself that if you'd loved me everything
would have been different. I'd have had a
good life, been worth something to myself. I
wanted to tell myself that. I wanted to believe
it. Griggs was right. I not only wasted my—
self, but I wanted it that way. All my life,
I guess, I wanted it that way.

CONSTANCE: And you're not in love with me,
Ned?

CROSSMAN: No, Con. Not now.

 

149

Like Chekhov's Astroff and Sonia, Crossman and Constance
are finally aware that what might have been will never
be. They face their future stoically: "Let's have a
nice dinner together, just you and me and go to the
movies."

By creating several characters who are thus
capable of comprehending and synthesizing their
experiences, Miss Hellman went a step farther than
Chekhov. Chekhov's characters rarely analyze their
own situations so accurately, and when they do, their
analyses are undercut by an action, another speech,
or the force Of the play as a whole. For Chekhov's
characters, self-delusions are replaced by other
delusions or they become momentarily transparent, but
they are never completely exposed or understood by
the characters themselves. Sonia, Astroff, and Vanya
are introspective, but they are incapable of serving
as their own analysts. In contrast, one critic
accurately Observed,

The Autumn Garden has the relaxed Chekhov
method without his unifying lyrical mood--his
sense that if people delude themselves, life
itself is delusive. Actually Chekhov cuts
deeper than Miss Hellman because, being a
realist rather than a moralist, he very seldom

grants his characters the ability to face the
truth about themselves.31

 

 

150

If moralists are the Opposite of realists, Miss
Hellman remained a moralist. She knew this about her-
self, and her comments about her first play, The

Children's Hour, are equally valid for The Autumn

 

 

Garden: "I am a moral writer, Often too moral a

writer, and I cannot avoid, it seems, that last

"32

summing-up. The last summing-up in The Autumn

 

Garden is entrusted to Griggs and Crossman, who thus
become Hellman's raissoneurs. The famous Chekhovian
reticence, which precluded judgments, theses, and
final denouements, was a quality which Hellman never
quite captured, either for herself or for her char-
acters.

She did, however, capture many of the tech-
niques that contributed to the "relaxed Chekhov
method." Although she made into a thesis the vision
that Chekhov had allowed to remain an inconclusive
suggestion, the nature of that thesis demanded that
she revise her techniques of plotting and character-
drawing.

If it is true that, for many people at least,
life will not change, it follows that a play which
dramatizes this condition will contain no peripetia.
Thus, for the first time in her career, Miss Hellman

turned away from the crises that had dominated the

151

third act of each of her previous plays. Instead she
presented nine loosely connected character studies.
There is no clear sequential progression of events in
the play but rather a theme, demonstrated by its
effect on the individual characters. For none of
these characters, with the exception of Sophie, is
there any dramatic confrontation or reversal; there
is only the Slow erosion of hOpe that leads each of
them, in a downward movement, to a recognition.
Several critics found such parallel recognitions
repetitive and overdone. Walter Kerr felt that his
dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the play lay in
Miss Hellman's
determination to handle it in multiples. That
six or seven characters, only loosely related,
would become emotionally petrified in precisely
the same way is inescapably pat; the parallel
construction leads to an unavoidable and all
too forseeable repetition of scenes in the last
act; and the very lack of variety or balance
in the case histories offends our sense of
proportion. What may be demonstrably true of
one man isrot always statistically true of the
species; it is Miss Hellman's bad luck that the
species itself seems defeated by eleven o'clock,
an impression which the audience is Obviously
reluctant to approve.
One suspects that even Mr. Kerr might have been more
willing to accept the Chekhovian truth about the

species if Miss Hellman had donned the Chekhovian

reticence about stating that truth—-if she had allowed

152

it to remain a probability, rather than hammering it
home with her characteristic vigor and insistence.

In one respect, however, she did adopt a more
reticent attitude toward plotting. At several points
in the play, we get the impression that She deliberately
walked away from big scenes. Frederick's confrontation
with Mr. Payson, Rose's visit to the doctor, and
Carrie's talk with Frederick-—these scenes might have
provided, in another play, a critical moment of
decision. But they are not dramatized on stage; they
are merely reported or alluded to after they take
place. For the new Miss Hellman, what happened was
not nearly so important as the effect of what happened
on characters who had already been defined. And it
was toward those definitions that Miss Hellman directed
most of her energies.

The stimulus for Chekhov's oblique method of
building a scene had come from his primary interest
in the inner lives of his characters. Sometimes
wistful, sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful, his
creatures' inner lives are as turbulent as their out—
ward lives seem becalmed. Each psyche moves through
its own separate labyrinth, and the indirect dialogue
reflects that separateness.

In theory at least, Miss Hellman had long been

aware that such indirection was verisimilar. In 1942

153

she said, "PeOple in life, I told myself, don't always
make the direct answer, or follow the immediately

34 There was little about her

preceding thought."
early plays, however, that dramatized this observation.
She had never lingered long enough over her characters'
inner lives to ask why their answers to each other
were indirect or why they failed to follow the immedi-
ately preceding thought. Instead, she tended to see
her characters as the embodiments of ethical norms.
She admitted that in Qay§_rp_gpnn she had conceived
of her characters in balanced pairs--each leading
character has a counterpart who is his ethical Oppo-
site.35 Typically, her characters demonstrate their
virtue or their depravity by their outward actions.
Regina Giddons, Mary Tilford, and Teck de Brancovis
are what they are because of what Miss Hellman has
them do. We do not really know how they got to be
that way. Nor do we know how they see themselves.
PeOple rarely see themselves in clear-cut
ethical terms. It is logical, therefore, that as
Miss Hellman shifted her focus somewhat from her
characters' Objective actions to their subjective
feelings about themselves, her judgments about them
were correspondingly softened. It follows tOO that
the dialogue she employed was looser, marshalled less

firmly toward a dramatic crisis. She never actually

154

captured the elusive Chekhovian dialogue, but The

Autumn Garden does give us, for the first time in

 

the Hellman canon, the impression that the characters
are left to their own devices.

