A. Chekhov - the Cherry Orchard Commentary

Throughout the plot of action in the play, The Seagull, Anton Chekhov illustrates various examples of human disappointment through the interactions of the characters. Whether human disappointment is presented in the form of one sided love or the a life with no meaning, Chekhov presents to his readers a world where joy and happiness are values that are no where to be seen. Therefore, feelings of disappointment and despair seem to dominate the lives of the characters.

The first act is about how the Russians are amazed by a rumor that caused everyone to believe that Anastasia may have survived the Bolshevik attacks that had killed her entire family. Two wanted con men, Dimitri and Vlad Popov, hear the rumors and decide to do “the biggest con in history”, in which they will find a girl to portray as Anastasia in order to win the reward from the Dowager Empress, Anastasia’s grandmother. Dimitri and Vlad, hold auditions which turned unsuccessful for their plan at the theater in the abandoned Yusupov Palace, where Anastasia’s family had lived. After they had finished and lost all hope, a young woman named Anya approaches them to ask Dimitri about paperwork so she can get tickets for Paris. Vlad and Dimitri dismiss

In act one they start the act on an open stage no props and curtain less. The stage manager enters the story and introduces the play. He tells us the setting the town of Grover’s Corners, “New Hampshire, just before dawn on May 7, 1901”. He describes landmarks, churches, schools, and other important places. This tells us that their home town is small but a big part of their lives.

What is important of this play is how time goes by, and how it is manipulated. The stage manager, which is possibly the main character of the play, as the power to stop the time in the play, cutting scenes as he wishes, or recreating scenes from the past as flashbacks. This creates a sense of non-chronological time, which the Stage Manager can control. This sense is a motif, or a recurring structure or contrast, that can help to develop and inform the major themes. By showing this manipulation of time, Wilder engages his audience by overturning their expectations of the theater as one that goes in a linear time. For instance, in Act one, the Stage Manager begins with a rough introduction to the play, mentioning “This is the back door. There's some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery. This is Mrs. Gibbs' garden. Corn... peas… beans... hollyhocks... heliotrope... and a lot of burdock. In those days, our newspaper come out twice a week” (Wilder 5). In this scene, the Stage Manager insults the audience by telling them that people are more important than objects, in this case the scenery, and they should focus more on the characters and the plot, rather than just the view of the play. By using the motif, Wilder gives a certain control over the play’s

This first act is just painting a picture for us of the small town life and everything pretty much goes the same way, day to day. The two families are just two families that live their lives by a routine without every changing, it is the so called way things are supposed to be. The wives will talk about their dreams even though they may never come true but they do have dreams or at least Mrs. Gibb’s does. The stage manager comes and goes and talks directly to the audience, he is not only narrating but giving you the picture in your head. He also can call the characters on stage and engage them directly. He demonstrates this by having the wives leave so he can talk about other things. He will call a scientist and Mr. Webb out to give a few facts about the Grover’s Corner. He is basically bragging up the little town even though it is just a little town that goes about their daily life, day in and day out. By the end of act one we will have heard about the marrying, living, and dying. This is what the whole play is about. They will even make a time capsule and the stage manager wants to make sure everything is in there to represent the town for years in the future. There is not a main event happening in act I, it is all just a broad picture to get your imagination going. At this point the stage manager reappears to let the audience know that this is the end of

The director, Tom Huston Orr, made the decision to make the play more of a movement piece, meaning more physicality from the actors. At the very beginning, the first

This play was directed by Rick Lombardo and performed in the Howard Logan Stillwell Theater on the KSU campus. The play is follows the lives of three sisters who had lost their father and have moved far from the city they loved. They hope that one day they will be able to return to Moscow, but the play starts out with them in rural russia. The three sisters live with their brother, Andrey, who spends a lot of his time studying downstairs. They oldest sister, Olga, is a teacher who seems to be the most mature of the three. The middle child, Masha, is married to a school teacher named Kulygin. She eventually has an affair with a military man named Vershinin, but this affair doesn’t end well. The youngest child, Irina, seems very optimistic and

In “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Ilych is a highly regarded official in the court of justice who lives carefree most of the time. However, as the story progresses, he starts to more and more self analyze and become emotional as he ponders the reason for his hellish illness and coming death . Although it may seem like he has done something to deserve such a cruel fate, it is honestly just the way life works, and all of us have to accept this fact. That is what Ivan ends up realizing and doing. It is not a punishment of how he has lived, but instead is a natural occurrence that ends up hitting everyone at different times in our lives.

