SOURCE: "Ghosts and The Cherry Orchard: The Theater of Modern Realism," in The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective, Princeton University Press, 1949, pp. 146-77.

In the excerpt below, Fergusson illuminates the carefully built structure underlying the seemingly plotless Cherry Orchard.

The Cherry Orchard is often accused of having no plot whatever, and it is true that the story gives little indication of the play's content or meaning; nothing happens, as the Broadway reviewers so often point out. Nor does it have a thesis, though many attempts have been made to attribute a thesis to it, to make it into a Marxian tract, or into a nostalgic defense of the old regime. The play does not have much of a plot in either of these accepted meanings of the word, for it is not addressed to the rationalizing mind...