Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Shaw Festival

Benedict Campbell as Lopakhin and Laurie Paton as Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya

You want variety if you’re thinking of seeing two Shaw Festival shows in one day.  For instance, you don’t necessarily want to see two yawner dramas like The Seagull and Heartbreak House within the course of nine hours.  We tried pairing a frivolous forties musical (see this post) with Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedy The Cherry Orchard and ended up with a nicely balanced day.  

On such doubleheader days we marvel at the repertory actors who are doing double duty.  The afternoon’s singing and dancing star of One Touch of Venus, Robin Evan Willis, for example, reappeared in the evening’s The Cherry Orchard as Anya — and we are in a position to report that Ms. Willis still had time between shows to have drinks at the Epicurean with what looked like out-of-town friends.  It was probably well that, in her first scene in The Cherry Orchard, Anya is supposed to be exhausted from a long journey.  Mark Uhre, Neil Barclay, Gabrielle Jones, and Julie Martell all delivered high-energy performances in the musical before walking across the street to use their heavy acting chops in the Chekhov play in the intimate confines of the Court House Theatre, where the actors are only inches apart from the patrons. 

Neil Barclay as Pishchik and Laurie Paton as Ranyevskaya

The Cherry Orchard is dear to our heart, and judging from the snippets of animated conversations we overheard at intermission, many of our many fellow patrons also had decided feelings about the play. It can’t be easy for a director like Jason Byrne to bring something fresh into a play so well-loved by so many, but we think he succeeded.  The Shaw Festival show is intelligently planned and exceptionally well-acted, and we found it genuinely moving.

The Cherry Orchard gives us several painful scenes in the life of a family of Russian aristocrats around the turn of the last century. The central figure is Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya (Laurie Paton), a widow whose large estate has a formerly magnificent cherry orchard that she considers “the one remarkable thing in the whole province.” As her brother Gayev (Jim Mezon) chimes in, it’s mentioned in “the Encyclopedia.”

But as much as she professes to love her home, Ranyevskaya has spent the last six years off in Paris wasting her fortune on a worthless lover while working out her grief from the accidental drowning of her small son.  She and and her daughter Anya (Robin Evan Willis) arrive back home just weeks before the estate is to be sold at foreclosure.  Even though the situation presents a business opportunity for himself, Ranyevskaya’s wealthy neighbor Lopakhin (Benedict Campbell) magnanimously urges her to save herself from financial ruin by taking an axe to the cherry orchard and converting the land into riverside summer cottages for upwardly mobile city-dwellers. 

As the family dithers, Yepikhodov plays his guitar for Dunyasha in the estate gardens. This illustration by Lajos Szalay is in one of our editions of The Cherry Orchard.

Ranyevskaya and Gayev can no more deal with this crisis than the czars could deal with the conditions that would lead to the communist revolution only a few years later. Still less can they hear advice from Lopakhin, whose father was, after all, only a serf. Together with their equally impecunious neighbor and constant houseguest Pishchik (Neil Barclay), they all dither until the day of the auction, expecting, like Micawber, that something will “turn up.” 

What riveted us in this Cherry Orchard was the relationship between Ranavskaya and Lopakhin.  Even though Ranyevskaya still thinks of her wealthy friend as a peasant boy, she is, paradoxically, anxious for her stepdaughter Varya (Severn Thompson) to be married to this very man. 

Early in the play, Lopakhin remembers when, as a child, his drunken father bloodied his nose and Ranyevskaya washed him up, saying, “Don’t cry, little peasant; it’ll mend by your wedding day.” A footnote in one of my editions indicates that this is just a proverbial Russian phrase, but Chekhov’s use of it was no accident. Decades after the bloody-nose episode, Ranyevskaya is hoping to see Lopakhin married in earnest. Is she thinking only of how such an alliance could save them all from poverty?  Or does she also mean to patronize the grown-up peasant boy?  Would she and Gayev still be anxious to bestow Varya on Lopakhin if Varya’s father had been a nobleman, not merely a lawyer? 

