Conspiracy

It was hard for me to understand what was going in this act as I sleepily read through and found no landscape in the tone of the story to keep me aware that something important had just happened. Usually I can get away with doing my reading when It’s late and I’m tired because I can just follow through an pay attention when something sounds (inside my head, I don’t read out loud) important, but with Chekhov’s little people yelling at the most unimportant details and ignoring the most heartbreaking of stories it’s not easy to see when something really matters with eyes half-closed.
I was thinking maybe Chekhov did it on purpose: a conspiracy against drained students.
Not really, but what he did do on purpose was try to hide the most shocking parts of his play within the play. As an audience we follow the character’s lead to understand a story but when they lead us away from emotion and into boredom it can get a bit strange. As realistic at Chekhov’s writing is, I don’t think that as a real person I’d ever be able to hear a story like Charlotta’s and let it slide just like that- I may be an awful person but I’m not all screws and tin. I’ve been trying to think why he would intentionally make his play boring and all I can come up with is lame and predictable “he’s trying to mirror real life and life is uninteresting and so are we blah blah” blah.
I’ll keep thinking about it I promise.