The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
directed by Sabin Epstein
Georgia Shakespeare, 2005 Summer Season
We saw the Georgia Shakespeare production of Chekhov's last play on an "actor chat" evening, a circumstance that's colored these notes. On the first Saturday of each show (now running in rep with Cherry Orchard are The Comedy of Errors and A Streetcar Named Desire), the director and performers invite the audience to stay and talk over the play. Sometimes this makes a delightful cap to the experience.
I enjoyed Carolyn Cook's performance as Lyubov', the heiress to the orchard. In her prime these recent years, Cook has played Beatrice, Blanche and Saint Joan among many other parts. She has good bones and, usually, good timing, as displayed this night. Her performance hung together and made an unshaking centerpole for Chekhov's big tent of relationships. Allen O'Reilly has just the right presence to bring off fatuous brother Leonid, with his "O Nature!" speech and his clawhammer coat and his probationary job at the bank. Park Krausen and Diany Rodriguez were more steady than stellar as Lyubov's daughters Varya and Anya--but "steady" is no small compliment in a piece whose tone is as hard to pin down as this.
Sabin Epstein made his own adaptation of the script, working from what he naïvely described as a word-for-word translation of the original Russian. (He meant a crib or pony or construe and might as well have said so. "Word-for-word" between Russian and English is meaningless.) He allowed one aspect of Chekhov's work to come through clearly: This is a comedy. Epstein's direction sought to realize the comic values, and by and large he succeeded. It must be an unparalleled joy working with a company that doesn't rely on gags; the Georgia Shakespeare outfit, in its 20th anniversary season, has the sensitivity to do comedy by playing the script and not the audience.
The best thing about The Cherry Orchard in my reception is that I'm still thinking about it a week after. The worst is a memory I can't shake--of the frightful hash our audience made of the play after the curtain came down.
Those who spoke from the house seemed to split right down the middle, half thinking Chekhov had prophesied the communist revolution and half taking his play as a big allegory of the passing of an era. The second group fixated on the line, "All Russia is the cherry orchard" (I'm not quoting but paraphrasing); the first, on Petya Trofimov's adolescent rants about social justice (he stood ready to toast it in champagne).
OK, Chekhov did see a time of rapid and profound change in Russia. Emancipation of the serfs, emergence of new political and economic forms, growth of a genuine middle class--these all happened in his short lifetime. It's arguable (and Vladimir Nabokov has argued) that the society was going through a transformation that would have led, in a short matter of decades, to a European liberal democracy if it had not been aborted. So you can think of the time of writing, 1902 more or less, as a time when an "old" Russia was giving way to a "new" one. While that isn't the whole picture at all, it isn't wrong in outline either. And this spirit of leavetaking is present in the play, too.
But you make trouble for yourself if you set Chekhov up as a prophet or if you misinterpret the evolutionary process. The Cherry Orchard presents the results of keen and wry observation, not a projection into some future. Certainly not into a future that we recognize because it's our past (World War, revolution, repression, perestroika, state-constrained capitalism). If Chekhov had tried to write his way into 1905 or 1930 or 1950, we can feel pretty confident he wouldn't have put Liebknecht or Stalin or Hitler in the play. No, this is not a work of prophecy. Nor does the sea-change in Russia have anything to do with speeches by a radical student. (Trofimov, if he lived till 1917, surely went to the wall as an anti-Bolshevik.) What was passing away in Russia was not the opposite of socialism, as one collection of 21st-century Americans thought, but a society of classes established by divine will, an economy designed to preserve blinding wealth in a few hands, and a political structure that Terry Pratchett would later describe (in a different context) as "One Man, One Vote"--in which the emperor was the Man and had the Vote.
The play doesn't hold up as allegory any more than it does as prophecy. Metaphors, yes, we have metaphors. The ancient major-domo and former serf Firs going dormant in the final scene, the woodsmen at work clearcutting the orchard for subdivision, and so forth. All these have meaning both in the play-world and in the real one. But we are not talking about Pilgrim's Progress here; Chekhov's play still makes viewers think, and it still compels directors to put it up. And it simply would not have this power if it were a simple-minded allegory in which Petya represented the Future, uncle Leonid the Old Upper Classes and neighbor Lopakhin the Death of Gentility.
It is wicked to say that an audience didn't deserve the play it got, and I think perhaps only a vocal minority of our audience misunderstood The Cherry Orchard in the way I've described. None of the wrongheaded statements in these notes comes from the play, it's only fair to point out, all from a sort of counterintelligentsia out in the seats.
This production is really worth seeing. Just don't listen to what anybody tells you about it.
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The Cherry Orchard