"The Cherry Orchard" is Too Arid

Actors, directors, playwrights and producers are now eager for ways to make theater more inclusive (which is a good thing) but the rules for how to do that are still being worked out. Which may explain how a well-intentioned production like the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of The Cherry Orchard can go so awry.

This final play that Anton Chekhov wrote before his death in 1904 at the premature age of 44 centers on an aristocratic Russian family that has become so feckless that it loses its ancestral home, including the beloved orchard, to the son of one of the serf's who once worked their land.

The guiding impulse behind the Roundabout's new reinterpretation appears to have been a desire to draw a parallel between the descendants of the Russian serfs during Chekhov's time and the descendants of American slaves during our own. Four of the eight main male roles in this production are played by black actors. (Click here to read about the impetus for this approach.)

But instead of letting this casting speak for itself, Stephen Karam, the recent and deserved Tony award winner for The Humans who did the adaptation; and Simon Godwin, the celebrated young British director who's staged it, trivialize the analogy. 

These characters—and only they—high-five one another and utter contemporary catchphrases like "Get out!"  In one climactic scene one of them breaks into a dance that includes hip-hop moves.

The result is an insult to the intelligence of the audience (we can figured out what the show is going for without such nonsense, just as we do with the black and brown Founding Fathers in Hamilton). It's also an insult to the artistry and dignity of the actors involved.

Although the white actors don't fare much better. Perhaps too preoccupied with his political message, Godwin has neglected the inner lives of the people in the play and failed to create a cohesive environment in which actors of any color could develop them.

The period has been updated but it's not clear exactly when or why. The tone jerks from slapstick to melodrama, with stops along the way for a carnival interlude, complete with a dance number.

Meanwhile, the costumes hit a variety of decades, sometimes within the same scene. And it took me until the play was nearly over to realize that the abstract mobiles hanging over the stage were supposed to represent the cherry trees.

Understandably confused, the actors seem to have grabbed on to whatever style works best for them. The result is a mishmash. And if you haven't read or seen the play before, it can be difficult to keep track of who is related to whom and why it even matters.

This is a particular crime because the cast includes such usually terrific actors as Tina Benko, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Chuck Cooper, Tavi Gevinson, John Glover, Harold Perrineau and Joel Grey. 

The troupe is lead by Diane Lane, who made her Broadway debut as a child actress in the ensemble of the 1977 revival of the play (click here to read an interview with her) before going on to four decades of success in the movies, including an Oscar nomination.

Lane looks lovely in the outfits that Michael Krass has designed for her but she also looks somewhat lost, making Ranevskaya, the patrician but oblivious owner of the estate, recede into the doings instead of commanding center stage as she usually does.

My friend Ellie, a former actress who is given to taking a generous view of even the poorest production, said I was being too harsh as we discussed the play on our way out of the American Airlines Theatre, where the production is scheduled to play until Nov. 27. 

There were, Ellie said, things here and there that did work. She has a point. And among those things were the performances by Keenan-Bolger and Grey that managed to convey some of the poignancy that makes a Chekhov play Chekhov. 

But the thing that worked best for me was the trio of musicians—playing clarinet, violin and percussion—who sit in a box stage right for most of the evening and play incidental music composed by Nico Muhly. The melodies were lovely and haunting, creating their own poignant sense of what the rest of the show might have been.

This "Cherry Orchard" Needs Some Weeding

 Repertory companies were once mainstays of the theater but, with rare exceptions like Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, they’re become rarities nowadays. It’s just too expensive for most theaters to maintain a resident crew of actors.  And it’s too much of a sacrifice for most actors to give up the chance to do more lucrative work elsewhere.

  

So it’s nice to see the same familiar faces turning up in Classic Stage Company productions with such constancy that they’ve come to constitute an unofficial rep company.  I just wish I had been as happy seeing what director Andrei Belgrader has done with them in the new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard that opened on Sunday night.

  

The production is the final installment of the company’s “Chekhov Initiative,” which has presented the father of modern theater’s four major country-estate plays beginning with The Seagull in 2008. I've seen all four and I’ve been up and down about them (click here to read what I thought of The Seagull and here of Uncle Vanya and here of Three Sisters but I found this one to be the most disappointing.  Although the New York Times’ Ben Brantley and others have raved (click here to see some of those reviews).  

