St. Ann's Warehouse

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The Cherry Orchard

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The Cherry Orchard

Upon the 1904 opening of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov notoriously fumed, “Stanislavski has ruined my play!” The playwright envisioned his work as a comedy with elements of farce, a stark contrast to the tragic conception of the renowned Moscow Art Theatre director. One wonders what these two artistic giants would think of the current interpretation now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Adapted and directed by Benedict Andrews, this Donmar Warehouse production from London is spare, farcical, interactive, and grooves to an indie-music beat. While purists may scoff at this cheeky approach to Chekhov, this is a Cherry Orchard for our times.  

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Blind Runner

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Blind Runner

Blind Runner, written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani, features only two actors. Set in Iran, the play is about a husband (Mohammed Reza Hosseinzadeh) and wife (Ainaz Azarhoush) who now only meet during prison visiting hours. Neither has an actual name. Wife is serving a sentence for something she posted on social media. Although it’s not specific, there is a suggestion she showed support for women who protested the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by the Guidance Patrol, a type of morality police. The post alters the lives of the couple.

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Dark Noon

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Dark Noon

Dark Noon, the South African-devised history of the American West now visiting Brooklyn from the Edinburgh Festival, foregrounds violence by white Europeans against blacks, Asians, and native Americans to debunk the mythology of America established by heroes in film westerns. The title deliberately references High Noon (1952), but the piece belongs to the “in yer face” school of theater, established in Britain in the 1990s. Although “slapstick humor” is billed as one element of the production, the send-up is a heavy-handed attack on the depredations of Manifest Destiny.

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Arlington

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Arlington

Few contemporary playwrights embrace the “one for me, one for them” trajectory as starkly as Enda Walsh. The prolific Irish writer/director alternates between loony, incisive chamber psychodramas (Misterman, Ballyturk) and loony, broad crowd-pleasers (Once, Roald Dahl’s The Twits, Lazarus) with a panache that marks him as a distinctly 21st-century artist, hard to pin down and adept at re-invention. His latest St. Ann’s Warehouse transfer, Arlington, sits firmly in the former camp, stretching his trademark idiosyncratic investigation of the effects of isolation on wild, creative minds toward exciting new abstractions.

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