And what of Lopakhin and his heart-breaking inability to propose to Varya? Before seeing this show, we chalked it up to the inability of any Russian in this play to act sensibly or decisively. But now it seems clear to us that Lopakhin cannot propose to Varya because he is, instead, in love with the unattainable Ranyevskaya. He agrees to speak to Varya only because, like a peasant, he can deny Ranyevskaya nothing to her face.  But there will be no wedding day; his peasant’s nose, figuratively speaking, will be bloodied and unmended for the rest of his life. 

Robin Evan Willis, Laurie Paton, Severn Thompson, Jim Mezon

The cast of The Cherry Orchard is the Shaw Festival’s “A” team. Jim Mezon overpowered a weaker cast last year in A Moon for the Misbegotten, but here, working with actors of the same rank, he is an ideal Gayev, a drone of a brother given to meaningless eloquence. As the much-abused Varya, Severn Thompson gives a nuanced, genuinely moving performance, the best we can remember seeing from her. Laurie Paton is finest of all as the tragic Ranyevskaya; every word, gesture, and glance from her tells. 

The family leaves the cherry orchard estate. Lajos Szalay's illustration: "Good-bye to the old life!"

We don’t know what to make of the fact that each of three shows we’ve seen so far this year at the Shaw Festival involves elements of magic. In Harvey, of course, the pooka himself is magical and the story is spiced with supernatural events. In One Touch of Venus, a statute transforms into a goddess who, in one scene, disappears like magic from a barber’s chair. And in The Cherry Orchard, Anya’s governess, Charlotta (Gabrielle Jones), who was raised among gypsies, performs magic tricks for the amusement of the family.

Emsworth’s take on the Shaw Festival’s production of the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus is at this post. His review of the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post.

Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on all the shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season are at this post.

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season

The poster for the original stage production of One Touch of Venus, the only musical on the 2010 playbill

We enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out what’s really going on at the Shaw Festival from the official clues. To our eyes, the 2010 schedule of plays shows that the Shaw is shifting direction, possibly because of the glum report that Shaw Festival theaters were only 63.5 percent full in 2009, down from 70 percent in 2008.

But we still like the 2010 lineup. We’ll begin with the shows we’re most looking forward to and end with a couple we may skip.

1. The Women (Clare Boothe Luce). Emsworth takes credit for this one. A year ago, reviewing the dreadful Hollywood version of The Women, we broadly hinted that this play was way overdue at the Shaw Festival (last seen in 1985, when Nora McClellan played the much-abused Mary Haines).  To the Shaw Festival: Thanks for taking requests! 

Clare Boothe Luce, a successful playwright during the 1930s, a Republican congresswoman in the 1940s

The Women is on our short list of the finest plays of the twentieth century, a tale of ruthless, catty, insecure society women behaving in beastly ways to one another, a play liable to make you quirm in discomfort and laugh at the same time.  (The Office is not an altogether original concept.) When it’s over you’ll realize you never actually saw any men on stage. By our count, this is the fourth play with an all-female cast that Jackie Maxwell has programmed since she’s been in charge — not a bad idea, since just at this point in its history, the female contingent of the Shaw company is remarkably strong. Deborah Hay, Mary Haney, Kelli Fox, and Sharry Flett will be among The Women. Ms. Hay will play Sylvia Fowler, the treacherous friend of Mary Haines, to be played by Jenny Young.

2. Harvey (Mary Chase).  If classic American comedies are what people will pay money to see (as was the case with Born Yesterday in the season just past; see Emsworth’s review of that excellent show), why not put on two? This play won the Pulitzer in 1945, and the 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart is among Emsworth’s five favorite films.

Elwood Dowd (James Stewart) admires a portrait of himself and Harvey in the 1950 movie

Harvey is, of course, the sentimental, half-magical story of the ever-pleasant, alcoholic, eccentric Elwood Dowd and his socially inconvenient friend Harvey, an invisible six-and-a-half foot rabbit.  Joseph Ziegler will direct; he’s one of the Shaw’s best. Peter Krantz will play Elwood Dowd and Mary Haney his distracted sister Veta.