In Act I, the six characters gathered in the
Tuckerman living room are having their after—dinner
coffee. None of them qualifies as a protagonist; they
comprise an ensemble in which each member has equal
dramatic value. Their conversation, though more
pointed than the typically languid Chekhovian dialogue,
meanders from topic to topic. The links between the
topics are present, but they are linguistic rather
than thematic links; the conversation moves more by
free association than by the requirements of the
action. As they speak, the characters reveal the per-
sonal problems which occupy most of their energies
and attention. Rose Griggs, for example, is bewildered
and unhappy by her husband's sudden decision to divorce
her. She has always conceived of herself as a charming
and loveable Southern belle, and has developed no
resources beyond those which must have been at one
time functional for a New Orleans debutante. Her image
of herself is reflected in her speech patterns. She
has develOped a linguistic eccentricity-—a habit of
cryptically referring to everything in pronouns--and

she finds this habit quite adorable. When old Mrs.

 

155

Ellis sharply calls her attention to her unnecessary
ambiguity (Chekhov would not have done this; he would
have allowed Rose's ambiguous remarks to pass un-
checked by any other character), Rose giggles, "I

know. It's a naughty habit. Ben has been telling

me for years." Rose's reference to her annoying
mannerism as "naughty" is a clear indication that she
has no intention of modifying it, and that she con-
siders Mrs. Ellis's criticisms to be part of a game.

In that, she is partially right. Mrs. Ellis is one

of the tart old ladies of which Miss Hellman was so
fond, but there are indications in the play that Mrs.
Ellis is also playing a role--the role of tart old
lady. After Rose pirouettes and preens, unsuccessfully
trying to force a compliment from her husband, she
turns to Crossman to suggest playfully that he is
becoming more of a hermit as he grows older. The motif
of approaching old age, introduced thus early in the
action, is kept alive throughout the play. Rose seems
carefree as she addresses Crossman, for she is momentarily
ensconced in her girlish posture, but her compulsive
prattling suggests the terror that will surface later
in the play. Mrs. Ellis spares Crossman an answer to
Rose's conversational gambit by ringing an unexpected
change on the tOpic of old age: "Happiest year of my

life was when my husband died. Every month was

156

springtime and every day I seemed to be tipsy, as if
my blood had turned a lovely yin Eggé." Her daughter
Carrie's response is understated and casual: "You're
lyrical, Mother." The potentially explosive tOpic

is allowed to die. Other tOpics take its place--
Frederick's interest in his friend's manuscript, his
engagement to Sophie, the Ellis' financial arrange-
ments, the mysterious Mr. Payson's unsavory books,
Sophie's coiffeur. As one topic after another is
introduced and dropped, we have the sense that each
character has a story of his own, a story which is
parallel rather than inter-dependent with the others.
Such character-drawing is essentially novelistic.

The technique confirms Miss Hellman's stated intent
to "write a novel in theater form," an experiment
first attempted by Chekhov.

The single character in The Autumn Garden who

 

belongs to a different dramaturgic idiom is Sophie,
Constance Tuckerman's seventeen-year-old niece, who
serves a bonne a tout faire in the boarding house.
SOphie never becomes a part of the ensemble; every-
thing about her is different. She speaks with a soft

German accent and she speaks in aphorisms:

157

I think perhaps you worry sometimes in order
that you should not think.

. . . You make the simple things--like going

to sleep--so hard, and the hard things--like

staying awake--so easy.

Don't you think peOple often say other peOple

are tough when they do not know how to cheat

them?
As her speech indicates, SOphie has no illusions and
she never deludes herself. She does not find her
present situation satisfactory, but she keeps a sharp
eye out for realistic solutions to her dilemma. At
the beginning of the play, she is engaged to marry
Frederick Ellis, fully aware of the fact that she
does not love him, that he is emotionally tied to his
mother, and that he is very probably a homosexual.
She patiently explains to her aunt:

I do not wish to go on with my life as it has

been. I have not been happy, and I cannot

continue here. . . . Please allow me to do

what I wish to do, and know what is best for

me. And don't look in such a way. Frederick

and I will have a nice life, we will make it

so.
The romantic, sentimental Constance is dismayed and
puzzled by her attitude, but for Sophie it is perfectly
reasonable. Her description of her own behavior is an
honest one: "I do the best I can." She adjusts her
circumstances as those circumstances change. When

Nick Denery compromises her reputation by spending the

night in her bed, her own reaction is purely pragmatic.

158

"I will Speak whichever way you think most fits the
drama, Aunt Constance."

For the other, more clearly Chekhovian, char-
acters in the play, there are recognitions but no
peripetia. For SOphie there is no need for a recogni—
tion, but there is a peripety. Her situation changes
at the end of the play. She is quick to see how she
can turn Nick Denery's indiscretion to her own advan-
tage, and she suggests to Nina Denery that five
thousand dollars would be suitable amends. They agree
to call it blackmail. With characteristic honesty,
SOphie says,

But I will not accept it [the five thousand

dollars] as largesse—-to make you happy. We

will call it a loan, come by through blackmail.

One does not have to be grateful for blackmail

money, nor think of oneself as a charity girl.
The five thousand dollars provide the means for a
more satisfactory solution to her situation than a
marriage to Frederick, and Sophie leaves the stage
singing a cheerful French song. Constance, watching
her, says, "She's happy. That's good. I think she'll
come out all right, always." The line is literal
description; nothing in the play undercuts it. SOphie
is no sister to Chekhov's Sonia or Irina or Nina.

In a narrow sense, however, she is half-sister

to Chekhov's Natasha. Although Chekhov's primary focus

159

was on the inner lives of his characters, he did make
a few exceptions. Natasha is one of those exceptions.
She is characterized from the outside; we observe
what she does, but we are given no indication that
she has any inner struggles. SOphie is also character-
ized objectively. As far as we can tell, she has no
inner life whatever. Thus she remains outside the
collective pathos that envelopes the other characters.
Because both Natasha and Sophie deal with
reality on their own terms, they represent norms
against which the other characters can be measured.
The difference between them is, of course, the author's
attitude toward those norms. Chekhov clearly did not
like Natasha, although even she does not remain outside
his understanding embrace. Miss Hellman, on the other
hand, seems to endorse Sophie's carpe diem approach to
life, and to offer it as an alternative to the stasis
which paralyzed the other characters. Her endorsement,
however, was not without a certain ambivalence, and
several reviewers of the play singled out the character
of Sophie for criticism. In his opening—night review,
Brooks Atkinson said the part "lacks the frankness of
the rest of the writing."36 Several days later he

elaborated:

 

160

I do not understand the character of the niece.
For two acts she is soft and reticent, but then
she suddenly emerges as the most cunning, hard—
headed person in the plays. It is as though
she game to life only when Miss Hellman needed
her.

