Uncle Vanya the professor's daughter by his first wife, who has worked with Vanya to keep the estate going, suffers from her unrequited feelings for Dr. Astrov. Matters are brought to a crisis when the professor announces his intention to sell the estate, Vanya and Sonya's home, with a view to investing the proceeds to achieve a higher income for himself and his wife. "Uncle Vanya" is unique among Chekhov's major plays because it is essentially an extensive reworking of his own play published a decade earlier, "The Wood Demon". By elucidating the specific changes Chekhov made during the revision process—these include
Ann Dunnigan but Dunnigan contested that van Itallie's translation was nearly identical to hers, and sued him. In the settlement that followed, van Itallie accepted responsibility for the legal costs, and agreed to cease promotion of his version. Years later, van Itallie applied himself to new renderings of "The Cherry Orchard", "The Seagull", "Three Sisters", and "Uncle Vanya". In the introduction to Applause Books' 1995 compilation of these, van Itallie asserts that he "worked on "The Sea Gull", and later the other three plays, with a specially-made literal English translation and a selection of French translations." Dunnigan's final stage performance was in