1976 | Directed by Andrei Serban |
|
Place: The Vivian Beaumont Theatre
Dates: 1976
The play deals with a once wealthy and honored Russian family (Mrs. Ranevsky, her brother
Gayev, her daughter Anya and her stepdaughter Varya) and the loss of their estate - the
ancestral family home and lands, including a vast and beautiful cherry orchard. Impoverished
after the death of the alcoholic Mr. Ranevsky and the dissipation of the family fortune by the
extravagance of his wife, the Ranevskys are incapable of avoiding the sale of their estate to
pay for their debts. The action of the play revolves around the characterization of the
ineffectual idleness and vanity of the Ranevskys and their victimization by the wealthy and
unscrupulous businessman Lopakhin. Another central figure, the student Trofimov, comments on
the historical necessities that have brought about the downfall of the land-owning Russian
aristocracy. While aware of the problematic rise to power of an enterprising but greedy and
soulless middle class, Trofimov and Anya look with optimism to a better day ahead for Russian
society as a whole.
| ADDITIONAL CAST & CHARACTERS |
Raul Julia
Meryl Streep
Mary-Beth Hurt
Priscilla Smith
Irene Worth |
... Lopakhin
... Dunyasha
... Mary-Beth Hurt
... Varya
... Lyubov Andreyevna |
TIME MAGAZINE | February 28, 1977
In Chekhov's plays extraordinary things usually happen in the most ordinary ways. Not so in the revival of The Cherry Orchard at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center. Director Andrei Serban emblazons even quite ordinary moments with extraordinary stage effects. Symbolic figures stalk in and out, backgrounds loom hugely, movement flows into patterns and tableaux. The results are bold, sometimes beautiful, but only partly successful.
Serban's best images effectively magnify the play's conflict between the old order and the bright new world that is its doom: a frieze of peasants laboring beneath modern telegraph wires, a group of aristocrats watching the setting sun silhouette a factory on the horizon. But this kind of staginess can also be distracting: an imposingly literal set of cherry trees all but overruns a house in Act I; a little girl bearing cherry blossoms self-consciously tiptoes into the old servant Firs' death scene. The high, deep stage-space forces the cast to play to a scale larger than that of Chekhov's text (here rendered into colloquial English by Jean-Claude van Itallie).
The Cherry Orchard is the most farcical of Chekhov's major works, and the cast (including George Voscovec, Raul Julia, Cathryn Damon, Marybeth Hurt and Michael Cristofer) whoops and tumbles through it with exaggerated zest. Especially delicious is Meryl Streep's housemaid Dunyasha, all borrowed gentility and sexual flutter.
The play's tragic relief is supplied by the wrenching pathos of the orchard's owner, Madame Ranevskaya. In this role the production boasts the splendid Irene Worth. Hers is a memorable portrayal — extravagant, feckless, alluring, touchingly vulnerable. When she ritualistically halves the telegram from her erstwhile lover in Paris — slowly, pain fully, like a bandage — an entire life is caught between the past it cannot release and the future it cannot resist.
At such moments Serban's penchant for formalized action fuses brilliantly with an actress's, and Chekhov's, art.
At other, more overbearing moments one wishes he had taken to heart a line in the play, when the student Trofimov advises the exuberant parvenu Lopakhin: "Stop waving your arms about. Get out of the habit of making grand gestures."