Harold Clurman, director of the play, promptly
responded to Atkinson's criticisms in a letter to the

drama editor of the New York Times.

 

Sophie is pivotal to the play not only in terms
of story but in terms of content. In her modest
way, she represents a typical "contemporary"
EurOpean point of view, an attitude which is
impatient with philosophical generalizations,
"ideals" which are merely verbal, and states of
mind that are not founded on concrete facts.
When SOphie is offered monetary help, she
resents the idea that she is being offered
charity. She realizes that in a pseudo-
sentimental way she is merely being bought off
by "nice people" who live useless lives and who
have made a career of getting around the scrapes
they constantly create, peOple so "genial" that
they were apparently able to have a good time in
Paris while the Nazis occupied it. So SOphie
with bitter humor uses the ugly word "blackmail,"
while the lady whose whole life has been a messy
compromise puts on noble airs.38

Clearly, Clurman saw SOphie as a foil to the rest of

the characters. "Against these people," he wrote else-

where,

Miss Hellman pits the half—European Sophie, a
normal girl who wants only to do an honest job
back in the grim environment of her native
land, where things are not pretty or "good,"
but concrete, unromanticized, real. Miss
Hellman does not make a heroine of this girl;
in fact, she makes her rather sharp, shrewd,
decently matter-of-fact and not above taking
advantage--with a certain humor and pride that
some might mistake for cynicism--of the folly
of the sentimentalists around her.39

 

161

The directorial interpretation seemed to reflect
the authorial intent, for Miss Hellman had expressed her
belief that "if you've invested yourself in life, you're
pretty certain to get a return. . . . The play isn't
meant to say that people can't do anything about such
emptiness as embodied by the other characters. It is
meant to say the opposite--they can do a great deal

40

with their lives." Sophie's solution to her problem

does, however, seem a curious way of dramatizing the
fact that people "can do a great deal with their lives,"
and Miss Hellman's Optimism was lost on many viewers.
One of them wrote in disgust to the Times:

There is not one redeeming character in "The
Autumn Garden," including the refugee girl.

A play of this sort, if it is to make its point
that there are hopeless, helpless individuals
in the world in desperate need of salvation
from their lifelong misconceptions about every-
thing, needs a standard in the form of at least
one character that is truly "different" so that
a contrast may be effected. But as it is, the
audience was confronted with nothing but a
stageful of sad-sacks slowly sinking in their
collective quicksand.41

Ironically, the play as interpreted by the disgruntled
patron is far more Chekhovian than Hellmanesque.

Of all her plays, The Autumn Garden was Miss

 

Hellman's favorite.42 Her audience, though appreciative,
was less enthusiastic, and the play had a modest run
of 102 performances. When critics looked for the cause

of such modesty, they suggested that although the new

 

 

162

play was probably superior to its predecessors, it
fell short of its mark. That mark was bona fide

Chekhov. Thus the consensus of opinion was somewhat
paradoxical: a Chekhovian Hellman was superior to a
melodramatic Hellman, but to have missed the Chekhovian
magic was to have sacrificed her wonted popularity.
Speaking as a critic rather than as a director,
Harold Clurman said that even though "Lillian Hellman's
The Autumn Garden is the most deftly constructed, the

most maturely thought, the most scrupulously written

play produced here in a long time,"43 the play suffered

by comparison with Chekhov's plays.

If it has a limitation, it is a philOSOphic or
spiritual limitations which is part of her
objectivity. The author is just with her char-
acters; she sees them with a certain smiling
asperity, an astringent, almost cruel, clarity.
But she is unable to reveal in their weakness
that which still makes them part of what is
blessed and great in life. The blunderers in
Chekhov are brothers in our nobility even as in ,nJ
our abjectness. The characters in The Autumn
Garden are our equals only in what we do not
respect about ourselves. Miss Hellman refuses
to be "metaphysical," poetic or soft. She will
not embrace her people; she does not believe
they deserve her (or our) love. Love is present
only through the ache of its absence. Miss

Hellman is a fine artist; she will be a finer
one when she melts.44

 

Speaking as a director rather than as a critic,
Lee Strasberg offered an alternative explanation for

the qualified success of the play. He felt that it

 

163

was Clurman, and not Hellman, who had missed the
Chekhovian note. The play was performed, he argued,

in a style more suited to the earlier plays.

The characters ceased to exist when they left
the stage. When they returned, their reappearance
seemed unmotivated. The characters described
their experiences rather than re-creating [sic.]
them. They seemed to "act" rather than to TIVe.
An almost "Chekhovian" environment was needed to
be created, one that would permit a sense of
continuous action with the characters continuing
to live and behave after their dialogue stOpped.
The setting would have had to be more open to
permit action to go on while other people were
speaking, and thus to create a kind of symphonic
orchestration of the behavior and the attitudes
of the people. A production visualized along
these lines would have served to bring out the
inherent humaneness of the characters (it has
been pointed out that, rare for a Hellman play,
there were no downright villains in the piece)
and their inability to act would have been
dramatized on the stage.45

Strasberg's remarks serve to remind us that
Chekhov had not worked in isolation; however much he
had disagreed with Stanislavsky and Nemirovitch-
Danchenko, he had usually conceived of his plays in
collaboration with the members of the company that
performed them. One can only speculate what the success
of The Autumn Garden might have been if Olga Knipper
had played the role of Constance Tuckerman and

Stanislavsky the role of Nick Denery.

