The Vaudeville of Chekhov

Yes! Google it and you will find many published books and articles with titles much like this post! I even dropped his name with reference to the many uses of the word vaudeville in my book No Applause. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the most revered serious playwrights of the modern age, did indeed indulge in his version of what he called vaudeville.

You saw those qualifiers, right? Most people miss them. This doesn’t mean he was “in vaudeville” or even in any kind of variety theatre, although that can’t be ruled out. When people ask me for a definition of the word vaudeville I often end up boring them with a broad and misty protoplasm of multiple definitions, because, unfortunately, like most theatrical terms, the word has no single, clear definition. Sorry, it just doesn’t. Chekhov’s usage of it is probably one of the farthest afield, but it’s fully legitimate. He uses it to mean “short, light one act plays, usually farcical, in the manner of the French“. To complicate matters, one act plays were a staple in vaudeville (it’s a topic of one of my upcoming books), but this doesn’t imply that Chekhov wrote these sketches for that medium, though they could easily be presented in that context, and I would not be shocked to learn that some were. Got all that?

Chekhov’s “vaudeville plays” were mostly written between 1884 and 1891, that is, prior to his famous Big Four full-length plays. The best known of the farces is The Bear (1888), as it as adapted by Dick Vosburgh for A Day in Hollywood/ A Night in the Ukraine and reimagined by actors impersonating the Marx Brothers and Margaret Dumont. Others include A Marriage Proposal (1889), A Tragedian In Spite of Himself (1889), The Wedding (1889), and The Anniversary (1991). There is also the monologue On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco (1886), and a couple of more dramatic plays.

Chekov, who was developing a reputation as a writer of serious fiction and journalism at the same time, dismissed these little vignettes as minor efforts as best, but I think they are a key to appreciating his later and longer efforts. Most of them are fairly outlandish and bizarre, with characters behaving in some compulsive, abnormal fashion that almost point the way to Absurdism. In A Marriage Proposal, a suitor asks the hand of a neighbor girl, but can’t refrain from arguing with her about small matters the entire time. In A Tragedian in Spite of Himself, a man is about to commit suicide, spewing a hilariously long laundry list of silly reasons for doing so. In The Bear, a textbook melodrama villain badgers a widow for the rent and it comes to a duel until the pair fall in love and start kissing.

These playlets are not unlike the more serious works, just broader and more heightened, and this is why I believe they provide the key to the tone required to make sense of The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Many seem perplexed by the fact that Chekhov called these later plays “comedies”, but it’s my strong belief that they are only redeemable as such, or, if you prefer, as tragicomedies. I played Treplev at school and made all the girls cry, if you can believe it, so I’m not unaware of the genuine suffering and sadness embedded in his characters. Yet, when you take the setting and situations into account, and the arcs of his plays, it’s possible, perhaps even inevitable to become completely turned off by Chekov’s writing. I was for many years and so were certain audiences in his own time. All of these characters with apparently endless leisure, sitting around in parlors and talking themselves to death about imaginary problems. Where’s my tiny violin? All of these whining, paralyzed, privileged people.

And that’s the key of course. It’s satire on some level, and this is why Chekhov’s plays continued to thrive in Russia after the Revolution, because they comment rather damnably on the moneyed classes. It was easy for the Soviets to exaggerate those elements for the purposes of propaganda. As one of the bourgeoisie himself, Chekhov’s attitude was surely more nuanced. But as a physician who had done lots of charity work among the genuinely distressed and stricken of the earth, his portraits were definitely coming from a place of critique. It was Stanislavski who saw the humanity in the characters and made hits of those plays with his Moscow Art Theatre, seeing all the rich opportunity in Chekhov’s writing to create compelling webs of human behavior. It became like catnip to actors. But it’s possible to get lost in the weeds. The big picture is a lampoon of human illusion and folly. It’s the only way to look at it that’s not contemptible. It’s why Shaw was a fan, and why Robert Brustein included Chekov in his book The Theatre of Revolt. These aren’t meant to be soap operas but comic ones.

You can watch some of ’em by the way! The BBC celebrated the 150th anniversary of Chekov’s birth in 2010 with a production called Chekhov: Comedy Shorts. Theirs and other productions are most certainly available to watch online.

For more on the many kinds of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.