Sometimes an imperfect show can be more memorable than a more competent but less interesting one. I didn’t find Benedict Andrews’ recent production of The Cherry Orchard to be an unqualified success, but a week later I’m still carrying around some of its most powerful moments.
No traditional stage here, just a monumental brick-colored oriental carpet stretching across the entire performance space, even climbing the back wall. The audience sat around this shared space and, sitting in the front row, I found my feet resting on the rug’s edge.
As I waited for the play to begin, I noticed a young man in bare feet seated across from me. He looked like a fairly typical Brooklyn theatergoer, but the bare feet struck me as a step too far. Then I looked more closely: it was Daniel Monks, who played Kostya in Jamie Lloyd’s Seagull. Of course: he must be playing Trofimov. Monks seems to be specializing in Chekhov’s disaffected young men.
I didn’t recognize the rest of the cast at first, dressed much like the Brooklyn audience—not even Anya and Yepikhodov seated next to me. In fact, when the buffoonish Yepikhodov made his entrance by violently knocking over his chair, I jumped, afraid an audience member had fallen.
The contemporary staging and costuming gesture toward the original while never fully embracing pre-revolutionary Russia or any other recognizable time and place. I complained a year ago about the unrootedness of Steve Carell’s Uncle Vanya. Why does it work so much better here?
One reason is certainly the terrific cast, all of whom plumb the depths of their lost characters. It seems I was wrong to insist that for Chekhov to work, the production must be firmly rooted in a specific place. Chekhov works when the director and actors fully embrace the emotional truth of these people. It’s the emotions that become specific, not the setting.
There are losses in this somewhat loose production. It’s disorienting to hear Russian place names alongside prices in dollars. The ancient servant Firs makes us laugh as he mutters about “fuckwits,” but what are we to make of his reference to the “disaster” that was the emancipation of the serfs? The final scene where he is left behind in the abandoned house loses some of its potency when his character feels so untied to time and place.
And then there are the overtly contemporary interpolations. Trofimov’s rant against capitalism turns to deportations and “so-called government efficiency.” It’s almost too easy, playing to the Brooklyn audience like this.
But oh!—the memorable moments!
I’d been wondering how this bare set would transform into the emptied-out house of Act IV. As the act begins, the actors rise from their seats and begin tearing up the carpet—all of it!—leaving its fragments in piles on the bare floor. They proceed with the melancholy conclusion of the drama, making their way around these heaps of fabric.
Having the very rug pulled out from under my feet, I found myself more involved with the fate of this house than I’ve been in any previous production. It felt like a gut punch.
There was another gut punch—a quieter one—that ended Act II.
The family and their hangers-on have gathered outdoors, passing time in the open air. As the scene winds down, a shabby, slightly drunken passerby stumbles into their midst. He asks for directions to the station and frightens Varya by asking her for money. But not before he loosely quotes the opening of a popular Russian poem, “My friend, my brother, tired, suffering brother…”
Not knowing the poem, I had never paid much attention to that line. But Andrews clearly has. In this production, he reimagines the role: the vagrant becomes a very young urchin, a small boy who plants himself before Mme. Ranevskaya and sings John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery:
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go…
Adeel Akhtar, Lopakhin in this production, told an interviewer that Chekhov once commented that the pauses in his plays are “slipstreams into eternity.” I can’t verify the quote, but it perfectly describes certain moments in Chekhov—moments that seem to suspend time, containing within themselves the weight of both past and future.
This song gives us one of those slipstreams. As I watched Ranevskaya struck dumb by this boy’s angelic voice, I felt that time had stopped. I had entered that liminal space theater sometimes brings you to, where all of life, all that matters, is somehow contained in a single moment.
Not all of this production holds together. But perhaps fracture is part of the point. The best Chekhov productions make us feel the world fracturing. The rug pulled out from under me, the poor urchin stopping the heroine in her tracks by confronting her with universal loss—these are the moments, the openings into eternity, that will stay with me.
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