Ah, the last of Chekhov's plays. Presumably, this is the one where he figured it out, the final attempt at his then-unusual, and now EXTREMELY unusual, swirling, "centrifugal" form, where the story elements chaotically spin away from the center, interweaving, colliding, stuttering, rather than neatly converging straightaways towards clarity. A lot has been made about how the theme concerns people being comically inactive, too mired in the past, to confront their own looming demise, but that seems to me to be too facile to be the point—if someone you loved were dying I doubt you would kill them prematurely and move on just because it was decisive and made perfect financial and logical sense; in fact you're much more likely to behave foolhardily just for the sake of holding onto something, anything. To me, it's more noteworthy that the characters can't seem to understand each other, due to selfishness or impatience or lack of life experience or insecurity or status or what have you, while at the same time desperately demanding that their own peculiar selves be understood. In fact, whenever the characters are flat-out offered clarity and resolution, they refuse it, as if they found more comfort in not knowing. If we know for certain everything is coming to an end, maybe we'd rather be lost, and foolish, and deluded, telling people who try to shake us out of our ruts to SHUTUP, because at least being lost in our own way is something we already understand. That seems like a bit of a soul-shaking point. In a sort of similar way, I liked his more ambitious, messier attempts better than this fairly well polished one, even if they weren't totally successful (it's the same reason I like "Billy Madison" more than "Happy Gilmore.") The feeling of "God, Chekhov, what the hell are you doing?" is far more thrilling than "Okay, Chekhov, I see what you're up to: perhaps the reason people don't seem to advance and evolve as sentient beings is simply because we don't want to. Also, Chekhov, remind me never to invite you to any parties. You're kind of a bummer." Three stars.