 

AFTERWORD

Eric Bentley once observed that "the public

. . . takes from an author what it craves and leaves
the rest alone. What we call 'the influence of an

author' is likely to be the influence of one famous

fragment of him."1 Chekhov's influence on American

theater consisted of several such "famous fragments."
He was known, variously, as the man who wrote The
Cherry Orchard, the poet of despair, the father of
the Mood Play, the rebel without a plot, the ironist
who smiled at life's futility, the painter of

extended portraiture, the comic with a strange sense

of humor. That some of these fragments were more

famous than others, or that some precluded others,

was not, ultimately, important. Nothing obligated

the American theater to come to a final decision about
Chekhov, nothing, that is, except a few vaguely
disquieted critics who wished for the matter to be

settled one way or another. In the absence of any

Quintessence 9_f_ Chekhovism, Eric Bentley wrote in 1946,

164

 

 

165

The rebels of the theater know their Chekhov and
love him; it is another question whether they
understand him. Very few peOple seem to have
given his work the careful examination it
requires. Handsome tributes have been paid
Chekhov by Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko,
and Gorky, among his countrymen; and since

being taken up by Middleton Murry's circle
thirty years ago, he has enjoyed a high literary
reputation in England and America. The little
book by William Gerhardi and the notes and
obiter dicta of such critics as Stark Young and
Francis Fergusson are, however, too fragmentary
and impressionistic to constitute a critical
appraisal. They have helped to establish more
accurate general ideas about Chekhov's art.

They have not inquired too rigorously in what
that art consists.2

 

 

Bentley was speaking about critics, of course.
Artistic influence, however, is not always the bed-
fellow of rigorous inquiry. A fragment will sometimes
do quite as well as a whole, and a partial understanding,’
or even a misunderstanding, of the work of one play-
wright may serve to stimulate another.

Thus it was with the American playwrights who
were, in one way or another, influenced by Chekhov.

Each settled on a fragment that he admired and found
useful. John Van Druten sought, and found in Chekhov,

a release from the technical restrictions imposed by
Ibsen and his followers. Arthur Miller admired

Chekhov for undertaking the moral and social obligations
that fell to playwrights. Joshua Logan became intrigued

with a specific dramatic situation that Chekhov had

166

created. Lillian Hellman found in Chekhov a dramatic
formula for expressing a sobering life view.

But the fact is that no single American play-
wright ever wrote a truly Chekhovian play. There
seemed to be something about Chekhov's assumptions
that remained incomprehensible to the American mind,
and the history of American critical reSponses to
Chekhov is replete with periodic attempts to name or
describe the difference between the American and the
Russian psyche. Two such attempts are eSpecially
perceptive. In 1966, Wilfred Sheed wrote, aprOpos a

production of Ivanov:

The melancholy fascination which neurasthenia
and paralysis of the will used to hold for
Russian writers under the later Tsars is diffi-
cult for Americans to share or cope with.
American actors do not know how to project
these wistful psychic states and American
audiences do not know how to enjoy them. The
actors tend to put too much verve into their
gloom, too much editorial comment; and the
audiences ask themselves, what is it all for?
Is it social criticism, or what?

Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol have all been
recent victims of this divergence of zeitgeists.
The fact is that bourgeois consciousness has
many mansions, and we are not really at ease
in this one yet. We dig bumbling and compulsion
and hard-core frustration; but sheer stasis,
simple inability to move--these arthritic
pleasures of a senile society have been denied
us so far, and American productions tend to
transform them into something else.3

Three years later, after returning from a visit to
Russia, Arthur Miller offered a different, but com-

patible, explanation:

 

 

167

We [Russians and Americans] both share an absolute
faith in progress, which is to say that man's fate
is to go from worse to better, and we are as one
in believing that the benefits of progress must be
Spread among all the people. So we are both very
eager to know what a person "does," how much he
makes, what sort of house he lives in. The
Russian conversation, however, soon gropes toward
fundamental attitudes, states of mind, the nature
of the person rather than his occupation, and this
is something we do not know how to talk about; it
verges on "philosophy," which to most normally
educated Americans is what history was to Henry
Ford--"bunk." It is perhaps the basic reason why
Chekhov, for example, is so hard to perform out-
side Russia, and eSpecially difficult in the United
States. To us, the characters seem vague, dis-
connected from one another, strangely abstract
rather than real. We are much more interested in
what a thing is, how it works, and very little
interested in what it means. We are the triumph
of technology. The irony is that the Russian
aspires to hard, materialistic, dialectically
sound explanations of processes--the American
style--when in fact he is extraordinarily quick

to idealize and to reach for general principles.
Nothing could be more alien to the American.

But was it, ultimately, Chekhov's nationality
that removed him from easy grasp? Was the Russian
mind more alien to Americans than, say, the Norweigian
mind, or the German? Maybe so. But Chekhov may have

been a difficult model for Americans not so much

 

because he was the quintessential Russian, but rather
because he was the consummate SOphisticate.

Chekhov's sophistication is his truest signature.
He was both worldly-wise and subtle about it. He was
able to create his characters, let them reveal them-
selves without being heavy—handed about it, and then

let them be. The ability to "let be" is perhaps the

168

key to his SOphistication, and it was the one character-
istic that eluded American dramatists. Arthur Miller,
who never claimed Chekhov as a model, came close to
it when he allowed his self-deluded salesman to bungle
his way across the stage. But Miller could not let
Willy Loman be. He was earnest and conscientious about
the meaning of his character and, like Linda Loman, he
demanded that attention must be paid this man, as if
his creating the character at all were not attention
enough. It is difficult to imagine Chekhov's sitting
down to hammer home the meaning of Lyuboff Andreevna's
difficulties. Chekhov spoke softly; his touch was
light. He never over-simplified his characters or his
materials, nor did he seem to feel he had to underscore
his ideas. He trusted his characters, which is to say
that he trusted his own artistry, and he trusted his
audience. "When I write," he said, "I count upon my
reader fully, assuming that he himself will add the
subjective elements that are lacking in the telling."5
American playwrights in the Fifties seemed to
have little intention of allowing very much to remain
"lacking in the telling." Perhaps they took the
measure of their audience, and realized that American
playgoers could not be trusted to provide the "sub-
jective element." It is even more likely that they

were themselves too earnest, too strident, too hopeful,

169

too ingenuous--in a word, too unsophisticated--to
approximate the Chekhovian restraint.

