Is Donald Margulies’s ‘Country House’ Too Chekhovian or Not Chekhovian Enough?

Some plays about actors, acting and other theater concerns can be quite good–a worthy example being Anton Chekhov’s 1895 work, The Seagull. Most plays about actors, acting and other theater concerns, however, are not so rewarding. Sorry to say that one of them is Donald Margulies’s newest comedy-drama, The Country House, now at the Samuel J. Friedman, following its world premiere at The Geffen Playhouse as part of a Manhattan Theatre Club-Geffen Playhouse co-production deal. Curiously, one of the reasons the play falls short of Pulitzer Prize-winning Margulies’s usual vaunted mark is that he’s chosen, as many playwrights before him have, to make The Country House an homage to Chekhov. To be more specific, he’s saluting–if you want to call it that–The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, and he goes seriously awry doing so, falling far short of Chekhov’s dramaturgically and emotionally involving level.