Lanford Wilson's The 5th of July is a pretty good Chekhovian play written too late….

Wilson's Chekhov does not out-Chekhov the originals; it is merely out of place in its anachronistic garb, like people in nineteenth-century attire in a Danish-modern living room….

[With the] unlikely plot device … needed to keep the characters spinning in the semblance of a non-vacuum … you have a clash of remembrances, recriminations, interests, and expectations. What you do not have, however, is dramatic development: a forward movement of a significant sort, a true change of human dynamics, despite not one but two switcheroos thrown in at the end. There are small conflicts, less than shattering revelations, and, mostly, people persisting in their old semi-impotent, semi-resigned ways.

All that is very Chekhovian—this sense of plus ça change, these people loving and hating one another to a stalemate, this blasé and cunning chatter that cannot keep the wolf of reality from the door, this getting nowhere even when one is most on the go, the very business of selling a house (Cherry Orchard) or planting for the future (Uncle Vanya) or yearning for other places (Three Sisters). But it doesn't work, for two reasons. It looks, sounds, and feels like a copy, however witty, wistful, and exquisite; and all that aimlessness, frustration, and failure does not have a compelling substratum of loss. In Chekhov's Russia, there were intimations of a collapsing empire, of a social order headed for bloody extinction; in Wilson's world, there is only the sense of the departed sixties, with their feeble political and sexual protests coming to an end. That is the implied fifth of July: the post-activist, post-coital, post-holiday depression.

Within this somewhat less than weighty framework, the individual moonings and moanings are also, unsurprisingly, trivial. But Wilson writes intelligent, amusing, racy dialogue, and is able to create lively albeit minuscule confrontations. The play is never uninteresting; it is merely, in the most profound sense, unsatisfying. (p. 77)