  

The Cherry Orchard, which famously ends with the sale of an aristocratic but improvident family’s country home and the sound of an ax chopping down their beloved orchard, is the most elegiac of Chekhov’s final quartet not only because it’s the last, completed the year before his premature death at 44, but because it echoes his boyhood experience when financial problems caused his own family to lose its home. 

  

But Chekhov being Chekhov, comedy sits right beside the family's tragedy in The Cherry Orchard (he told his wife that he was writing a “a four-act farce”) and as always, the challenge for a director is finding the right balance between the two.

  

Belgrader tips his production way towards the comedic and, despite a new flamboyantly colloquial translation (characters call one another “jerk”) by the actor John Christopher Jones, it also strives to be enigmatic.   

  

For the first time I can remember in all the years I’ve seen shows at CSC, curtains were drawn around the three-quarter playing area. It’s already a tight space with audience members sitting just inches away from the performers and the curtains were placed in a manner that made it difficult for people to get to their seats. The reveal when they were drawn hardly seemed worth the trouble. Santo Loquasto’s set is just a minimalist spin on the same old nursery room that always opens the play.

  

Things don’t pick up once the show gets under way either, although there’s a lot going on.  Costume designer Marco Piemontese has done up some characters in funny top hats and mismatched socks. A couple sport Brechtian-style whiteface makeup.  And several address their speeches directly to the audience.

  

One, Roberta Maxwell as the eccentric governess Charlotta, even breaks the fourth wall Pirandello-style and actually asks an audience member to move to another seat so that she can sit in his place and observe her fellow players. She also reaches into her pocket for a pickle, bites into it and then gives the remainder to the person sitting next to her. The man who got the leftover at the performance my friend Mary Anne and I attended was game and munched on the other end of the pickle. 

  

Mary Anne and I got caught up in a milder form of audience participation when a pillow was cut open and thrown up into the air: the feathers settled over those of us in the rows nearest the stage and stuck.  I was still pulling these unsolicited souvenirs off my clothes on the subway ride home.

  

All that funny business earns chuckles but I’m not sure what other purpose it serves. Shouldn’t the humor come from the characters and the situations they’ve created for themselves—falling in love with the wrong people, spending so much that they can’t hold on to the family patrimony, blindly ignoring the changing times—than from sticking on extraneous stuff?  

  

Now, this is the point in the post where I usually praise the actors (New York is chock full of 

so many awesome actors) regardless of what I’ve thought of the play.  The cast here is lead by Dianne Wiest and John Turturro, both formidable actors and CSC vets (click here to read a Q&A with him). 

  

They’re backed up by such CSC stalwarts as Maxwell and Alvin Epstein and CSC newcomer Daniel Davis (giving one of most subtle but effective performances). Plus there are a bunch of younger talents including Josh Hamilton, Juliet Rylance, Michael Urie (click here to read an interview with him) and the Waterston sisters, Elisabeth and Katherine.

  

Actors of this caliber are seldom bad and they aren’t here either. But none of them wowed me this time out.  Luckily, most are part of the CSC rep and so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be back soon in other productions that will. 

"Uncle Vanya" is Unfocused

“Do your own thing” was a major mantra back when I was in college. Now, the sentiment seems to have been revived in the Classic Stage Company’s new production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Because everyone involved—from the actors to the designers—seems to be following his or her individual bliss. You might have thought director Austin Pendleton, an old-hand at Chekhov as both an actor and a director, would have kept everyone marching in the same direction but like an indulgent parent, he has let them all go their own way. And the result is a production that is all over the place.

This show has gotten a lot of attention for two reasons. One: it comes in the middle of a coincidental Chekhov festival, with the appearances of The Seagull on Broadway last fall, The Cherry Orchard at BAM now and the upcoming Three Sisters from the Classical Theatre of Harlem opening later this month. Two: it has a starry cast lead by the real-life couple Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard (whom one critic has called our local Brangelina) as, respectively, Yelena, a bored trophy wife, and Astrov, the environmentally-conscious doctor who loves her; Tony-winner Dennis O’Hare (who’s recently gotten lots of big screen time playing villains in the movies "Milk" and "Changeling") in the title role; and Mamie Gummer (whose mother is Meryl Streep) as the plain-Jane niece Sofya.

