The Good Doctor

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Nominally by Neil Simon, The Good Doctor is a dramatization of several of Anton Chekhov's most beloved short stories, written when Chekhov was a medical student in Moscow in the 1880s. Simon's contribution is restrained to the point of being almost undetectable, although copyright laws allow him to take full credit on the playbill. (Chekhov himself, surprisingly, isn't even mentioned anywhere in the program, although no one is really trying to hide his part in it. It's in the press releases.) Simon transposed the stories to the stage with a minimum of fuss, adding only a narrator — a "writer," presumably Chekhov — who introduces and comments on some of the sketches, and a music-hall-type piano player who performs the same function musically.

I could find little explanation of why Simon was moved to write The Good Doctor, which apparently wasn't particularly successful in its 1973 debut. With Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and several other stage successes behind him, he was well into his career as an original playwright, and that's what he continued to be. Chekhov and Simon seem on the face of it a bit of an odd couple. Some years after writing these jolly stories, Chekhov would transform the nature of modern playwriting from neatly wrapped tragic or comic packages into unresolved shades-of-gray landscapes of character exploration. Simon to some extent came along a half century later and steered American theater back into more accessible territory.