Ben Brantley: “Chekhov’s characters are endowed, for better or worse, with a painful awareness of their existential lot. They whine and moan and soliloquize about it, as figures in classic Russian literature are wont to do. Mr. Foote’s characters, being thoroughly American, aren’t big on self-analysis. They know on some level just how lonely life really is, but they tend to avoid the subject as if it were indecorous, like talking about bathroom or sexual habits.”