Only Gummer worked for me. She gives her character a gawky poignancy that seems most in keeping with Chekhov’s theme of repressed and thwarted dreams. Yelena is supposed to express her disillusionment through a restless ennui but Gyllenhaal is so languid that my attention kept wandering to the details of the beautiful period costumes Suzy Benzinger has designed for her. And I didn’t like Sarsgaard any more in this than I liked him as Trigorin in The Seagull. I’m a big fan of Sarsgaard’s movie work and I’m all for actors stretching and taking roles outside their comfort zone but try as he might, Sarsgaard seems as at ease in Chekhov as a skinny kid in a superhero’s suit.

But it was O’Hare who drove me up a wall. He has said that Uncle Vanya is his first professional production of Chekhov and he plays the title character as though he were the dacha’s resident smart ass—willing to do anything, including literally chewing the scenery, to get a laugh. This might have worked if Pendleton had decided to give the entire production a similar contemporary sensibility; instead O’Hare seems to have time-traveled in from a Judd Apatow flick.

The design team appears to have had just as difficult a time deciding what to make of the production. The talented set designer Santo Loquasto has created a beautifully atmospheric two-story house. But the actors seldom use the upper level and it’s hard to see what’s happening when they move to the back of the large set. If you’re sitting in the seats on either side of the three-sided stage, it’s a challenge to see anything since supporting beams block so many sight lines. And because the actors vary so radically in the way they deliver their lines, sound designer Daniel Baker apparently has had a tough time figuring out how to amplify them so that you can hear everything that’s being said.

After the show, my friend Ellie and I left CSC’s 13th Street theater in search of a drink but the neighborhood bars that Ellie likes were closed or so crowded that we ended up walking over to the West Village where we found seats at the bar of Mario Batali’s Otto and treated ourselves to drinks and a couple of plates of his delicious and surprisingly affordable antipasti. On the way there, Ellie, a former actress and a longtime Chekhov lover, asked me what I’d liked about the production. “Nothing,” I snapped and then changed the subject. My response was an overstatement. But, alas, not by much.

The Sparseness of "The Cherry Orchard"

There should be no such thing as the definitive production of a play. Particularly not one by Shakespeare. Or by the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Or by Chekhov. And yet, a few days before I went to see The Bridge Project’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, I watched the 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company version of the play that was recorded for the BBC. It starred Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Dorothy Tutin, Ian Holm and Judi Dench. And although a recorded version of a play almost always suffers in comparison to a live one, watching that nearly 50-year old interpretation of the final play Chekhov wrote before his premature death at 44 may have ruined me for any other.

That’s certainly how I felt as I sat at BAM’s Harvey Theater watching the recently opened production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Sam Mendes, with a new translation by Tom Stoppard and a cast lead by Sinéad Cusack, Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall, Richard Easton and Ethan Hawke. The Bridge Project is a collaboration between artists on both sides of the Atlantic and the same production will be presented over the next six months at The Old Vic in London, as well as in Singapore, New Zealand, Spain, Germany and Greece. It’s a noble idea. The people involved are first rate. Most of the critics have raved. And yet, I was unmoved.

I confess I’ve always had a harder time with Chekhov than with Shakespeare or even the Greeks. But I loved the limited-run production of The Seagull that opened on Broadway last fall. The Cherry Orchard's story about people living above their means and poised on the brink of great societal change seemed even more timely. And the talented folks involved in the production made it all the more appealing. The minute I first read about the show, I emailed my pal Bill to see if he were interested and then ordered tickets for us to see it.

We met at the theater in downtown Brooklyn an hour before the 7:30 curtain. Zagat lists some nearby restaurants but all I ever see are fast food joints when I’m walking from the subway to the theater. So Bill and I decided to grab a bite at the lobby bar in the Harvey. According to a recent article in the British newspaper The Guardian, eating at theater bars has become increasingly popular in London (click here to read an evaluation of some of them).

I wish the practice would catch on here since a bar meal tends to be cheaper than one at a restaurant, not an inconsiderable benefit in these pinched-purse times. The Harvey bar’s menu is mainly sandwiches but my pulled pork was tasty and Bill seemed to enjoy his roast beef. There was Junior’s cheesecake for dessert and you can’t beat that. The small plastic cups of wine—though overpriced—didn’t hurt either.

If only the show had been as satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, there were good things about it. Cusack was touching as Madame Ranevskaya, the middle-aged aristocrat who is so unable to adjust to the changing times and her declining fortunes that she plans a party instead of tending to the threatened auction of her estate. Cusack was so poignant that Bill wondered at intermission why she isn’t better known in this country like her equally talented contemporary Helen Mirren.

