SOURCE: “To Moscow Again,” in The King of the Cats and Other Remarks on Writers and Writing, Second Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 84-90.

In the following essay, Dupee examines the stylistic and thematic limitations of Chekhov's work and the special demands that The Three Sisters places upon the performers.

“The profundity of Chekhov's works is inexhaustible to the actor,” Stanislavsky said. But under present theater conditions, Chekhov's profundity, like Shakespeare's, can involve liabilities, for audience and actors alike. Perhaps it was so even in the patriarchal days of the archetypal Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov's shrine. There is evidence that things did not always go well there, although the playwright himself was at hand, or at least in Yalta, for consultation. He once complained that the officers' uniforms in The Three Sisters were too smart. The Russian military, he said, had ceased to be a glittering...