'The Orchard'

 by Kirk Woodward 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will be familiar with my friend Kirk Woodward.  He’s the most prolific of the guest-bloggers I’ve published on ROT, with something over 100 contributions.  His territory ranges from directing and playwriting to acting, to songwriting and music performance (especially The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and jazz), to biographies of cultural figures (particularly in theater and music), to theatrical performance, notably reviews and reports. 

[This time, Kirk’s writing about a performance he saw on Wednesday, 29 June, of The Orchard, the adaptation of The Cherry Orchard conceived for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s theater center in Hell’s Kitchen.  The two-hour, high-tech production opened on Tuesday, 7 June, and closed on Sunday, 3 July. 

[I won’t spoil Kirk’s effort by previewing what he says; he and I both want you all to read it for yourself.  Suffice it to say that he applies his rather deep understanding and experience of theater to his observations.  Besides, as he points out, he got to see Baryshnikov.]

I have not seen the production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Alex Lawther and directed by Robert Icke that opened on June 28, 2022, at the Park Avenue Armory. I begin by mentioning it only because a section of a review of the show by Maya Phillips in The New York Times on July 1, 2022, caught my eye. Phillips writes in part:

What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.

The screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective: soft overhead light haloes Lawther as he seems to address theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.

I quote this review, written by someone who sees a great deal more of theater than I do, because earlier that same week I had seen The Orchard, a version of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (translated by Carol Rocamora, with “new material” by Igor Golyak, who “conceived” and directed the show) at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street in Manhattan. I will explain.

I wanted to see The Orchard for two reasons. The first was that I had never seen Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) in person, and I wanted to. For years he and Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993) were shining stars in the world of dance. I saw Nureyev at least twice, but never saw Baryshnikov.

Those unfamiliar with his work in ballet might check out the film The Turning Point (1977), selected dance highlights of which are available in a YouTube video (Mikhail Baryshnikov - The Turning Point (Ballet) - YouTube). Far from being satisfied with his career in ballet, Baryshnikov continued to expand his range and interests, working with numerous choreographers, leading the American Ballet Theatre, performing with and founding modern dance companies, and acting (including both plays by Samuel Beckett and the 2003-04 season of Sex and the City).

So I had always wanted to see him in person (and why hadn’t I?). I was also curious about the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), opened in 2005 and home to a variety of arts and artists. It’s a modern, industrial-style building, rather severe, but efficiently designed.

The Orchard played in the BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; it seats 238, so it’s relatively intimate, and it has a floor-level stage (with minimum offstage space). The seating is steep, so visibility is good, although from the back of the balcony, where I sat, one sees a lot of tops of heads.

One feature in the Robbins Theater is new to me: instead of each seat being a single unit, there are many seats for two and even three, kind of like sitting on a small couch, and often two people have to stand up to let one pass.

In The Cherry Orchard (first performed in 1904), an extended Russian family unit faces the likely sale of its estate, including the orchard of the title, as part of the wave of modernization moving through the country. The family offers little resistance to change, and at the end of the play the house and the orchard are being torn down and the family is dispersed.

In The Orchard Baryshnikov plays the aging servant Firs, representative of the oldest Russian traditions (he was originally a serf, and considers himself attached to the family). Among others in the cast, Jessica Hecht plays Ranevskaya, an impulsive actress who has returned from Paris to see the estate again. I was particularly taken with the performances of Nael Nacer, who plays Lopakhin, a businessman, and Mark Nelson as Gayev, a billiards-obsessed eccentric who simply can’t focus on the danger the estate is in.

Baryshnikov brings to his acting a quality he also brought to his dancing: he is always present in the moment, giving it exactly what it requires, and it often requires a lot. His performance in The Orchard is by no means showy, but I find myself thinking a great deal about it as time passes. “Focus in the moment” is a requirement of good acting, and Baryshnikov does it.

(I should add that a friend said to me, “You went to see the greatest dancer of all time, and he spent the evening walking around like an old man?” Well, yes. Better late than never.)

I said above that I had two reasons for wanting to see The Orchard. Baryshnikov was the first. The second is that I saw from advance publicity and from reviews that The Orchard has a high-tech, multimedia aspect to it, and I wanted to see what that was like.

As a director I’m a minimalist; I’m happiest with the fewest possible costumes and properties and the least set. I may be exaggerating to say that for me, stage technology means electric lights (although I did act in a performance once that was lit entirely by candles, a story for another time). But the only multimedia performance tool I’ve ever used is Zoom.

So I wanted to learn what “multimedia” means in terms of theater, and how it can be used. Clearly The Orchard offered a chance to find out.