The always formidable Beale captured the ambivalent mix of reverence and resentment in Lopakhin, a former peasant on the family estate who has become the wealthiest man in the area. But Morven Christie failed to convey the endearing distractedness that the young Judi Dench brought to the role of Anya, Ranevskaya’s daughter, and she didn't replace it with any other distinctive quality. Similarly, while Paul Jesson was fine as Ranevskaya’s prissy brother, no one does prissy like Gielgud.

I know. It’s silly to compare. And maybe the current cast members will grow into their roles and make them their own as they explore their characters over the weeks and months to come. But there are other things that are totally fair game to criticize. Mark Bennett’s incidental music called far too much attention to itself. Mendes’ visual imagery paid far too much homage to The Coast of Utopia. The entire production seemed much like the magic tricks the family governess performs in the show: well executed and yet failing to amaze.

A Holiday Gift List for Theater Lovers

The power shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us but if you’re still looking for gifts to buy the theater lovers in your life (or to put on a wish list for someone to get you) here are 12 treats, one for each day of Christmas, that I’d love to find under the tree if I hadn’t already caved in and bought most of them for myself:

Tickets. D’uh. The one thing every theater lover wants is to see more shows and this year, the Theatre Development Fund is making it easier to satisfy that longing by offering TKTS Gift Certificates that can be use to buy reduced-price tickets on the day of the show at any one of the three TKTS booths in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They come in $25, $50 and $100 denominations.

Theater Ticket Album. It can be hard to keep track of all your tickets if you see lots of shows but this handy holder from the That’s My Ticket website keeps them all in one place. Or it could double as a keepsake filled with the stubs of all the shows seen in one season. $11.90 at that’smyticket.com

Kristin Chenoweth’s “A Lovely Way to Spend Christmas” CD. I have a weakness for Christmas music (and an embarrassingly large collection of Christmas CDs to prove it) but even if you tend to jingle to fewer of those bells, it’s hard to resist a collection of carols and holiday songs by Broadway’s inimitable cheer-bringer Chenoweth. $10.99 at Amazon.com

The Anton Chekhov Collection. This DVD collection brings together some of the world’s best classical actors (like Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Patrick Stewart) in fully-filmed and beautifully-performed BBC productions of some of the theater’s most beloved plays (such as The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya). What theater junkie could ask for anything more? $53.99 at Amazon.com

The August Wilson Century Cycle. The scripts of all 10 of Wilson’s landmark plays chronicling the experience of African-Americans in each decade of the 20th century are collected together in a gorgeous boxed set, complete with insightful introductions to each work by such commentators as Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, and Frank Rich. It’s pricey but priceless. $129.36 at Amazon.com

On Broadway 2009 Wall Calendar. Palm Pilots and BlackBerries can’t replace the charm of an old-fashioned wall calendar, especially if it’s one that features reproductions of the original posters for classic Broadway shows like The Glass Menagerie and Show Boat. Published by the Library of Congress, this calendar also contains fun facts about each month’s featured show. $13.99 at Amazon.com

How Does the Show Go On: An Introduction to the Theater. What’s Christmas without a pop-up book or an advent calendar? This combo, written by Disney honcho Thomas Schumacher and Jeff Kurtti, is a doozie, even if it only cites Disney musicals. It was created to introduce kids to the theater but is filled with enough great stuff (like swatches for costumes from The Lion King and the stage manager’s cue notes for the now-departed Tarzan) to appeal to the inner child in every theater geek. $17.21 at Amazon.com

Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater: 1850-1970. Beginning with a portrait of Junius Brutus Booth and his young son Edwin and ending with a shot of the naked cast from the original production of Hair, this book is filled with rarely seen photos, all drawn from the Billy Rose collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The one of a young and very sexy Arthur Miller suggests that Marilyn Monroe was turned on by more than just his mind and is, all by itself, worth the price of the volume. $31.96 at Amazon.com

The Wicked Music Box. Over 3 million people have seen this mega-musical twist on "The Wizard of Oz" so chances are you know someone who loves it. Or love it yourself. If so, then this official keepsake, which plays the show’s “Defying Gravity” anthem and comes with a seasonally-appropriate snow globe, is for you. $75 at playbillstore.com

