Cody Rhodes: the Chekhovian man & Mythic Agent

The Cherry Orchard

Is one of Anton Chekhov’s many plays showing not dramatic action, but a kind of atmospheric ache.

In The Cherry Orchard, the house is sold offstage. The orchard is lost offstage. And in a final, quiet cruelty which is also strangely merciful, the forgotten servant appears from offstage in the final moments to lie down and die. Throughout The Cherry Orchard, the play’s most decisive events remain invisible, heard only as echoes or intimated through gesture. What remains onstage is not dramatic action, but a kind of atmospheric ache: the passage of time, the texture of loss, the slow unwinding of presence.

Peter Szondi, in his Theory of the Modern Drama, takes Chekhov’s formal decisions as evidence of a deeper historical truth — that drama, understood in its classical sense as a unified action culminating in resolution, had become impossible in the modern world. The world could still be performed, but not resolved. Characters could still speak, but their words no longer bore consequence. The theater remained, but drama had entered a state of metaphysical fatigue.

The same can be said — surprisingly and convincingly — of professional wrestling in what I will here call the Nachkayfabe era.[1] If Chekhov was writing plays after the death of drama, wrestling in this late phase performs conflict after belief, gesture after narrative coherence. It retains the form, even the trappings of the traditional dramatic struggle (wrestling matches, staged to look competitive), but everyone — wrestlers, promoters, fans — now knows that that center no longer holds. And like Chekhov’s theater, contemporary wrestling’s most compelling power comes not from hiding this collapse, but from showing it, stylizing it, even ritualizing it.

Consider the case of Cody Rhodes. In early 2022, Rhodes — co-founder and executive vice president of All Elite Wrestling — quietly exited the company he helped create. The backstage reasons were many and largely inaccessible. But what happened on screen — or rather, what didn’t — was revealing. There was no storyline heel turn, no final betrayal, no worked-shoot confrontation. His last appearances were suffused with a strangely lit mood: gratitude, distance, a vague sadness. He delivered promos in which he seemed to speak not to his opponents but to the history of the business itself — evoking memory, legacy, and sacrifice. And then he was gone.

Cody Rhodes – The Exit Interview

Like the estate in The Cherry Orchard, the most significant developments in this story happened offstage. And what remained — the televised, choreographed part — took on an elusive yet undeniably elegiac tone – but an elegy delivered with the intensity of a pro wrestling promo. The audience suspected what was happening; they could read the press, follow the rumors, sense the mood. But they stayed, not to witness surprise, but to participate in a farewell that was beautiful precisely because it lacked narrative necessity and clarity. Rhodes’s departure was not an angle, but it had the feel of one — a new form of wrestling storytelling that leverages absence, restraint, ambiguity and audience complicity as its core materials.

This is what Szondi meant when he said that modern drama becomes a performance of the crisis of form. In Chekhov, plot dissolves, but structure remains. Characters are trapped not by external events, but by time, memory, and a loss of coherence between language and consequence. In The Cherry Orchard, the characters talk, remember, stall, and hesitate — but their actions never avert the orchard’s fall. The result is a kind of theater of drifting souls. Wrestling in the Nachkayfabe era has from time to time, become something similar — not absurdist, but Chekhovian.

And yet — Rhodes did not end his story there. His quiet departure from AEW became the opening movement in a broader arc. His closing interview hinted nothing as to what was to come.  How could it?

But, yet, when he returned to WWE, the tone was different, the themes endured. Indeed, they were magnified. He began to speak openly, ritually, about the unfinished legacy of his father. He invoked the past again and again — not to dwell in it, but to shape his own future through it. He said, often and without irony, that he had come back to “finish the story.” By doing so, he crosses over into a more traditional, heroic dramatic arc, but a heroic dramatic arc, poignantly infused with an extraordinarily powerful memory and presence of a colossal figure, his father, Dusty Rhodes.[2]

And he finished his story at Wrestlemania 40 in a magnificent, Wagnerian flurry of drama which we will discuss in detail in future essays.

Here, the Chekhovian register remains — but something else breaks through. Rhodes begins as a man reflecting on memory and fate, caught in contemplation — but then proceeds, over nearly two years, to act. He wins. He loses. He suffers. And eventually, he triumphs. He crosses from a theater of reflection into a theater of resolution. And in doing so, he begins to restore what Szondi believed had become impossible: the dramatic link between fate, speech, and meaningful action.

This is not a contradiction of the earlier mode — it is its evolution. Szondi teaches us that Chekhov’s characters are not failed agents; they are observers to a world in which agency has grown hollow. In wrestling, Cody Rhodes plays both roles: first, the Chekhovian man, aware of history’s weight, speaking into absence; then, the mythic agent, reclaiming action and resolving the past through will.

If Chekhov shows us how the theater survives the death of drama, Cody Rhodes shows us how the ring — that most theatrical of spaces — can momentarily reverse the drift. His journey doesn’t negate Szondi. It affirms it, then turns the page.

I am convinced that Aristotle, the author of Beowulf, Shakespeare and Chekov would all enthusiastically endorse The Saga of Cody Rhodes.

Mark Cole

It is not unlike Hamlet — another figure suspended between memory and consequence. Hamlet ponders, delays, speculates — but eventually acts, tragically and decisively. Like Hamlet, Rhodes shows that reflection, for a time, forestalls action but is ultimately unable to preclude it. And when action comes, it is rendered more charged, more meaningful, more dramatic — for Hamlet, tragic; for Rhodes, heroic.

I am convinced that Aristotle, the author of Beowulf, Shakespeare and Chekov would all enthusiastically endorse The Saga of Cody Rhodes. And Szondi would be pleasantly surprised at the brief and nuanced fusion of classical and modern which he would not have thought possible.

***

Wrestling after kayfabe, like theater after classical form, is not dead. It is self-aware, layered, aching — and still capable, now and then, of moments that feel final and complete and bring catharsis which the greatest classical dramatists could not even aspire to.  This is a humane achievement that should be understood as a meaningful contribution to our western literary canon.

The orchard is gone. The EVP is gone. But the form persists. And in rare, luminous moments, it remembers itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]Nachkayfabe is a term I have coined to describe the world of professional wrestling after kayfabe—that is, after the disciplined concealment of the scripted nature of matches has largely lapsed. But kayfabe, of course, is more—much more—than a simple code of secrecy. It is an entire ontological framework, a mode of being in which fiction is lived as truth, performance is indistinguishable from identity, and belief is enacted communally, even if not fully possessed individually. Thus, Nachkayfabe does not merely name a chronological aftermath. It signals a deeper transformation: a world in which the suspension of disbelief is no longer maintained by illusion, but by shared awareness and aesthetic complicity. The German prefix nach- is deliberate—it implies not only “after,” but also “following from,” “echoing,” or even “haunted by.” Nachkayfabe is not the death of kayfabe, but its spectral continuation.

[2] The lead-up to WrestleMania 40 is where I became deeply, personally invested in the outcome. The intergenerational storytelling — the invocation of Dusty Rhodes, a figure I kayfabe despised as a young wrestling fan, but who must now, through the prism of history, be recognized as one of the greatest performers of all time — carries real emotional weight. It caused many of us to want, with startling sincerity, for Cody Rhodes to “finish the story” of the Rhodes family legacy, even while we knew that Dusty never held the WWE title for legitimate business Chekhov in the Squared Circle: Szondi, Silence, and Nachkayfabe and dramatic reasons. It is, quite simply, narrative alchemy — where performance becomes legacy, and the scripted becomes true.