One of them may have realized this. In 1955,
in response to a questionnaire asking, "What, in your
opinion, are the most important trends in American
Playwriting?" Arthur Laurents answered: "The realization
that the Ibsen era is over and that Chekhov was a genius

not to be imitated."6

NOTES

 

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1Winston Burdett, "Mr. Carnovsky Says a Word
for Idealism in the Theater," Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
17 February 1935, p. 22.

2Clifford Odets, "Some Problems of the Modern
Dramatists," New York Times, 15 December 1935, Sec. 2,
p. 3, col. 4.

 

3Stark Young, "New Talent," The New Republic,
29 May 1935, p. 78.

 

4Robert Garland, "Clifford Odets Sees a
Growing Maturity," New York World-Telegram, 14 December
1935, Sec. 2, p. 16.

 

5John Van Druten, "Mood of the Moment," New
York Times, 25 November 1951, Sec. 2, p. 3, col. 5.

 

CHAPTER I: THE CHEKHOV SIGNATURE

 

lRonald Hingley, Chekhov: A Biographical and
Critical Study (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1950),
p. 206.

 

 

2Maurice Valency, The Breaking String (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 249i

 

170

171

3Emile Zola, "Naturalism on the Stage," in
The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York: The
Cassell Publishing Co., 1893), p. 124.

 

4Letter to Maria Keseleva, 14 January 1887, in
The Selected Letters gf Anton Chekhov, ed. Lillian
Hellman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1955),
p. 20.

 

 

5Letter to Alexei Souvorin, 30 May 1888, in
Hellman, pp. 54-55.

6For a brief, helpful overview of the Russian
theater in Chekhov's day, see Valency, The Breaking

String, pp. 3-47.

 

7Scribe's well-made-play formula is described

as follows in Oscar Brockett, History 9: the Theatre

(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968), p. 371:
"Often used as a term of derision, the well-
made play merely perfected dramatic devices
which had been current since the time of
Aeschylus: careful exposition and preparation,
the cause-to-effect arrangement of incidents,
the building of scenes to a climax, the use of
withheld information, startling reversals, and
suspense."

 

8Letter to Alexei Souvorin, 21 November 1895,
in Letters on the Short Story, the Drama and Other
Literary To—Ics by Anton Chekhov, ed. Louis S. ;
Friedland New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1964), §»
p. 146.

 

 

 

9Anton Chekhov, Best Plays b Chekhov, trans.

Stark Young (New York: The Modern Library, 1956),

p. 154. Stark Young's translations of Chekhov's plays
were perhaps the most popular and influential of all
the translations available to the American public.

 

10Anton Chekhov, Ivanov, trans. Ariadne

Nicholaeff (Longon: Heinemann, 1966), p. 59.

172

11Letter to Alexei Souvorin, 30 December 1888,
in Friedland, p. 138.

12Letter to Alexander Chekhov, 24 October
1887, in Friedland, p. 130.

13Letter to Alexei Souvorin, 30 December 1888,
in Friedland, p. 140.

14See Chekhov's conception of the role, reported
in J. L. Styan, Chekhov in Performance (Cambridge:
Cambridge UniverSity Press, 1971), p. 38.

 

15Styan, p. 153.

16Charles W. Meister, "Comparative Drama:
Chekhov, Shaw, Odets," Poet Lore, 55, No. 3 (Autumn
1950). 249.

 

17Letter to Alexei N. Pleshcheyev, 4 October
1889, in Friedland, p. 63.

18Matthew Josephson, "Introduction," The
Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov (New York: Lear Pub-
lishers, Inc., 1948), p. 22. Josephson suggests that
Chekhov deliberately suppressed his own political
views: "Intellectuals like Chekhov, in effect, lived
according to a double standard. On the one hand they
were convinced that the structure of their society
was rotten and their governments' policies demented.
On the other hand they knew that their rulers were
all-powerful and they pretended to conform in order
to survive."

 

 

19Styan, p. 246.

20William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of
Craftsmanship (New York: Dodd, Mead & Campany, 1934),
pp. 227-28. Archer defines the obligatory scene as
follows:

 

 

 

173

"An obligatory scene is one which the audience
(more or less clearly and consciously) forsees and
desires, and the absence of which it may with reason
resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I
think, that there are five ways in which a scene
may become, in this sense, obligatory:--

(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent lOgic
of the theme.

(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies
of specifically dramatic effect.

(3) The author himself may have rendered it
obligatory by seeming unmistakably to lead
up to it.

(4) It may be required in order to justify some
modification of character or alteration of
will, too important to be taken for granted.

(5) It may be imposed by history or legend."

It was assumed by most drama critics of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--
Brunetiere, John Howard Lawson, Francisque Sarcey--
that the concept of the obligatory scene was a
sound one, applicable to all good playwriting.

21Letter to Alexander Chekhov, October 1887, in
Friedland, p. 129.

22Letter to Alex. P. Chekhov, 11 April 1889, in
Friedland, p. 170.

23Va1ency, p. 146.

24Eric Bentley, "Craftsmanship in Uncle Vanya,"
In Search of Theater (New York: Alfred A. KnOpf,
1953), p. 347.

25Hingley, p. 80. Nastroenie is usually
translated as mood or atmosphere.

 

 

26David Magarshack, Chekhov: A Life (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1952), pp. 371-72.

 

27Letter to Alex. P. Chekhov, 8 May 1889, in

Friedland, p. 171.

174

28Henrik Ibsen, "Hedda Gabler," in Drama,
trans. and ed. Otto Reinert (Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1961), pp. 426-27.

29Valency, p. 230.

30See Robert W. Corrigan, "Introduction,"
Six Plays of Chekhov (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1962), rpt. in Modern Drama: Essays in
Criticism, ed. Travis Bogard (New York: Oxford—Uni-
versity Press, 1965), pp. 93-95. Corrigan discusses
the tendency of Chekhov's characters to aestheticize
life.

 

 

 

31Styan, p. 247.

CHAPTER II: CHEKHOV ON THE AMERICAN STAGE

1"'Sea Gull' Droops at the Bandbox," New
York Times, 23 May 1916, p. 9, col. 1.

 

2Gertrude Besse King, "Cherry Orchard," The
New Republic, 26 June 1915, p. 207.

 

 

3Philip Littell, "Books and Things," The

New Republic, 17 June 1916, p. 175.
41bid. '
5Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (New York: The

 

Macmillan Company, 1970), p. 278.