Few of the many Shakespeare works that have been re-imagined for ballet have had the lasting impact and been embraced with as much affection as Romeo and Juliet. The famous story of two young lovers whose passion is tragically thwarted by the enmity of their respective families has inspired numerous choreographers over the decades, attracted by the enduring power of its themes and narrative and by its potential for dramatic and evocative dancing.

Each of the story’s main settings, Yalta, Oreanda, Moscow, and S---, reveal something about the central characters and their relationship: Chekhov introduces The Lady With The Dog with the setting of Yalta, so the reader immediately associates the central characters Anna and Dmitri, who initially appear straightforward and almost stereotypical, with casual affairs and infidelity. Chekhov increases complexity to the characters through backstory, and uses the isolated setting of Oreanda to reflect the development of the relationship between the characters. When Anna and Dmitri go back to their homes, Chekhov suggests that they are unhappy. Again, the setting compliments the atmosphere of the narrative as Moscow and S--- are given hostile description.

Anton Chekhov's short story The Lady with the Dog, is written from a man named Dmitri Gurov’ standpoint. The plot involves himself and Anna, a woman who he meets on vacation. Although both are married, they have an affair. At the end of the story, there is a sense that all though they know it will be difficult, Gurov and Anna will continue with the affair. This story took me on a journey with two characters who were full of contradictions.

IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at work. He would long ago have flung aside his work and gone out into the street, but a customer from Kolokolny Lane, who had a fortnight before ordered some boots, had been in the previous day, had abused him roundly, and had ordered him to finish the boots at once before the morning service. "It 's a convict 's life!" Fyodor grumbled as he worked. "Some people have been asleep long ago, others are enjoying themselves, while you sit here like some Cain and sew for the devil knows whom. . . ." To save himself from accidentally falling asleep, he kept

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born a year before the emancipation of serfism in Russia took place. Although he was the grandson of a serf, Chekhov was able to attend the medical school at the University of Moscow and become a physician. Chekhov started writing in order to support his family economically, becoming a master in drama and short stories. His literature is characterized by the use of colloquial language which could be understood even by the less educated and recently liberated serfs. Social change is the main theme in ‘The Cherry Orchard’, a four-act play written in 1904. In this play the different characters portray how changes in Russia after the emancipation of 1861 were taking place and although the play is set several

  Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard projects the cultural conflict of the turn of the twentieth century of Russia. With a historical allusion, Chekhov exhibited the changing Russia with "slice of life" in his play. The Cherry Orchard is not only a depiction of Russian life but also an understatement of changing traditional value. Cultural conflict itself is an abstraction. To explain it, it is the traditional culture that is unable to resist the invading one. In the play, each character has his or her own personality, which symbolizes their individual social levels of Russian society. But these characters distinguish themselves into two sides, which are conservators and investors;

In high school I read a short story called The Bet by Anton Chekhov. The story was about a young lawyer who made a bet with a banker that imprisonment for fifteen years was better than the death penalty. Like Socrates in Plato’s Crito the lawyer was trying to challenge society’s beliefs. While in confinement the lawyer read many books, whose subjects ranged from languages to philosophy. After fifteen years of solitary confinement the lawyer rejects his prize money and defaults on the bet, hours before winning. I wonder if the man had read the Crito. We can reason that Socrates’ could have inspired the man to decide to pick the more brash choice to try and teach his accusers a lesson. The man may have decided to default on the bet when he was so close to winning because he wished to make the lesson the banker learned more memorable and infinite. In the Crito even though Socrates thinks himself to be innocent of the charges brought against him he still refuses to escape prison when presented with the opportunity. This helps him teach his final lesson about the principles he believes are worth dying for. His principles are that the opinion of the many is unimportant, his life is not worth living with a corrupt soul, life is not as important as living justly, the only consideration to take into account is justice, and acting unjustly is always bad and shameful. Even though Socrates and the polis or laws arrive at the same conclusion that Socrates should not escape prison, the