Humor And Melancholy: Chekhov's Cherry Orchard Poem by gershon hepner

A tale of classes that conflict and meditations
on middle age and all its malcontents,
including its persistent inhibitions,
it’s a tragedy that makes most sense
as comedy, and therefore bound to fail,
as we all do when tragedy occurs,
and we don’t sublimate its sorry tale
with comedy, which everyone prefers,
and generally is all that people pay
attention to. If you can’t make them laugh,
you’ll lose, and they will go away
until it’s time to write your epitaph.

In the September 2009 Commentary, Terry Teachout writes about Alan Ayckbourn, about who Kevin Spacey wrote in 2003:

His reputation has suffered from the snobbery of others. Because he writes comedies, there is the incorrect assumption that he is not part of the same canon as Beckett or Chekhov or Mamet, writers to who he is closer in terms of the genius with which he weaves webs between his characters.

Teachout continues by reminding us that Chekhov disliked the first production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky in 1904, claiming that its unrelieved tragic tone was ill-suited to what he intended as “a comedy, in places even a vodevil.” Scholars translate that word not as “vaudeville” but “farce, ” which, Teachout points out, leads most English-speaking audiences to expect something altogether different from “the elusive commingling of humor and melancholy that is The Cherry Orchard.

8/24/09