Stephen Sondheim The Story So Far. Anyone who loves Sondheim already has the songs on this box set in their collection but there are just enough extra goodies to add some holiday cheer, including a 76-page booklet filled with nifty photos drawn from Sondheim’s own personal photo albums and a few rehearsal songs sung by the master accompanying himself on piano. $35.99 at Amazon.com

Essential Shakespeare Handbook. The folks at DK Publishing, who made their name with lavishly-illustrated travel guides, have brought their distinctive touch to this visually-rich guide to the Bard’s plays. There’s a scene-by-scene summary of each one, a who’s who of the characters, famous quotes, historical and literary analysis and marvelous images ranging from illustrations for 19th century productions to photos for 21st century ones. $24.50 at Amazon.com

The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II. Truth be told, I don’t have this one. But a previous book in the series, "The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter," has been on my bookshelf for years and is one of my great joys. The new book, which just came out, has collected the lyrics of more than 850 songs of arguably the most influential Broadway lyricist ever (and the mentor to Stephen Sondheim). It’s an enchanting gift for anyone who’s obsessive about musicals. $40.95 at Amazon.com

"Dividing The Estate" is Wholly Entertaining

If Leo Tolstoy were alive today and going to theater in New York this season, he might rethink his famous edict that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I don't know if it's a reflection of the shaky stock market or the fact that the parents of baby boomers are dying but in play after play over the past few weeks, families have been unhappy about one thing: their patrimony. There are the sisters squabbling over the rare stamps their mother left behind in Mauritius. And there are the Russian aristocrats in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and the coffee-growing clan in The Coffee Trees, Arthur Giron's Guatemala-based homage to Chekhov, all lamenting the fates of their once-grand legacies in the Resonance Ensemble productions currently playing in repertory at the Beckett Theatre. But, without a doubt, the best of these battling broods are the Gordons in Horton Foote's thoroughly entertaining Dividing the Estate.

Part of what makes the misery of the Gordons such a delight is the show's impeccable cast. Elizabeth Ashley, scarcely older than the actors who play her children, makes a marvelous matriarch and underplays her trademark smoldering sensuality just enough to make you realize what a vital force this woman was, and is. Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter and renowned as one of his best interpreters, is a hoot as the youngest and greediest of the three adult children, all dependent on handouts from their cash-poor but land-rich mother. Gerald McRaney, best known for his work in several TV series, is totally comfortable on stage and totally believable as the middle-aged ne'er do well who as the only son will always be the apple of his doting mama's eye. And Arthur French as the family's ancient servant was so laugh-out-loud funny that my husband K started chuckling each time he just walked on stage.

But as wonderful as the performances are, it is the rich verisimilitude of the characters and the well crafted play in which they exist that make the evening at Primary Stages' 59E59 Theater such an enjoyable one. Horton Foote, now 91, had his first full-length play produced in 1941, was one of the founding fathers of TV drama in the Golden Age of Television in the '50s, and had his first hit screenplay, the Oscar-winning adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," in 1962. Over the years he has won a Pulitzer Prize, two Academy Awards, a couple of Emmys and the National Medal of Arts. So it would be ridiculous to call him unsung as a writer. And yet, I confess that until the last few years, his name only rang a vague bell with me. But it wasn't just me. Foote has written some 60 plays over his career and only five of them have been produced on Broadway; the longest run was the 10 weeks for the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man From Atlanta back in 1997. The Signature Theatre Company offered some recompense when it dedicated its 2005-2006 season to his work but, of course, that happened when he was 90.

I don't know why more attention has not been properly paid to Foote here in the capital of the theater world. Maybe we city folks just don't appreciate that so much of his work has revolved around the fictional Texas town of Harrison (the stand-in for the small town where he grew up). Or maybe it's that we like our playwrights to be as dramatic offstage as on—like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and William Inge— while Foote stayed married to the same woman for nearly 50 years and kept his politics largely to himself. Whatever the reason, this production, which is scheduled to play just until Oct. 27, is reason alone to show me the error of my ways.

Foote was in the audience the night my husband K and I saw Dividing the Estate. Sitting ramrod straight in a seat at the back of the theater, nodding graciously to audience members who, recognizing him, went over to shake his hand and say a few words of thanks. Maybe Tolstoy had it right after all. One way to distinguish an unhappy family is to do what Foote does: treat it with love and respect.