In both Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Samuel Beckett's Endgame, there is a complete lack of change in any of the characters' lives. Under normal circumstances, this lack of one of the most important elements of theatre would result in two plays that are utterly worthless and simply not deserving of the effort that one would expend while reading them. However, these are not normal circumstances, and these are certainly not your everyday, average playwrights. In both plays, the absence of any change is a deliberate choice that each author has made. In The Cherry Orchard, the characters simply refuse to accept that the world around them is changing, and therefore never undergo any changes themselves while in Endgame Beckett uses numerous ambiguous elements to simply prevent any change from being achievable.
             Chekhov's manifests the absence of change in The Cherry Orchard through the characters' simple refusal to change. The dialogue at the beginning of the play informs the reader that the Cherry Orchard and the estate must be sold because of Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya's and the rest of the family's inability to pay their debts. From this simple circumstance, the reader can infer that Ranevskaya was once wealthy but no longer is. This leads to another important factor of the play: Many things have changed outside of the presented time frame of The Cherry Orchard. This is significant because it is important for the reader to remember that any dialogue regarding change is about a change that has already occurred. Another important aspect of the characters in The Cherry Orchard is their need to live in the past. This need not only distracts any goal that the character might hope to achieve (saving the cherry orchard for instance), but also allows for no new development to occur within the character. An excellent example of this need to live in the past comes at the very beginning of the play when Lyubov Andreevna Ranevskaya firs...