He wasn't lazy. He liked to put things off as long as he could. He was a procrastinator. He got his copy done just in the nick of time for the New Yorker. They often had to send runners out to get it. Benchley's law is "Any man can do any amount of work, provided it's not the work he's supposed to be doing." So he would find all manner of things to do rather than start a piece.

Both directors and actors are confronted with many perplexing problems when they deal with Chekhov's full length plays. Perhaps the most perplexing are those which they meet in the attempt to discover and express the dramatic significance of Chekhov's dialogue. The difficulty is not that Chekhov's dialogue requires any unusual acting techniques, but rather that it has no obvious form. It seems to be rambling, disconnected, and irrelevant. Take...