SOURCE: “Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, September, 1981, pp. 357-66.

In the following essay, Hubbs discusses the various dimensions of themes and characterization in The Three Sisters.

In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject of increasingly enlightened debate. Bernard Beckerman, in a recent article in Modern Drama on “The Artifice of ‘Reality’ in Chekhov and Pinter,” begins with a summary of the two main sources of “reality” in the drama as a starting point for a discussion of Chekhov's contemporaneity. The first is “the...