Chekhovian

He also gives these Chekhovian wobblers more spine while curtailing some of the excesses that threaten to turn character into caricature.

One doesn’t expect Chekhovian subtlety, but a little more trust in the perceptive powers of the audience wouldn’t be amiss.

Perhaps because we have been down this road before, and because the series opens, flipping the old Chekhovian dictum, with the sound of shots that will later — chronologically earlier — require the display of a gun, a sense of impending disaster haunts even the quieter scenes.

But by so closely defining her characters by their sociological predicament, she can’t expect us to respond to them in purely Chekhovian terms.

Brash British playwright Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California,” a Chekhovian drama with a modern edge about the vigil variously embittered sisters are holding for their dying mother, who unsuccessfully groomed them for showbiz glory.