3. One Touch of Venus (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman). The Shaw Festival is evidently ceding the field of expensive big production musical plays to the Stratford Festival. In 2007 and 2008, the Shaw put on two of the finest musicals we’ve ever seen (Mack and Mabel and Wonderful Town), but they evidently weren’t as popular as they needed to be. The Shaw’s 2009 musical, Sunday in the Park with George, was, as we sorrowfully reported, a crashing bore (see this post).

So the Shaw is trying to re-create past glories. Back in 2005, the Shaw pulled Kurt Weill’s edgy musical Happy End out of utter obscurity; it did so well that they brought it back in 2006.  In 2010, it’ll be One Touch of Venus, a not-quite-so-obscure Kurt Weill musical about what happens when a barber from the New York suburbs brings a priceless statue of Venus to life (they fall in love). The songs include “Speak Low,” which we know mostly from Barbra Streisand’s “Back to Broadway” album a few years ago. Robin Evan Willis will play the goddess; Deborah Hay also appears.

James M. Barrie

4. Half an Hour (James M. Barrie) We are extraordinarily partial to both the novels and the plays of J. M. Barrie (see this Emsworth review of a recent Barrie biography) and think he belongs in the top tier of English writers.  This poignant one-act play — we’ve only read it, never seen it — is superb drama, as a mistreated young wife flees to a lover. Expect an emotional roller-coaster and a shocking plot twist. But don’t expect Half an Hour to be anything like Peter Pan — it’s more in the vein of Noël Coward’s Still Life, which the Shaw presented in 2009 (see Emsworth’s delighted review). The talented and extremely attractive Diana Donnelly will play Lady Lillian.

This will be the “Lunchtime” offering at the Shaw this year.  These hour-long $30 shows are a great bargain, though we wonder how Half an Hour will take up the full hour of the show. Might there be another short one-act Barrie play? Coincidentally, Peter Pan is on the playbill at the Stratford Festival for 2010.

5. An Ideal Husband (Oscar Wilde). Once again, the Shaw’s looking backwards; An Ideal Husband was such a hit in 1995 that the Shaw brought the production back for a second year. But we don’t weary of Wilde and applaud the Shaw Festival for keeping his plays in rotation. An Ideal Husband is the story of a woman who worships her husband, a hot-shot British politician, to be played by the silver-haired Patrick Galligan; she’s ill-prepared to learn from a morally challenged rival that her husband has a skeleton in his closet. (Insider trading, of all things, is a theme at the Shaw in 2010.)

6. Serious Money (Caryl Churchill). Candidly?  We’re skeptical of contemporary plays that we don’t know anything about, and ticket prices being what they are, we don’t often take chances. We’ve been burned too often with newer plays that aren’t any better than mediocre TV sitcoms.  Not to say that good plays haven’t been written in the last fifty years — we know all about Edward Albee, August Wilson, Neil Simon, and David Mamet – but we’re not good at sifting the wheat from the chaff.  So if the Shaw Festival is going to weed out the dreck of the post-modern era and bringing the good stuff to Niagara-on-the-Lake, we’re all for it.

We don’t know much about Caryl Churchill except that she’s a leftist with an interest in gender issues. That would ordinarily be a recipe for dreariness and drivel.  But Churchill is also said to be one of the finest living English playwrights, and Shaw Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell still has capital with us, so we’ll give Serious Money a shot. The play was written in 1987 and apparently has to do with shenanigans in the stock market.

This contemporary drama will be at the new, small Studio Theater space where The Entertainer was presented in 2009. (We liked both the space and the John Osborne play; see this Emsworth review). We are grateful to see that tickets for shows in the Studio Theater space are cheaper — only $49 — though we’re not quite sure why. Or perhaps we do — would we pay full price for a pig in a poke?

7. The Doctor’s Dilemma (George Bernard Shaw). What does it say about the status of Bernard Shaw at the Shaw Festival when no Shaw play is scheduled to be performed till mid-June, nearly three months after the season starts?  Ominously, a recent piece in one of the Toronto papers suggested that Shaw’s standing among playwrights of the modern era isn’t what it used to be. Is it possible that the Shaw Festival is beginning to feel weighed down by having to build its seasons around Shaw?

