Episode 332 - Wednesday, May 16, 1979

Standard Countertop Position

Chekhov's Lasagna is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed; elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play. The statement is recorded in letters by Anton Chekhov several times, with some variation:

"Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a pan of lasagna sitting on the counter, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must be eaten. If it's not going to be eaten, it shouldn't be sitting there."

"One must never place a delicious food item on the stage if it isn't going to be consumed. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889. Here the "lasagna" is a monologue that Chekhov deemed superfluous and unrelated to the rest of the comic.

"If in the first act you have placed a pan of lasagna on a surface, then in the following one it should be consumed. Otherwise don't put it there." From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521.

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