The Cherry Orchard for Laughs

The Cherry Orchard, featuring John Turturro and Dianne Wiest, is surely entertaining. But that is the bane of this production by the Classical Stage Company. The casting was good; aside from the leads, it had Alvin Epstein as Fiers, Juliet Rylance as Varya, and Daniel Davis as Gaev. The lines were delivered clearly, and the course of events was easy to follow. But the director Andrei Belgrader’s view of Chekhov is apparently slanted toward comedy. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the production “heartbreakingly funny” and applauded it.

Chekhov himself called the play “a comedy in four acts.” But to understand the word comedy in the modern sense as understood in the age of television, I believe, is a distortion. The Cherry Orchard is more a satire, but this production rinsed out the irony. First of all, the new translation by John Christopher Jones was colloquial for easier understanding of the text; but it failed, for that reason, to portray accurately the upper class of the Ranevsky household. Dianne Wiest’s Ranevskaya lacked class; she made her a fool rather than a sympathetic anachronism out of step with the changes that had happened during her absence. So, John Turturro made Lopakhin into a clown, a bit too vulgar for Chekhov, a vaudeville act. They both performed well, and in consort with them, all the other characters, each in her or his own way, performed for laughs. Roberta Maxwell’s Charlotta, the governess, after repeating her line, “There is no one I can talk to,” continues saying “No one” more than once after her exit as an echo to squeeze laugher (successfully) from the audience. There was consistency among the players; so, the interpretation is evidently the director’s.

What was lost at the expense of clarity is complexity of interpersonal relationships. It is not a simple failure of communication that these Chekhov characters suffer. It is not that they don’t hear each other; they hear but somehow partially, each in her or his own way. The production, eager to create comedy, missed on Chekhov’s poetry, “elusive poetry” in the words of Michael Billington of The Guardian in his review of Howard Davies’s production in London earlier this year. Aura of elegy was sorely missed. It was like a Sung landscape cleared of its mist.

Entertaining as it was, this was The Cherry Orchard for vaudeville, a good histrionic Chekhov, a crowd pleaser.