Dramaturgical Dip: Trusting the Audience

What I love best about Chekhov is everything he doesn’t say–all the silences and interruptions; stories that go nowhere, family memories long forgotten, and explanations that never come. These hollow spaces give Chekhov’s storytelling room to resonate.

Chekhov was a revolutionary playwright. He worked diligently to fight the theatrical tropes he had seen on the 19th-century Russian stage, aiming to depict instead real people behaving as they do, but in all the messy chaos of the theater. His language is simple, direct, and spare. Its poetry relies on everyday words and laconic restraint. Chekhov takes his time building images and relationships, even scripting silences–like musical rests–as if to let the play breathe. While another playwright might have spelled out all the details, taking care to catch us up on who’s who and what just happened, Chekhov dispenses with all that, trusting his audiences to lean into what they don’t yet understand. 

As a country doctor, Chekhov observed and collected remarkably specific details of human behavior (including his own) and recorded them in his diaries, fiction, and plays. The idiosyncratic details he gives his characters (like, from his fiction, a man shaped like a question mark) make them distinctive and memorable. Chekhov understood that while people act in ordinary, even predictable ways, they are still unique, often laughable, and sometimes magnificent. In his plays, we see characters who are jealous, desperate, bold, and gutless, as well as those who seem to care too much or not at all.  Chekhov wrote dramas that are funny, and comedies that are sad. All the contradictions we see in Chekhov point to his core pursuit and distinctive quality: honesty, above all else, in depicting human nature.