6Christine Edwards, The Stanislavsky Heritage
(New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 232.

 

7Ibid., p. 233.

175

8Stark Young, "The Moscow Art Theatre," The
New Republic, 28 February 1923, p. 20.

 

9Ludwig Lewisohn, "Players from Moscow," The
Nation, 14 March 1923, p. 312.

10John Corbin, "Russian Despair and English
Tragedy," New York Times, 4 February 1923, sec. 7,
p. 1, col. 1.

 

llJohn Corbin, "Russian High Comedy," New
York Times, 23 January 1923, p. 18.

 

12John V. A. Weaver, "Re: Moscow Art Theatre,"
New York Times, 11 February 1923, Sec. 7, p. l, cols.
5-6.

 

l3John Mason Brown, "Escapes from a Formula,"
Theatre Arts Monthly, January 1927, p. 10.

 

l4J. Brooks Atkinson, "Anton Chekhov," New
York Times, 11 March 1928, Sec. 8, p. 1, col. 1.

 

15"The Cherry Orchard," New York Times, 8
November 1928, p. 26, col. 8.

 

Isl-i

16J. Brooks Atkinson, "View of a Masterpiece,"
New York Times, 10 April 1929, p. 32.

 

 

17A notable exception was Robert Allerton
Parker, who alone insisted that Chekhov was "revealing
the eternal irony of human existence. . . ."
"Moscow's Art Theatre Visits New York," The Inde-
pendent, 3 February 1923, p. 98. _’—

 

18Atkinson, "Chekhov in English," New York
Times, 6 March 1928, p. 20.

 

176

19Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, "The Cherry
Orchard," The Catholic World, April 1929, pp. 79-80.

 

20Atkinson, "Random Revivals," New York Times,
18 November 1928, Sec. 9, p. 1, cols. 2-3.

 

21Joseph Wood Krutch, "Chekhov's World," The

Nation, 2 October 1929, p. 366.

22Stark Young, "Two Special Openings," The

New Republic, 9 October 1929, p. 205.

 

23Atkinson, "Generalities of a Genius," New
York Times, 16 April 1930, p. 26.

 

24Brown, Two 9n the Aisle (New York: W. W.
NOrton & Company, Inc., 1933), p. 91.

 

25Atkinson, "The Play," New York Times, 29
March 1938, p. 19, col. 3.

 

26David Magarshack, The Real Chekhov (London:
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1972), p. 13.

 

27Young, "Plays and Problems," The New F-
Republic, 13 April 1938, p. 305. r

.‘ ' #145 I

28Brown, Broadway in Review (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 1950), p. 232.

 

29Guthrie McClintic, "Directing Chekhov,"
Theatre Arts, April 1943, p. 212, passim.

30"Three-Star Classic," Time, 21 December
‘ 1942, p. 45.

31Brown, Broadway in Review, p. 24.

177

32"Star Piece," Newsweek, 4 January 1943'

33John Gassner, "The Russians on Broadway,"
Current History, February 1943, pp. 548-49.

 

34Krutch, "The Three Sisters," The Nation,
2 January 1943, pp. 31-32.

 

35Lewis Nichols, "The Play," New York Times,
22 December 1942, p. 31.

 

36Mary McCarthy, Mary McCarthy's Theatre
Chronicles, 1937-1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Company, 1963), p. 57.

 

 

 

37Wolcott Gibbs, "Retreat from Moscow," The
New Yorker, 2 January 1943, p. 32.

 

38McClintic, p. 215.

39Kappo Phelan, "The Cherry Orchard," Common-

weal, 11 February 1944, p. 420.

 

40Nichols, "Uncle Vanya," New York Times, 19 ba-
May 1946, Sec. 2, p. 1. 1

41Richard Hayes, "The Expense of Spirit," Er
Commonweal, 20 April 1956, p. 76.

 

 

42Harold Clurman, "Theatre," The Nation, 10
November 1956, p. 415.

 

43Eric Bentley, "Theatre," The New Republic,
21 March 1955, p. 22.

 

178

CHAPTER III: "CHEKHOVITIS" IN THE FIFTIES

1Stark Young, "Two Special Openings," The
New Republic, 9 October 1929, p. 205.

 

21bid.

3Emory Lewis, Stages: The Fifty-Year Child-
hood of the American Theatre (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), pp. 75, 78.

 

 

 

4John Gassner, Theatre at the Crossroads

(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wifiston), p. 129.

 

5Brooks Atkinson, "Dramatic Material," New
York Times, 4 January 1953, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 1.

 

6Arthur Miller, "Many Writers: Few Plays,"
New York Times, 10 August 1952, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 1,

 

7Atkinson, "Dramatic Material," p. 1.

8Miller, "Many Writers: Few Plays," p. 1,

col. 2.

L.
9Ibid., col. 3.

10Miller, "The Shadows of the Gods," Harper's,
August 1958, pp. 35-43.

 

11A minority Opinion is voiced in Vernon E.
Johnson, "Dramatic Influences in the Development of
Arthur Miller's Concept of Social Tragedy," Diss.
George Peabody College for Teachers, 1972. Johnson
argues that several of Miller's plays, and especially
A Memory gf Two Mondays, show the influence of
Chekhov.

 

179

12Miller, "The Shadows of the Gods," p. 37.

lBIbid., p. 38.

14Ibid., pp. 39-40.

15John Van Druten, "Mood of the Moment," New
York Times, 25 November 1951, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 7,
and p. 3, col. 4.

 

l6Gassner, Crossroads, p. 146.

 

17John Van Druten, Playwright 32 Work (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), p. 39. '

 

lBIbid.

lgIbid., p. 67.

20lbid., p. 89.

211bid., p. 36.

Walter Kerr, How Not To Write a Play (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), p. 1.

23Ibid., p. 33.

24Ibid., p. 32.

25Ibid., pp. 101—02.

26Ibid., p. 104.

180

27William Becker, "The New American Play,"
The Hudson Review 6 (Winter 1954), 578.

 

281bid., p. 587.

29Horton Foote, "A Trip to Bountiful," in
Harrison Texas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1953), p. 230.

 

30Letter to O. L. Knipper, 2 January 1901, in
Letters g£_Anton Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New
York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 388.

