A Country Scandal may be mere chaff compared to Chekhov's masterpieces, but even chaff will do for a light snack. This is all that the Theatre Company of Boston intends to serve with its current production. The play has ambiguous possibilities: it could be staged as light comedy or as rather heavy tragi-comedy. The Theatre Company has chosen to save its sobriety for meatier drama.

The scandal takes place in a placid little provincial backwater, on the surface of which floats a handful of dissipated notables trying to forget how bored they are. Everyone is caught in a pointless, narcotic whirlpool of wine and frivolity, and everyone is constantly being dragged down into silly flirtations and seductions.

The dizziest man in town is Platonov, a napless Don Juan whose bumbling charm creates a pentagonal affair that stirs up billows of social mud. While trying half-heartedly to stick by his angelic wife ("I don't want happiness, I want you"), Platonov intermittently toys with a flighty young female scientist, fights off the amorous intentions of a beautiful widow, and rekindles an old college flame. Meanwhile the widow collects an entourage consisting of a lecherous old landowner, his Paris-educated fop of a son, a weasling Jewish merchant, and a brash horse thief named Ossip. Platonov's brother-in-law, a boozing doctor, and the widow's childish stepson, husband of Platonov's mistress, complete the menagerie.

As soon as it is populated with these freakish characters, the play gets under way, fitfully propelled by Platonov's will-power. "An empty-headed woman-chaser, that's what I am," Platonov admits. By alter-chaser, that's what I am," Platonov admits. By alternating pledges to take up and break off extra-marital escapades, he invites insults, homicide, suicide, and laughter. While the plot thrives on surprise entrances and simultaneous incidents this boobish Casanova slides toward his comic doom.

Beneath all the heady good-natured nonsense, A Country Scandal hints at personal tragedies and deplores the empty hypocrisy of country life. The dissolute socialites act like buffoons but they live an aimless "puppet existence" in "a hell of vulgarity and disillusionment." Their barbarous antics hide frustrated ambitions and a loss of self-respect; "irrepressible passions" drive them to torment one another.

But the Theatre Company has decided to softpeddle the pathos. Instead it looks for laughs on the strength of the play's irony, and usually finds them. Chekhov filled A Country Scandal with dozens of juicy exchanges, giving the actors plenty of material.

Dustin Hoffman, expertly leading the light-hearted approach to Chekhov as the tipsy doctor, is the funniest figure in the play. John Lasell manages to capitalize on Platonov's absurdities without making his tragic side incongruous. And Penelope Laughton portrays the simple naivete of Platonov's wife with great subtlety. Unfortunately, the roles of the young fop and the widow's stepson are somewhat overinflated by David Bouvier and Joseph O'Sullivan. And Betsy White, as the widow, proposes sin to Platonov like a lenient mother trying to sell her children on brushing after every meal.

In this early play, written at the age of twenty-one, Chekhov was already a master of comic technique though he strongly foreshadows the sulking self-mockery in his later pieces. Resemblances to later plays in A Country Scandal may be partly due to the able work of Chekhov's translater Alex Szogyi. Szogyi judiciously pruned the manuscript down from six to two and a half hours of curt speeches in contemporay idiom, broken by endless exits and entrances. The "few liberties" which the translater took "for the sake of fashioning a coherent play" almost certainly improved on the original, bringing A Country Scandal closer to Chekhov's mature comedies. And since director Frank Cassidy has freely interpreted Szogyi's adaptation as a controlled farce, the version of the play at the Hotel Bostonian Playhouse actually may be more worth performing than what young Chekhov had in mind. It is certainly worth seeing.