[The first production of] The Cherry Orchard was not a success. The press was, on the whole, favorable, but the reviewers were not enthusiastic, and both the production and the acting were criticized. As to the play, the consensus appeared to be that it was no great thing; the theme was dated; the vein had been worked to death. The play was taken to be a portrayal of the passing of the old order. Nobody suggested that there was anything in the least funny about this. Nevertheless Chekhov persisted in his notion that Stanislavsky had ruined his comedy by playing it tragically. On April 10, he wrote [to his wife] Olga: "Why is it that my play is persistently called a drame in the posters and newspaper advertisements? Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky see in my play something absolutely different from what I have written, and I am willing to stake my word that neither of them has read it through attentively even once. Forgive me, but I assure you that this is so."
Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard often occupies a peculiar position in the general education curriculum. Since it is included in many anthologies of world drama, The Cherry Orchard is readily available for use in those humanities courses which would consider such works as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Jonson's Volpone, along with two or three plays by Shakespeare, as the appropriate texts for a study of the drama. The critical reputation of Chekhov's play, coupled with this accident of availability, leads those who feel that modern drama should somehow be represented in a humanities course to select The Cherry Orchard for this purpose. Thus The Cberry Orchard is most often chosen by teachers of the humanities with a sense of reluctance, for lack of a better alternative rather than for any intrinsic qualities of the play as a work specially suited to the purposes of general education.
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