 

31Letter to Maxim Gorky, 3 January 1899, in
Letters 22 the Short Story, the Drama and Other
Literary TOpics by Anton Chekhov, ed. Louis S.
Friedland (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1964), p. 86.

 

 

 

32Letter to A. S. Souvorin, 23 January 1900,
in Friedland, p. 176.

33Letter to v. E. Meierkhold, n.d., in
Friedland, p. 184.

34Letter to O. L. Knipper, 2 January 1900, in
Friedland, p. 186.

35Letter to Alex. p. Chekhov, 8 May 1889, in
Friedland, p. 171.

36Letter to Alex. P. Chekhov, 10 May 1886, in
Friedland, p. 71.

37Letter to Alex. P. Chekhov, 6 April 1886,
in Friedland, p. 70.

38Letter to O. L. Knipper, 2 January 1900, in
Friedland, p. 186.

 

181

39Kerr, How Not Tg_Write A Play, p. 33.

40Kerr, "That Furtive Fellow Chekhov," in
Thirty Plays Hath November (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1963), p. 146.

 

4lIbid., p. 148.

42David Magarshack, Chekhov: A Life (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1952), and Earnest Simmons,
Chekhov: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1962).

 

43Kerr, "That Furtive Fellow Chekhov," p. 150.

44Ibid.

45Kerr, "The Comic Country of the Blind," in
Thirty Plays Hath November, pp. 158-59.

 

CHAPTER IV: JOSHUA LOGAN: A CHERRY
ORCHARD FOR AMERICANS

lRobert Littell, "The Russians Are Coming,"
Theatre Magazine, June 1930, p. 19.

 

2Robert Brustein suggests that the analogy

might work in the other direction. The Cherrngrchard,

 

he notes, bears many surface resemblances to Dion
Boucicault's The Octoroon, written on the eve of the
Civil War. Thus, Chekhov's play may itself be part
of a larger tradition; it might even be literary
parody. Brustein says: "I am not suggesting that
Chekhov was familiar with Boucicault's play. But the
materials are conventional enough, and Chekhov cer-
tainly knew the popular French 'mortgage' melodramas
which Boucicault used as his models, for they were
the staples of the commercial Russian stage." The
Theatre 9: Revolt (Boston: Little, Brown and Company,
1962), p. 168.

 

 

182

3See N. Bryllion Fagin, "In Search of an
American Cherry Orchard," The Texas Quarterly, 1, No. 3
(Summer-Autumn 1958), 132-41. Fagin lists several
plays other than The Wisteria Trees which he con-
siders to be attempts to create another Cherry
Orchard: Thomas Wolfe's Mannerhouse, Paul Green's
The House gf Connelly, Clifford Odets' Paradise Lost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4Joshua Logan, "Introduction," Building A
Character, by Constantin Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth
Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1949),
p. xiii.

 

SIbid., p. xix.

6Ibid., pp. xiv-xv.

71bid., p. xx.

8Harold Clurman, "Stanislavski in America,"
The New Republic, 22 August 1949, p. 21.

 

 

9Joshua Logan, "Recovery from Fear," Look,
19 August 1958, p. 74.

10Kappo Phelan, "The Wisteria Trees," Common- L.
weal, 28 April 1950, p. 69.

11Joshua Logan, "All Helen's Fault," New

York Times, 26 March 1950, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 6.

 

 

12Logan, "Recovery from Fear," p. 74.

13Ibid.

l4Logan, The Wisteria Trees (New York: Random

House, 1950), pp. 9-10. All further references to
the play will be cited from this edition.

 

183

15Logan, "My Greatest Crisis," Look, 5 August
1958, p. 54.

16A letter in the New York Times, 22 October
1950, Sec. 4, p. 4, col. 4 noted that wisteria is
misspelled; the proper spelling is wistaria.

 

l7John Mason Brown, "Louisiana Chekhov,"
Saturday Review 9: Literature, 15 April 1950, pp. 36-37.

 

 

18J. L. Styan, Chekhov i2 Performance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 245.

 

19See Jacqueline E. M. Latham, "The Cherry
Orchard as Comedy," The Educational Theatre Journal,
March 1958, pp. 21-29, rpt. in Herbert Goldstone, ed.,
Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, Allyn and Bacon Casebook
Series (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1965),
pp. 142-52.

 

 

20Letter to Stanislavsky, 30 October 1903, in
Letters 92 the Short Story, the Drama and Other
Literary Topics by Anton Chekhov, ed. Louis S. Fried-
landiTNew York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1964), p. 159.

 

 

 

ZlLatham: "The Cherry Orchard as Comedy," l
pp. 146-47. 7i

22Logan, "Recovery from Fear," p. 70.

 

23Logan, "A11 Helen's Fault," Times, Sec. 2,
p. 3. cols. 3-5.

24Ibid.

25Letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko, 2 November
1903, in Friedland, p. 161.

184

26Letter to Stanislavsky, 5 February 1903, in
Ronald Hingley, The Oxford Chekhov (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), III, 318.

 

27V. I. Nemirovich—Danchenko, My Life in
Russian Theatre, trans. John Cournos (Boston: fittle,
Brown and Company, 1936), p. 63.

 

28Logan, "The Art in Yourself," in Directing

the Play: A Source Book 9: Stagecraft, eds. Toby
Cole and Helen Krick Chinoy (New York: The Bobbs-
Merrill Company, Inc., 1953), p. 216.

 

 

 

29Kappo Phelan, Commonweal, p. 70.

 

30Logan, "All Helen's Fault," Times, Sec. 2,
p. l, cols. 6-7.

3lIbid., p. 3, col. 6.

32Lewis Funke, "'The Wisteria Trees' Benefits
From Old Merchandising Idea--Other Items," New York
Times, 29 January 1950, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 4.

 

33"Harrison Yields Reins of Comedy," New York
Times, 7 February 1950, p. 22, col. 1.

34Louis Calta, "'Wisteria Trees' Delays
Premiere," New York Times, 18 February 1950, p. 8,
col. 1.

 

35Brooks Atkinson, "The Wisteria Trees," New
York Times, 9 April 1950, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 1.

 

36Ibid., cols. l, 3.

