IV.

Plays

In his dramatic works Chekhov sought to convey the texture of everyday life, moving away from traditional ideas of plot and conventions of dramatic speech. Dialogue in his plays is not smooth or continuous: Characters interrupt each other, several different conversations often take place at the same time, and lengthy pauses occur when no one speaks at all. The plays depart from the customary practice of focusing the action on one central character. From his first major play, Ivanov, to his last, The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov included less and less of what earlier playwrights would have called drama. Although Ivanov has some truly emotional scenes and a suicide, The Cherry Orchard deliberately underplays what would seem to be its dramatic moments, and the play ends anticlimactically. The action of The Cherry Orchard may seem sad—a landowning family loses their ancestral estate—but Chekhov insisted that the play was a comedy. Through the use of devices such as undercutting (interrupting a solemn speech or situation with a comic remark or farcical incident), he ensured that an audience did not respond to a play with just a single emotion.