We hope not — the Shaw plays have been better than ever in recent years, including The Devil’s Disciple, which was one of the best things we saw anywhere in 2009 (see this post) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (ditto in 2008; see this post).  The Doctor’s Dilemma deals with a doctor (Patrick Galligan) who has to choose between two patients who need the same life-saving treatment; he can treat only one.  Now that Obamacare has become law in the United States, of course, the theme has renewed relevance for us patrons from the United States.

8. The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov). Ever since we saw a marvelous production of this play at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn last winter (see our review), The Cherry Orchard has rated as one of our very favorite plays. The cast will include Shaw all-stars Benedict Campbell and Jim Mezon. Sadly, the exquisite Goldie Semple, who had been scheduled to appear in this play, passed away last winter. We’re looking forward to seeing it close up in the Courthouse Theatre.

A scene from one of the earlier productions of The Age of Arousal (we borrowed the image from Linda Griffiths's website)

9. The Age of Arousal (Linda Griffiths). Two contemporary plays in one season? Things are definitely changing at the Shaw Festival. Written in 2007, this play is practically fresh off the press. Set in 1885, The Age of Arousal is about a London suffragette, Mary Barfoot, who opens a typewriting school to help young women become independent.

Linda Griffiths is an award-winning Canadian playwright and actress, but this is the first this American has heard of her. So many contemporary writers find Victorian mores an inviting target; we hope the play’s not just another version of “isn’t it awful how repressed they were before the sexual revolution?” Or, God forbid, a stage version of a bodice-ripper.

10. John Bull’s Other Island (George Bernard Shaw). We saw this play at the Shaw Festival in 1998 and again here in Rochester at GeVa Theater several years ago, and we just haven’t taken to it. So we figure to give it a miss in 2010, feeling we are not bound to like every Shaw play. It’s the story of a couple of men from London who go to Ireland and get mixed up with a Irish beauty and local politics. Benedict Campbell and Graeme Somerville will play Tom Broadbent and Larry Doyle.

The Cherry Orchard at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn

We might have thought August: Osage County was a better play if we hadn’t seen this fine production of The Cherry Orchard in Brooklyn the night before. (Emsworth vents about the popular but incoherent Osage County play in this post.)

Ethan Hawke, Sinéad Cusack, Paul Jesson, and Rebecca Hall. Hall's drab costumes only accentuated her appeal.

Of course, no one needs Emsworth to tell him that The Cherry Orchard is a masterpiece. But it’s easier to make a Chekhov play into a dreary yawner than to bring it to life.  We can report that this production by director Sam Mendes and the Bridge Project is a great success.

We saw it on a whim, ordering our tickets by cellphone as we were driving down to New York City on a Friday afternoon. (We were agreeably shocked to find ourselves talking to a actual box-office employee of the theater, not an anonymous Ticketmaster flunky.) What we Rochesterians didn’t realize until after we’d bought our tickets was that the BAM Harvey Theater is in Brooklyn, not Manhattan (To our shame, we did not know that “BAM” stands for the Brooklyn Academy of Music or that it has been an oasis for classical theater for many years.). We took a different set of expressways, dodged the enormous Brooklyn potholes, and arrived in time for a decidedly undistinguished meal at a kitschy, self-important diner called “Junior’s” that we spotted a couple of blocks from the theater.

The theater itself was something to see.  It must have been a fine old vaudeville playhouse, with its Roman columns, staircases, and a grand balcony, back in the day (1904) when it used to be the Majestic Theater. The place was apparently crumbling and abandoned when (as we learned) one Harvey Lichtenstein bought it twenty years ago and renovated it — after a fashion. It looks as if they stripped away a lot of plaster, down to the pipes and wires, then ran out of money and simply sprayed shellac over everything. We make no value judgments.

