‘The Cherry Orchard’

Theater Review

If the foreshadowed demise of the orchard hinted at in Act One of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” had been an Ibsen hint like the pistols in the “Hedda Gabler,” the audience would have prepared for a dark climb to a tragic climax. But “The Cherry Orchard” is not in the vein of Ibsen and Strindberg, who were both tireless manipulators and gloomy naturalists. No, Chekhov is a master at keeping out of the way of the characters. He’d rather let the audience judge human folly for themselves. I was so looking forward to seeing this classic play, which is now on stage at the Ahmanson Theatre through March 19. Director Sean Matthias is credited for using Martin Sherman’s adaptation, which gives Chekhov’s words a distinctly American, even slangy sensibility. The plot serves only to bring a gentle clash between the past and the future, but more precisely gives the audience a window through which we see a romp of emotion, as if we were watching a family holiday reunion. The action swirls around Ranyevskaya (Annette Bening), who has returned to her beloved childhood home and cherry orchard in rural Russia, which is slated to be sold to pay her debts. While the playwright could have set up a particularly sad drama about loss and the passage of time, he never lets the audience feel pathos. The spare stage, sprinkled with a few pieces of turn-of-the-century furniture here and there, and efficient dialogue sit well with me, if I could believe in what’s confined in that space at that moment. This is the problem with this production. The characters, who after all are kin or old family servants, fail to convince us of this intimacy. There is plenty of hugging and kissing, and tearful embraces, none of which stick. Chekhov is a master of detail, and a storyteller, and each of these men and women has a story: Ranyevskaya is a spoiled, harmless elitist who makes countless bad decisions for love; Trofimov (Jason Butler Harner), the revolutionary student, professes to be “above” love while at the next turn he is blinded by hopeless adoration; and Lopakhin (Alfred Molina) is no Simon Legree, but a peasant who made good who can’t quite believe his good fortune. All of these stories are told in mini-monologues that add meat to the bones of the plot, but don’t further the action. Each character tells his or story, but then figuratively walks off the stage. This is Chekhov, certainly. Poet and critical essayist Kenneth Rexroth writes that “there is something intrinsically ridiculous about all the people in the play. Chekhov’s is truly a theater of the absurd. Yet we never think of them as very funny’and we don’t think of them as very sad, either. Chekhov’s people we simply accept.” The talented Molina’s Lopakhin is the one person who holds the center together. Here is a man, son of a serf, whose father was not even allowed in the kitchen of the house he now owns; a man who long ago was shown a kindness by the woman whose estate he has foreclosed, and a man uncomfortable in his new clothes, who is unable to commit to the woman who loves him. In summary, a man we accept because we know him to be human. “The Cherry Orchard” plays at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tickets: (213) 628-2772.