Lanford Wilson's The 5th of July is a pretty good Chekhovian play written too late….

Wilson's Chekhov does not out-Chekhov the originals; it is merely out of place in its anachronistic garb, like people in nineteenth-century attire in a Danish-modern living room….

[With the] unlikely plot device … needed to keep the characters spinning in the semblance of a non-vacuum … you have a clash of remembrances, recriminations, interests, and expectations. What you do not have, however, is dramatic development: a forward movement of a significant sort, a true change of human dynamics, despite not one but two switcheroos thrown in at the end. There are small conflicts, less than shattering revelations, and, mostly, people persisting in their old semi-impotent, semi-resigned ways.

All that is very Chekhovian—this sense of plus ça change, these people loving and hating one another to a stalemate, this blasé and cunning chatter that cannot...