Lyubov Ranevskaya (Jessica Hecht, center) and members of her household prepare to leave the ancestral estate and its cherry orchard (left to right: Darya Denisova as governess Charlotta, Juliet Brett as daughter Anya, and Mark Nelson as brother Leonid). Photograph by Maria Baranova.
After squandering her inheritance as an expatriate in Paris, Lyubov Ranevskaya, protagonist of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, comes home to Russia to discover that the old order, so favorable to the haute bourgeoisie, has been scrambled by burgeoning social mobility. Unable to meet the carrying charges on the family estate, Ranevskaya (Jessica Hecht) and her brother Gaev (Mark Nelson) dither rather than addressing the double whammy of altered personal circumstances and a transformed national culture.
Chekhov conceived this 1904 comedy-drama (his last play and arguably his greatest) amid class conflict and civic change. Soon to come (though after Chekhov’s untimely death): an abortive insurrection, the slaughter of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, and the Bolshevik revolution. It’s no surprise that Chekhov’s characters appeal to artists pondering the relentless flux of the present.
Nael Nacer plays Lopakhin, the grandson of a serf, who buys the family estate and its orchard at public auction. This photograph and banner photo by Pavel Antonov.
Ukrainian director Igor Golyak has adapted Carol Rocamora’s fine translation, condensing exposition, eliminating four significant characters, and paring dialogue to the bone. Though radically streamlined and dubbed The Orchard, this production offers both less and more than Chekhov’s original. Anna Fedorova’s scenic design is a spooky but beautiful dreamscape, with cherry blossoms (curiously blue in hue) floating in the air and ankle-deep on the ground. Images (some lovely, others horrific) and bits of Chekhov’s text appear on a scrim that separates the audience from the performers and on the rear wall of the stage. Visual references abound to homelessness, the war in Ukraine, and the ebb and flow of refugees. Moreover, all performances of the show are accessible online worldwide, with interactivity and added-value material, including Mikhail Baryshnikov as Chekhov and Hecht as his wife, actress Olga Knipper.
Under Golyak’s direction, actors run harum-scarum around the stage in a fever of heightened angst that’s at odds with Chekhov’s low-key realism. A beggar, merely creepy in the original, is now a fierce storm trooper (Ilia Volok), as unsettling to the audience as to the characters he menaces on stage. Hecht and Nelson, always formidable, make the most of what remains of the dialogue, lending charm to characters who are far too neurotic to be appealing in real life. Playing Firs, the family’s aged retainer, Baryshnikov (more than three decades after his award-winning turn in Metamorphosis on Broadway) is still masterful at expressive movement. As Lopakhin, a nouveau riche businessman, Nael Nacer makes palpable the tension between his genuine affection for Ranevskaya and his ache to acquire the estate where his grandfather was a serf. John McGinty, as Trofimov the eternal student, delivers the most passionate performance of all, though delivering his lines in American Sign Language, which is translated only intermittently.
“With its visual and aural innovations, plus the quirky alternate online experience, ‘The Orchard’ is intriguing, if not always engrossing.”
At two junctures Chekhov’s script references “the sound of a breaking string,” heard “from far, far away … as if coming from the sky” and “dying away in the distance, a mournful sound.” That’s among the oddest stage directions in modern drama; and, in production, it’s frequently de-emphasized and seldom convincingly executed. Momentarily, that mysterious, far-off sound overrides the action on stage, portending monumental change and possibly doom. Hearing this unnerving sound, Firs recalls something similar on the day that Russia’s serfs (he among them) were emancipated by the government of Tsar Alexander II—an event he terms a “catastrophe.” “It was the same thing,” recalls the ever-wary Firs. “The owl screeched, and the samovar hissed, it never stopped.”
Hecht with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Firs, the serf who stayed with his masters after emancipation. Baryshnikov also plays Anton Chekhov in the production’s online component. Photograph by Maria Baranova.
Similarly, Ranevskaya and Gaev abhor the prospect of the shifting status quo. They can’t fathom the unselfish advice of Lopakhin: cut down the cherry trees, subdivide part of the property, build rental cottages for vacationers, and collect the revenue. Surprisingly generous under the circumstances, Lopakhin even offers Ranevskaya a loan to make the renovation feasible. She scoffs, unable to imagine life without the orchard or (Heaven forfend!) being beholden to an arriviste like Lopakhin.
With its visual and aural innovations, plus the quirky alternate online experience, The Orchard is intriguing, if not always engrossing. Chekhov’s genius for characterization has been mislaid by Golyak’s textual excisions; and the emotional power of the great playwright’s work is obscured amid dystopian accretions such as the robotic contraption—positioned near center stage and resembling a giant piece of dental-office equipment—engaging in surveillance by closed-circuit videography. Yet by projecting the eerie stage direction about the “mournful sound” of a breaking string on the scrim at the end of the play, Golyak signals that the dystopian vision of The Orchard is beholden to, if not derived from, Chekhov’s spirit. One hundred and eighteen years after premiere of The Cherry Orchard, he suggests, the most urgent issue for humankind is the imminence of devastating change.
The Arlekin Players Theater/Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab production of The Orchard runs at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (450 West 37th St.) through July 13. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday and at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit theorchardoffbroadway.com.