37Brown, "Louisiana Chekhov," p. 38.

 

185

38Atkinson, Times, 9 April 1950, Sec. 2, p. 1,

col. 2.

39Joseph Wood Krutch, "Drama," The Nation,
15 April 1950, p. 354.

 

4oHarold Clurman, "Theatre," The New Republic,
10 April 1950, p. 22.

 

41Robert Garland, "A Favorable Decision But
Not a Knockout," New York Journal American, 30 March
1950, rpt. New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XI, 320.

 

 

42"New Play in Manhattan," Time, 10 April
1950, p. 68.

43Richard Watts, Jr., "With Chekhov in the
Deep South," New York Post, 30 March 1950, rpt. New
York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XI, 322.

 

 

44Styan, Chekhov 12 Performance, p. 241.

 

4SArthur Harris Friedman, "Drama Mailbag,"
New York Times, 16 April 1950, Sec. 2, p. 3, col. 7.

 

46Logan, Times, 26 March 1950, Sec. 2, p. 3,

col. 3.

CHAPTER V: LILLIAN HELLMAN: THE
THE CHEKHOVIAN GARDEN

lJohn Gassner, "Entropy in the Drama,"
Theatre Arts, September 1952, p. 16.

 

2Harry Gilroy, "Lillian Hellman Drama Fore-
goes a Villain," New York Times, 25 February 1951,
Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 2.

 

186

3John Mason Brown, "A New Miss Hellman,"
The Saturday Review, 31 March 1951, p. 27.

 

4Richard Watts, Jr., "Lillian Hellman's
Latest Drama," New York Post, 8 March 1951, rpt.
New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XII, 326.

 

 

5Brooks Atkinson, "Lillian Hellman Dramatizes
Middle-Aged People in 'The Autumn Garden,'" New York
Times, 8 March 1951, p. 36, col. 2.

 

6John Gassner, Theatre at the Crossroads
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and WiHston, 1960), p. 132.

 

7Atkinson, Times, 8 March 1951, p. 36, col. 2.

8Gassner, "EntrOpy," p. 73.

9Brown, "A New Miss Hellman," p. 27.

10Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman: Playwright
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1972), p. 227.
Moody asserts: "She [Hellman] had not been reading
Chekhov prior to writing The Autumn Garden. . ... l“

 

 

 

llLillian Hellman, "Introduction," Four Plays
(New York: Random House, 1942), p. x.

 

12Richard G. Stern, "Lillian Hellman on Her
Plays," Contact A, l (1959), 114.

 

13John Phillips and Anne Hollander, "The Art
of the Theatre I, Lillian Hellman: An Interview,"
The Paris Review, Winter 1965, p. 72.

 

l4Hellman, The Selected Letters 9: Anton
Chekhov, ed. Lillian Hellman (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Company, 1955), pp. xx-xxi.

 

 

187

15Ibid., p. xix.

16Ibid., p. xxiv.

l7Ibid., pp. 5, xxv-xxvi.

18Ibid., pp. xxv—xxvi.

19Ibid., p. xiii.

20Ibid., p. 204.

21Ibid., p. 90.

22John McClain, "Play at Coronet Beautifully
Set," New York Journal American, 8 March 1951, rpt.
New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XII, 325.

 

 

23Letters, p. xi.

24Matthew Josephson, "Introduction," The

Personal Papers 9f Anton Chekhov (New York: Lear
Pubiishers, Inc., 1948), p. 9.

 

 

25Hellman, AA Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, I969T, p. 137.

 

26Anton Chekhov, "Uncle Vanya," Best Plays by

Chekhov, trans. Stark Young (New York: The Modern
Library, 1956), p. 81.

 

27This interpretation is shared by several
Chekhovian scholars, but is stated most effectively,
perhaps, by Eric Bentley, "Craftsmanship in Uncle
Vanya," 22 Search gf Theater (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1953).

L.

 

188 1

28Marvin Felheim, "The Autumn Garden: Mechanics
and Dialectics" Modern Drama, September 1960, p. 192.

 

29Gilroy, Times, 25 February 1951, Sec. 2,

30Hellman, The Autumn Garden (Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1951), p. 57. A11 further references
to the play will be cited from this edition.

 

31"New Plays in Manhattan," Time, 19 March
1951, p. 51.

32Hellman, "Introduction," Four Plays, pp.

 

xiii-ix.

33Walter Kerr, "The Stage," Commonweal, 6
April 1951, p. 645.

 

 

34"Introduction," Four Plays, p. ix.

35Ibid.

36Atkinson, Timeg, 8 March 1951, p. 36, col. 2. [71
37

Atkinson, "Autumn Garden," New York Times,
18 March 1951, Sec. 2, p. 1, col. 2.

 

 

38Harold Clurman, "Director's Explanation,"
New York Times, 22 April 1951, Sec. 2, p. 3, col. 6.

 

39Clurman, Lies Like Truth (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1958), pp. 48-49.

 

4oGilroy, Times, 25 February 1951, Sec. 2,

189

41Lewis Howard, "The Drama Mailbag," New York
Times, 13 May 1951, Sec. 2, p. 3, col. 7.

42Phillips and Hollander, "The Art of the
Theatre," p. 68.

43Clurman, Lies Like Truth, p. 47.

 

 

44Ibid., p. 49.

45Lee Strasberg, "Introduction," Famous Plays
9: the 1950's (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.,
1962), pp. 18-19.

 

 

AFTERWORD

1Eric Bentley, "Theatre," The New Republic,
21 November 1955, p. 30.

 

2Bentley, "Craftsmanship in Uncle Vanya,"
£2 Search gf Theater (New York: Alfred A. KnOpf, 1953),
pp. 342-43.

3Wilfred Sheed, "Paralysis of the Will,"
Commonweal, 27 May 1966, p. 283.

 

4Inge Morath and Arthur Miller, £2 Russia
(New York: The Viking Press, 1969), pp. 7-8.

5Letter to Alexei Souvorin, 1 April 1890, in
The Selected Letters 92 Anton Chekhov, ed. Lillian
Hellman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1955),
p. 99.

 

 

6Henry Hewes, "American Playwrights Self-
Appraised," The Saturdanyeview, 3 September 1955,
p. 19.

 

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