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I apologize, if this has been already pointed out, but as far as I know, it wasn't.

In Ada, Marina Durmanov, Ada's and Van's mother, is a talentless actress, whose appearences on the stage, and later on the screen, invariably end in a flop. The only role that she manages to play brilliantly is that of a hysterical nun Varvara in a film version of Chekhov's Four Sisters, which happens at the close of her career as an actress (Part Two, Chapter 9). Her success in that role apparently can be attributed to the fact that this time she finds herself in her element, so to say, because the source of her name (her maiden name, under which she appears on the stage) happens to be a phrase from another play by Chekhov, Chaika ("The Seagull"), 1896.

In the beginning of Act One of this play, Treplev says to Sorin about his mother (Sorin's sister), the actress Arkadina: "Nuzhno khvalit' tol'ko eio odnu, nuzhno pisat' o nei, krichat', vostorgat'sia eio neobyknovennoiu igroi v "La dame aux camelias" ili v "Chad zhizni," no tak kak zdes', v derevne, net etogo durmana, to vot ona skuchaet i zlitsia, i vse my - eio vragi, vse my vinovaty." 

("You have to praise only her alone, you have to write about her, to cry, to admire her wonderful performance in La dame aux camelias or in The Fumes of Life*, but because here, in the country, there is no that intoxicant, she is bored and shows temper, and we all are her enemies, we all are guilty." I apologize for my slap-dash translation.) A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie Sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh, Moscow, 1963; vol. 9, pp. 429-430.

There certainly exist some parallels between the characters in Chaika and in Ada:

Arkadina - Marina (both are professional actresses);

Nina Zarechnaia (the young daughter of a neighbor country squire) - Ada (who, like Nina, becomes an unsuccessful actress); and

Treplev - Van (who, like Treplev, becomes an unsuccessful writer).

 

The real title of Chekhov's play is, of course, Three Sisters, 1900, and there is no fourth sister Varvara in it (although there is a brother, Andrei, who is not mentioned in Van's account of the Antiterran version of the play). Anyway, in Four Sisters, Marina is said to have beautifully rendered the pevuchiy ton bogomolki ("a singsongy devotional tone") of Varvara. I have found a female character in Chekhov, who speaks "stepenno, naraspev" (in a sedate sing-song voice) and has a swift and fussy gait like that of a bogomolka. It is Olga, the wife of the retired man-servant Chikildeev, who, having fallen seriously ill, returnes from Moscow to his home village, in Chekhov's short story Muzhiki (1897).

 

* given its title, which sounds like a parody, one might think that the play was invented by Chekhov, but Chad Zhizni (or Olga Rantseva) happens to be a real play by Boleslav Markevich, written ca 1880.

 

best regards,

Alexey