The Cherry Orchard Cherry Orchard" was Chekhov's tribute to himself. Many of the characters in the play hearken back to his earlier works and are based on people he knew in his own life. It should also be noted that his boyhood house was bought and torn down by a wealthy man that his mother had considered a friend. The breaking guitar string in acts 2 and 4 hark back to his earliest works. Finally the classic "loaded gun" that appears in many of Chekhov's plays appears here, but this is his only play in which a gun is shown but not fired.
Ann Dunnigan plays: "Ivanov", "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", and "The Cherry Orchard"; each of these translations has been performed onstage. Dunnigan went on to translate Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Ilya Tolstoy in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Her translations have served as the basis for numerous scholars' comments and analyses of Russian literature. Tennessee Williams regarded her rendering of "The Seagull" to be the best available in English, and made it the principal reference for his 1981 adaptation, "The Notebook of Trigorin". Dunnigan's rendering of "War and Peace" (New American Library, 1968) was the first American English