ABSTRACT
. . .A tragi-comedy, an affair depending upon no single theme, no overwhelming simple emotion - an affair as wayward as the days and the nations - 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 efficiency can, to the average American mind, make neither sense nor music. I do not know. The Average American Anything is hearsay to me and I will not believe in hearsay. But 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. . . . It is true that the quality of pathos is the most perfectly difficult to achieve on the stage and its result can never be outright amusement at all, but rather a sort of catch-in-the-throat, a musing laughter, a smile. Certainly to laugh at this play rather than with its characters is to find these people merely queer, stupid, capricious; it is to leave the theater long before the end. And it does not seem possible that anyone could put on a play for such a purpose.