Sinéad Cusack and Simon Russell Beale

The Cherry Orchard is set in Imperial Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. It is the story of a proud and formerly wealthy Russian land-owning family that can’t come to grips with changing times.  Here’s the plot: When Ranavskaya (Sinéad Cusack) and her daughter Anya return home from several years in Paris, they face a crisis; their grand estate is about to be sold at a mortgage foreclosure auction.  Ranavskaya’s neighbor Lopakhin (Simon Russell Beale), a prosperous merchant from a peasant family, urges her to save the estate by cutting down its large but unproductive cherry orchard (of which the family is immensely proud) and converting the land into summer villas for the nouveau riche from the cities.

Sinead Cusack's Ranevskaya is prone to melodrama. Standing: Richard Easton as the aged Firs.

But Ranavskaya refuses to face the crisis, or even to talk about it.  Her inability to engage with Lopakhin, who genuinely wants to help her, is just one of many instances in this play in which the characters simply fail to listen to one another.

Ranavskaya throws money around as if the family were still rich. And she still treats her “free” servants like serfs, like the non-people of Gogol’s Dead Souls, even though serfdom was abolished in 1861, several decades before the scenes in The Cherry Orchard. Her elderly footman, Firs (Richard Easton), pines for the days before emancipation, when people knew their places in society.

Ethan Hawke as Profimov resembled Emsworth in his own student days

Ranavskaya’s stepdaughter Varya (Rebecca Hall) and Ranavskaya’s brother Gaev (Paul Jesson) realize that a marriage between Varya and the now-wealthy Lopakhin would solve the family’s financial woes. Varya is willing, but Lopakhin, acutely conscious of their differences in social rank, and perhaps still harboring a crush on Ranavskaya, has never brought himself to speak to her. Instead, a useless romance has sprung up between Anya and the former family tutor Trofimov (Ethan Hawke), a fervent radical socialist and perpetual student.

Rebecca Hall as Vicky in the recent Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona

There are more than enough “names” in this show. The ravishing Rebecca Hall had the title role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona last year (we thought she was excellent, although Penelope Cruz got the Oscar nomination). Ethan Hawke had lots of screen time in last year’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. And we remember vividly Sinéad Cusack’s supporting role as Dr. Delia Surridge in V is for Vendetta.

Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

But this show is not just something movie stars decided to do between films; this is serious acting by serious, first-rate actors.

We learned from the program that the Bridge Project is a sort of exchange program for actors, a joint undertaking of the Old Vic, in London, where Kevin Spacey is artistic director, and the BAM Harvey Theater, where Sam Mendes is in charge. (Talk about the movies, though! — Mendes was the director for American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, and the recent Revolutionary Road.)

Because of this collaboration, some of the actors (like Simon Russell Beale and Sinéad Cusack) are British members of the Old Vic company; others (like Ethan Hawke and Dakin Matthews) are American. Our only cavil was with the accents. The Brits used upper-class British accents; Ethan Hawke used a working-class American accent; and Selina Cadell, as the French governess Charlotta, spoke in what seemed to be a parody of a French-Russian accent. We thought at one point that the accents might have been intended to match the social status of the characters, but can’t say for sure.

Although we (understandably) couldn’t keep our eyes off Rebecca Hall, we loved Simon Russell Beale as Lopakhin, ambivalent about his upward mobility. He’s one of the best actors we’ve ever seen. And we were especially delighted with Richard Easton as the addled old servant Firs.  These classical actors are worth going out of one’s way for.

The script of this play was a “version” (apparently not a “translation”) of Chekhov’s play by the contemporary playwright Tom Stoppard.  When we got home, we pulled the Constance Garnett translation off our shelves and read it through; we don’t think Stoppard did anything radical.  In the older translations like Garnett’s, the language is so stilted that the essence of Chekhov is lost — or at least so it seems to us. On stage, Stoppard’s “version” was natural-sounding and went a long ways toward closing the cultural gap between our time and Chekhov’s Russia.

This show rates with the 2003 production of The Three Sisters at the Shaw Festival, directed by Jackie Maxwell, as the best Chekhov we’ve ever experienced. We see that this same outstanding ensemble of actors is now also performing Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in repertory at the Bam Harvey Theater. Unfortunately, we probably won’t be back to New York City before its run is over.