You don’t think of Anton Chekhov as someone who wrote plays “ripped from the headlines”—even turn-of-the-19th-century Russian headlines. But it’s hard not to chuckle a bit at the familiar real estate panic rippling through the world of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s production of The Cherry Orchard. Returning home from their five-year “holiday,” the brother and sister owners of the estate could easily be modern investors looking over their retirement plans, or perhaps facing foreclosure. To save their beloved house and orchard, there is talk of “borrowing money against promissory notes,” or carving up the land and selling them as vacation plots. It’s a wonder financial therapists Suze Orman or Jim Cramer don’t show up and give these Russians a firm scolding/pep talk.
But Chekhov’s specialty was people, not finance. He was dying when he wrote The Cherry Orchard, and it’s his most melancholic reflection on the astonishing variety of the human animal, and the curious ways they behave when brought together. The inhabitants of his play are a motley group that would put any episode of Survivor to shame, but they all share a bemused inertia as they watch their world quietly crumble around them.
Todd Rosenthal’s cavernous set is a perfect evocation of that world. A room of raw plaster and lathe, you can’t tell if it’s being built or torn down. When the building is sealed up at the end of the play, the light pushes in through the cracks like the force of time itself.
But until that final moment, the characters barely acknowledge the changing world Lyubov and her brother Gayev (Deborah Staples and Torrey Hanson) are more concerned with playing their well-developed parts, which usually involves suffocating those around them with mounds of sticky nostalgia. Both actors perfectly capture the charming disengagement of good-hearted privilege, playing their sadness as if it were part of this season’s style.
But the play truly belongs to Mark Corkins as Lopakhin. Watch him parade around the room after he announces that he has bought the land—poised between guilt, triumph, and the uneasiness that comes with the feeling that he has successfully navigated the winds of history and left his old life (and old friends) behind.
Director Ben Barnes orchestrates this collection of personalities with great skill. Characters have their moments to shine, but then slip back into the genial and comic soup where their flavors mellow. The great challenge in Chekhov, of course, is to make inaction active, and there are only a few moments when the energy and tension between the characters flags and seems to run on autopilot.
Speaking about his landmark production of The Cherry Orchard in the late ‘80s, Peter Brook said the play is “society in the process of change…. It can convey the message that political, geographic and cultural barriers are not what they seem to be at all.” It might be hard to see how this odd bunch of Russians can teach us to face the 21st century, but rather than rely on FDR’s admonition of “fear itself,” Chekhov would probably quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo instead: “We have seen the enemy, and he is us.”
Photos by Jay Westhauser
