Kelly is a teacher of Drama and Creative Writing at Oakton Community College in Illinois and the author of a full-length drama. In the following essay he examines whether Soyony really loves Irina, as he claims, and the significance of this to the play overall.

The characters in Anton Chekhov's drama The Three Sisters present various emotional conflicts, but one generalization that can be made about all of them is that they all hope that love will provide release. The sisters of the title feel themselves being dragged down by boredom, and two of them turn to love affairs to do for them what circumstances haven't. It might at first seem that "boredom" is the wrong word, because we tend to think of boredom as slight, as an inconvenience that will pass, but it is clear that Olga, Masha, and Irina are suffering acutely from a lack...