Chekhov's Plays.

Chekhov is known for his dictum that a gun hanging on a wall in the first act of a play must fire before the close of the final scene. But his own plays are far more dramatically oblique than this famous maxim would suggest. They draw power from fleeting humors and much talk--characters that brood, waffle, reminisce, declare love, renege, and laugh and cry simultaneously. In his insightful reading of the plays, Richard Gilman explains that, while making no formal innovations to the drama of the time, Chekhov did defy conventions of plot, theme, and character. Refusing to staff the plays with heroes or villains, shaking the moods free of unalleviated tragedy or comedy, and muddying emotions that might too easily fall into cliche, the playwright opted for "the implicit where we would have expected the overt, discontinuities, leaps, gaps, breaks in dramatic logic."

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An image Gilman returns to several times is that of "language and actions...filling in a field, not moving in any sort of conventional straight line." The conceit is particularly useful in explaining the plays' language, which is never linear. When he describes the non-sequiturs and inconsistencies that jostle the flow of Chekhov's dialogue, Gilman brings in the splendid German word aneinandervorbeisprechen ("talking past one another"--used to describe the speech of characters in the early nineteenth-century plays of Buchner).

The "field" conceit also helps Gilman explain in what sense the plays are dramatic, despite the paucity of conventional plot: in the place of "linear, destination-bound" action, Chekhov substituted a stream of characters with independent desires, frustrations, and ideas. Each play incorporates "a revolving dramatic field...which as it turns gives us glimpses of successive arrangements of feeling and idea, connectedness and disconnection, participations near the center of the imaginative frame or farther away."

Out of context this kind of argument can sound so refined as to be mystical. In context, with a large number of quotes to back it up, it is quite convincing. Devoting one chapter to each of Chekhov's five major plays (Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard), Gilman uses close readings to inspire and illustrate his definition of Chekhov's original technique. He sets the plays in the context of the theater of their time, but also lets his reflections range more widely, making connections that are more poetic than analytical: just before plunging into an examination of The Cherry Orchard's opening moments, for example, he stops to remark, inside a humble parenthesis, "The four acts of Three Sisters. The language and rhythm of this sentence irresistibly bring to mind Gertrude Stein's and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts...."

As this playful observation shows, Gilman's own style is associative--a field rather than a line. "I do lay the responsibility at Chekhov's feet," Gilman says, "...his own digressive style is infectious..." When he runs ahead of his argument, dodges backwards, takes advantage of a space break to change tack, or pauses after a quotation to emphasize and interpret specific words before linking them to words in other passages, Gilman sometimes sounds as though he cannot restrain his enthusiasm for the subtlety and philosophical depth of Chekhov's work.

What distinguishes the plays fundamentally, Gilman maintains, is their resistance to being summarized, labeled, or otherwise reduced on any level. Themes--even recurrent ones like the passage of time, or the importance of work--are always too deeply meshed into the writing to be easily analyzed. Characters are always more than the sum of their situations, and behavior never stems from simple motives. And innumerable important issues can barely be discussed, because their significance comes from omission, so that the play's glory lies in "a matter of spaces, rests, things left unsaid or undone but implicit, tacit, like hovering notes unsounded."

Seen in this light, apparently simple plot devices gain an almost metaphysical weight. Toward the end of the book, for example, Gilman attempts to explain an apparent awkwardness at the start of Three Sisters. In her opening speech, Olga recites the salient facts in the family's history over the previous year: "Father died just a year ago, on this very day--the fifth of May...It was very cold, snow was falling...." So much background, recalled for no apparent reason, just when the audience needs it--this speech can seem absurdly clumsy coming from the pen of a writer like Chekhov.

But Gilman has a justification, albeit a rather abstract one. The speech is meant to perplex, he argues, to lure our minds away from the level of pure realism, thus leaving them open to the play of emotional significance. Olga is not speaking to anyone; she speaks because she is "thoughtful" and thoughtfulness in a Chekhov character is "the surprise and seriousness of the mind when feeling passes into awareness." Thought, feeling, and speech, in Three Sisters and the other plays, are all connected by an eerie current that runs through the mystery of things.

This kind of explication is not always easy to follow, but Gilman always expresses himself beautifully. Packed with provocative thoughts, his book will be particularly edifying to anyone under the impression that Chekhov's plays all take place on the same decaying estate, frequented by droves of aimless gentry, where, beyond a long avenue of fir trees, an offstage pistol shot from time to time reminds us that we are all even worse off than we'd thought.