[In the following assessment of A Month in the Country, Hutchens argues that the Theater Guild actors significantly enlivened Turgenev's rather diffuse and vague play.]

To Turgenev's A Month in the Country, [a] troupe of Guild actors, under Rouben Mamoulian's direction, brings the flow of ensemble acting effectively orchestrated, spaciously framed in Raymond Sovey's brilliant, old regime settings. They bring, also, the first Turgenev play to be performed in this country in English; a play which, arriving so long after Tchekov's popularity has been established here, is yet curiously prophetic. Like the Tchekov plays which Turgenev's preceded by half a century and unquestionably influenced, A Month in the Country has an apparent formlessness, a veiled and moody quiescence. It is less searching, less subtle and moving than any of the Tchekov masterpieces; and, unlike them, it would hardly be endurable were it to be badly played. There is in it no passionate necessity for a statement of human futility and despair. The stature of its characters does not change palpably under the stress of emotion, and its interludes are without the compact and telling strokes that make a Tchekov play close knit for all its seeming languor. But this is to judge competence by genius. A Month in the Country does not waste its time. Its leisure is devoted to the creation of an old, rich provincial atmosphere, and its tragi-comedy—as far as it goes—is etched with certainty. One must admit that the certainty does not go far, that Turgenev is excessively gingerly with a theme that asked for sharper treatment even in his time, and is a little mouldy now without it. Natalia, beautiful and mature, loves the tutor Aleksei, who loves her ward Viera but is quickly susceptible to the former when he is awakened to her. The play wanders through its pattern of mild hysteria and passiveness to a final frustration, passively encountered—Aleksei will return to Moscow, and the entire matter will go on from there as best it may … Finally, the structure, as Turgenev shaped it, is only half a play; but a half good play can be immeasurably enlivened, even if it cannot be made important, by the playing that goes into it. To see Nazimova is to know how creative an actress so endowed can be in a mediocre role, and how important are subtle silences and fluent gesture to the fragility and weakness that are the character of Natalia. And in keeping the movement of the play in a state of placidity, Mr. Mamoulian turned from what might have been mere excited absurdity to give full room to the development of the character portraits Dudley Digges, Henry Travers and Douglas Dumbrille have provided. The portraits, like the best moments of the play, exist for their own sake. When they are fitted as well and harmoniously into a gallery as they have been here, the result is justifiable in the theatre whether or not it is dramatic.