Estate Value

It was the late actress Kim Stanley who alerted me to Chekhov’s greatness. Years ago, I was trying to write a piece, for this magazine, about the fabled performer, a process that led to a number of late-night calls. Stanley had a beautiful voice, memorialized as the uncredited narrator in the film version of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” and when we talked about theatre, particularly actors, she was as brilliant a commentator as Shaw or Tynan—a constructive truth teller. She asked me, had I read Chekhov? I had not, I said, not in any great depth—I wasn’t excited by the flatness of his prose—and she almost put the phone down when I asked, on top of everything else, why he was important. “Because he’s life!” she said. Stanley had played Masha in the incredible Actors Studio production of “Three Sisters” (there’s a terrific filmed record of the 1966 show)—how could I give so committed an adviser the brush-off?