This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for Nov. 25, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
Last Week I had an email conversation with my long-time friend, American playwright, Ellsworth Schave, about the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, and another email conversation with a drama director and theatre owner about Trip to Bountiful by Horton Foote. The two email conversations (I don’t do telephone conversations) renewed my interest in playwriting and my love for the great plays of Anton Chekhov.
So what brings these thoughts together? The fact that Ellsworth’s playwriting “style” was influenced by Anton Chekhov whom he admired as much as I did, and by my once-held theory that the wonderful and deceptively simple plays by Horton Foote were influenced by Chekhov. When Mr. Foote (many folks in Wharton called him “Horton,” but he was always “Mr. Foote” to me) would spend his annual six months a year in his family home in Wharton, I had a chance to ask him during one of several seminars he did with the drama majors and my creative writing class at Wharton County Junior College if his writing style had been influenced by Anton Chekhov.
He replied that many people have asked him the same question, and he told them as he was telling me that, alas, he had not read Chekhov before the first person had asked him the question. I told him I believed in spite of his lack of exposure to Chekhov, his plays were very “Chekhovian” (if that’s a word, lol). He seemed to be pleased with my assessment.
My friend (he was a groomsman in my wedding) Ellsworth has written and still writes deceptively simple plays that are very Chekhovian (in my opinion), A Texas Romance, Calvin’s Garden, The Turquoise Pontiac, The ‘47 Ford, and numerous others. One of his first plays, A Texas Romance, was premiered in Michigan City, Indiana, and continued its run in Bossier Parish, Louisiana. Like Horton Foote, Ellsworth Schave is an American playwright who is keenly associated with Texas.
Mr. Foote, who died in 2009, wrote screen plays and television dramas, as well as plays for live theatre, and won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and two Academy Awards. The first play I ever read by him was The Dancers (written in 1954), but my favorite, and absolutely cherished, play by him, is Trip to Bountiful. Tender Mercies was an original screenplay that is a classic.
Not too long ago, in the Plaza Little Theatre in Wharton, Texas, the group of Plaza players presented the Chamber Opera version of Mr. Foote’s play, A Coffin in Egypt, with libretto by Leonard Foglia and score by Ricky Ian Gordon. I couldn’t experience the presentation myself, but my wife did. The setting was Egypt, Texas (down the road from Wharton), and Lady Egypt (the title I knew her by) was a person I knew very well in her later years.
Saying all that about two American playwrights whom I admire leads me back to Anton Chekhov. In my opinion, the best biography written of Chekhov was Henri Troyat’s Chekhov.
Born in 1860, Chekhov died in 1904, some time before the abolishment of serfdom and the Bolshevik Revolution. His grandfather had been a serf, but by the time Anton died, Anton ironically was master of his own large estate with his own serfs. The Cherry Orchard is my favorite of his plays and seems to presage the coming changes which would lead to the Revolution in 1917. Working as a physician was his career which he loved to the very end, never giving up the practice of medicine.
He was master of understatement, and his plays were so subtle with implications that the less educated didn’t “get it”. Simple and subtle but profound I suppose is what I mean by “Chekhovian,” and I see those qualities in Ellsworth Schave and Horton Foote. Long live the theatre!
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, a retired LCMS pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.