Cherry Orchard

photo by Julieta Cervantes

Chekhov’s classic play Cherry Orchard was brought to New Yorkers by Maly Drama Theatre of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Director Lev Dodin is known both at home and abroad for his edgy interpretations of Russian classics, and he didn’t disappoint this time either.

Dodin brought the entire play in one set, the old noble family mansion where its owner, Lubov Ranevskaya, is returning from a five years stay in Paris. BAM Harvey Theater seems like a perfect backdrop for the play with its raw uncoated walls. The house furniture is arranged on the floor of the orchestra along the stage and a pool table is sitting in the middle of the audience. Chairs in the orchestra are covered with the same white linen covers as the furniture on stage, expanding the set to the entire theater.  

By partly moving the action to the orchestra, Dodin engages the audience and makes them participants of the action. The same way as actors hang out on stage, even if they don’t have any lines in the scene, members of the audience are also sitting right there, moving their heads and torsos in order to see the speaker. This physical activity trick the audience into action and makes them part of the play themselves.       

Ranevskaya, her daughter Anya and other family and servants arrive through the door from behind the audience. In silence, the landowner makes her walk through the orchestra and then through the backstage, of which we only hear footsteps. She marks her domain and the premises of the action, which will be happening in three arias: the orchestra floor, the narrow strip of the proscenium and a vast empty stage behind a movie screen which a merchant, Lopakhin, is about to erect.   

This long silent entrance of Ranevskaya and her companions also gives us the key to watching the Cherry Orchard. As in Chekhov’s play, in Dodin’s production the sounds are very important. This includes the sound of silence, which in the Harvey Theater consists of chairs squeaking, resembling the sounds of an old house. Elongated pauses in speech and gaps between dialogues filled with accentuated and meaningful actions seem to be another important method in Dodin’s directorial vocabulary. This inevitably affects the way the audience starts feeling time – unbearably long and swampy.

The odd timing of the performance is contrasted by the film, a sort of “home video”, which Lopakhin demonstrates to the amusement of Ranevskaya. The film projection, although not a part of the original play, is a brilliant idea of Dodin’s. Instead of looking out of the window at the real garden, people admire a ghost of it. Ranevskaya is ecstatic in her reminiscence about the past. She hugs the screen then runs to the projector and we see the shadows of her hands playfully grabbing the blooming branches. Meanwhile her fortune is slipping through her fingers and her mansion is being sold at the auction to pay for the debts.

The entrepreneurial merchant Lopakhin, in his dynamic presentation, proposes that Ranevskaya divide her land into pieces and rent it out as summer cottages. The aristocratic woman is shocked. In her worst nightmare she couldn’t imagine her orchard and her house being destroyed. She continues to remain indecisive and nostalgic till the end of the play, keeping up with her eccentric life style even though she cannot afford it.

Rappoport brought her character a good amount of bohemian mannerism, which I found an interesting take on Ranevskaya. The way she talks, accentuating sometimes multiple words in the sentence and not those, which you might accentuate in everyday speech, might first throw one off. In fact, the speech of almost all of the representatives of the “old order”, the landowners and their servants, might seem vocally odd and at times artificially over-the-top.

Chekhov wanted us to be attentive to sounds and Dodin takes it to the next level by highly stylizing the speech of his cast. Sometimes it demands too much from the audience by not letting us through the text and shoving our face in every single word. Sometimes it feels quite appropriate, for example the dialog between Varya and Lopakhin, after the intimate moment between them behind the curtain of the screen. She goes from flirting to demanding to crying in desperation, and all of it in one sentence.

Although there was no weak link in the cast, the performance of Danila Kozlovsky, playing Yermolai Lopakhin, is worth mentioning separately. His rendition of the merchant was surprisingly humane. First introduced to us as a smart and unsentimental businessman, he later becomes someone who we pity. The deep trauma of his origin from a family, basically of slaves, made him a cruel destroyer of other people’s lives. In his wild dancing and singing of Sinatra’s My Way towards the end, we see not only triumph but also pain and deep disturbance.  

Nobody wins, so to speak. Everybody is leaving the house except for the ancient servant, Firs. Slowly he travels through the stage to check every door only to find out that all of them are locked. He approaches the giant screen and realizes that there is a wall behind it now. He bangs on it until the screen falls down uncovering the fence of planks, reminiscent of a coffin lid. A projection is cast on it. In the video, the actors wearing white robes step forward one after another and make a line side by side as though before a firing squad. Dodin’s finale leaves us with no hope for anybody.