SOURCE: Kane, Leslie. “The Agony of Isolation in the Drama of Anton Chekhov and Lanford Wilson.” Philological Papers 31 (1985-86): 20-6.

In the following essay, Kane compares Wilson to Anton Chekhov in terms of their preference for realism in their works and their characterizations of solitude.

In contemporary drama we have become accustomed to the drifter, the loner, the single—a character who is emotionally detached from others and who quests, usually with little success, for connections. This problem of isolation is not a new one, nor is it a peculiarly contemporary one. The agony of isolation and the efforts of characters to mitigate that agony received empathetic treatment in the drama of Anton Chekhov. More than any other dramatist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chekhov was cognizant of ontological solitude. He knew, suggests Robert Corrigan, that “each man is alone and that he seeks to...