The Cherry Orchard
Written by Anton Chekhov
Translated by Jean-Claude van Itallie
Directed by Michael Menendian
At Raven Theatre in Chicago
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on June 12, 2011
As Professor Irwin Weil explained in his brief lecture after this performance, Stanislavsky fought with Chekhov over the character of The Cherry Orchard, arguing that it should be treated as a tragedy. The playwright himself, however, defended it as a comedy. Even today, 107 years after the play's premiere, its duality is still a cause of struggle for those trying to produce it. But to me, Michael Menendian, who directed this production of Orchard for Raven Theatre, didn't make a choice between these two and then build around it. On the contrary, under his direction the play seemed to wander without either a trajectory or a unifying sensibility, despite the presence of certain strengths in the production. In my opinion, Raven's power lies in classic American theatre, which they understand better. Their attempts at European works, an example being Hedda Gabler in 2009, involve trying too hard to fit themselves into roles for which they're mismatched. The cost of their effort is authenticity; they create a void that awkwardness then moves in to fill. And once that occurs, the believability is gone.
Although, as I said, this production lacked a "unifying sensibility", it did possess a unifying deficiency: excessive acting. And I don't refer to exaggeration. What I mean is that one could tell that each actor or actress was trying hard to be his or her character, rather than just being that character. And I can't resist the urge to note the irony that they might have benefited from Stanislavsky's method. At any rate, let's consider Mme Lyubov Ranevskaya, played by Joann Montemurro. Lyubov is the naively generous and loving matriarch who embodies one entire theme of this play: flight from reality. Yes, it's a common theme in theatre, but in this play there's a confounding factor. It's possible for whoever plays Lyubov to find within her personality not so much an active effort to ignore imminent trouble but the passive absence of a sense of urgency toward that trouble. This is the impression Montemurro gave, at least to me, despite her weak and inelegant acting in this role. She's much better at playing brash American women, examples being Maxine in Night of the Iguana and Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. As Lyubov, Montemurro's delivery was choppy and her accent was forced; she sounded like an American trying to be a Russian -- and even worse, a Russian aristocrat. The most regrettable outcome of this hyperthespianism was a superficial, noncommittal characterization that obfuscated the theme. She established no foundation on which we otherwise might have constructed a rational interpretation of Lyubov's psychology. For example, why does Lyubov have no sense of urgency vis-a-vis loss of the family estate? Was she just afraid of facing reality? Or was she oblivious? Did she fail to understand what was about to happen? Was she genuinely stupid? Or was she actually living in a fantasy world within her own mind? Do the director and the cast see this play as a funny tragedy or as a tragic comedy?
Similarly, Jason Huysman tried to fashion the old man Pishchik out of a stoop, a shuffling gait, and presbyphonia, the last of which, in my opinion, is the hardest characteristic of an elderly person for a young actor to reproduce. It rarely, if ever, sounds real, because even though imitation of an old voice by a young voice is possible, duplication isn't. And the product of Huysman's unsuccessful efforts to seem old were distracting; it would have better either to cast someone whose natural physicality aligned with that of Pishchik or to permit Huysman to play the role without forcing a physicality that he couldn't achieve. Just as Montemurro tried too hard to be Russian, Huysman tried too hard to be old. And in the role of Firs, David Adams had the same problem. His character's senescence simply wasn't believable. Firs' function in the story is to represent the profound change in the social order since Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Firs was a holdover from the days of slavery, a man who had known no other way of life and who couldn't adapt to freedom. He represents the uglier side of what Russia had been and exemplifies the aphorism that old ways die hard. Along that line, what Adams did effectively in this role came forth at the very end, when Firs casually resigns himself to having been carelessly, though inadvertently, left behind by the others and locked in the house. Too feeble to escape, he consigns himself there, probably to die by starvation, if not dehydration. Adams made this acquiescence seem natural, even reflexive, as though the old man expected and accepted it, despite feeling a little disobliged along the way.
The performance had other strengths, as well. One of those was found in actress Liz Fletcher, who played the comparatively small role of Charlotta Ivanovna, the eccentric governess who could entertain people with prestidigitation. Her portrayal reminded me of a female Rasputin, not in mesmerizing her company, of course, but rather in projecting a creepy deviousness. Perhaps more importantly, Fletcher also captured Charlotta's loneliness, which served as the antipode to Lyubov's devotion to forging and keeping human connections. Another credit to this production was Michael Peters, who played Trofimov as the blindly -- and dangerously -- arrogant young ideologue that he is in the story. But as student revolutionaries go, this Trofimov was up to the challenge of changing the world. Peters was apparently familiar with the frequent confusion of passion for rectitude among zealots, as though those two forces were mutually interchangeable, even if the pith of a zealot's argument happens to be factual. He gave us an accurate stereotype in which passion supersedes, or substitutes for, reason.
The momentum of this play comes from Lopakhin, played in this production by Frederick Harris. As a former serf, now millionaire, Lopakhin retains the coarseness and insensitivity of his peasant roots, while having developed the ability to recognize beauty when he sees it. Harris succeeded at mixing -- without blending -- these inconsonant traits into one of the crass and unsophisticated nouveaux riches. He supplied the energy that drove the story forward, but his attempt to be energetic almost erased his success at being energetic. What further impeded his characterization of a Russian man in 1911 was the subtle but noticeable phonology of African-American Vernacular English present in his speech, albeit less unsuitable than Mickey Rooney's embarrassing Japanese accent in Breakfast at Tiffany's. In fact, the Russian personal and place names in this play didn't roll trippingly off the tongue of anyone in this cast, another minor but irritating cause for Raven to reconsider its approach to European plays. If Raven continues producing them, it should improve the accents (along with the gestures, stances, and attitudes) appropriate to the cultures in question. Otherwise, they should adhere to Standard American English, with or without rhoticity, or to the smooth but unjustly maligned American Theater Standard.
The characters in this play are both good and bad, wise and foolish, attractive and distasteful. And fusing these disparate qualities into a credible composite requires good acting. Because this play turns on the success of that fusion, Chekhov's message from 19th-century Russia can lose its definition and, therefore, its impact on a 21st-century American audience. Unfortunately, Raven's production was incoherent. That missing unifying sensibility, which would have tied it all together, might have materialized had the director decided whether Orchard is a funny tragedy or a tragic comedy, if the cast had given less the impression of trying to act, and if they'd responded properly to the fact that most of them don't speak Russian, least of all natively.