So, which high-tech, multimedia elements stand out in The Orchard? For starters, when the audience enters the theater it sees benches, a couple of large balls and a rocking horse (the first act takes place in a nursery), and, almost center stage, a huge white three-section machine, with a base for two long interlocked sections that when fully extended must reach at least twelve feet in the air.

The machine in The Orchard. Note the robot dog at the far right

This machine remains center stage for the entire play. It has a camera on the end of the second extension. Sometimes the “arm” reaches down so the camera is in someone’s face. Once it furnishes a tray with cups of tea. It has a personality – it will occasionally seem to favor one character rather than another. Sometimes it just sits there.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure what the machine reminded me of. A dentist’s drill . . . a Storm Trooper in a Star Wars . . . the Pixar Animation Studios lamp . . . a Martian . . . a modern sculpture . . . a dinosaur . . . .

You will not need to be told that Chekhov (1860-1904) did not envision such a machine, nor does the play as he wrote it call for it. He probably also would be startled at the “scrim,” an opaque stage-sized screen that when lit from behind can display elements of a scene. This particular scrim stretches between the stage and the audience, so when projections appear on it, the effect is much like a 3-D movie.

Frequently the scrim shows cherry tree leaves floating down to earth. (At least I think so. I spent nearly the entire performance thinking the leaves represented snow – actually, most of the time, a blizzard. I found this extremely confusing.) The entire stage floor is also covered with paper “blossoms.” This is symbolism; a nursery floor almost certainly would not be covered with cherry blossoms, no matter how big the orchard was.

Usually leaves fill the scrim, but in one scene (the most effective use of the device) the planets and the solar system appear, looking quite beautiful. Sometimes computer messages appear on the screen. Sometimes it shows dialogue from the play, sometimes lines the actors are speaking, occasionally lines from a different translation. Act-change information is also projected.

There is a dog in the play; it is portrayed by a robot. A tiny model of the house has lights in its windows; later they go out, showing that the house will be emptied. The model is passed around among the characters. Cameras (both on the machine and somewhere in front) capture a live simulcast of the performance, and sometimes show the in-house audience what the remote audience is seeing.

How does Chekhov’s play fare with all these distractions? – because they are distractions, if the play is what interests you, or that’s how they struck me. I have the impression of a tiny, mostly decent production of the play, surrounded by a battery of relentless technical effects. What is the production trying to achieve with this approach?

In attempting to answer this question, I don’t want to simply reject the production, make fun of it, or use it for a series of comic riffs (although the temptation is strong). A lot of gifted people worked on The Orchard, and they must have believed their approach was worthwhile. Was it?

Some things worked well. A deaf actor, John McGinty, was cast as Trofimov, the dreamer of a new and better world, and he signs his impassioned speech about the destruction of the present world and the coming of a future one to Juliet Brett’s Anya, who completely misunderstands what he’s saying and believes he’s talking about his love for her.

The most effective scene of all, when Lopakhin tries to find words to propose, is simple and straightforward, with no technical effects at all.

To my mind, a great deal of what went on did not serve the play at all, and it seems to me that serving the play is what a production of a play should do. But I’ve tried to think of justifications. The most obvious is that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.

But either this supposition is incorrect, or it was poorly carried out, because for me at least it was difficult to find the play that’s hiding behind the tech, and, besides, The Cherry Orchard is not a play that needs a lot of illuminating. It’s clear in theme and in characterization, there’s nothing difficult to understand in the story, and it’s hard to imagine an audience that needed a vast array of technical tools to make sense of it.

Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand. For that matter, is there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit? For some reason directors seem terrified that their plays will seem obscure.

I have already mentioned that Chekhov’s first scene takes place in a nursery. That’s not an accident – Chekhov is underlining from the beginning the family’s infantile nature when it comes to understanding business, and in many cases themselves as well. Nothing much of that carries over into The Orchard except a moment when a character is riding the hobbyhorse. Perhaps Chekhov should be allowed to do his work?

If all the special effects were meant to illuminate the play, they skipped important plot points. For example, the family has opportunities to save its house, but lets those opportunities fly away; it can’t concentrate on them. Why not? The director must make sure the answer to that question gets through to the audience. The Orchard doesn’t try.

But perhaps the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were “something special.” Perhaps, but I doubt that that’s a general feeling. How many people (besides me) want to see a play because of its technical effects, rather than because of the play itself? (Do tech-heads make up a large segment of any theater audience?)

Might we suppose, then, that the purpose of all the tech is to get audiences to use their imaginations? If so, I believe the result is actually the opposite. I felt no opportunity to use my imagination during The Orchard, because I was so busy looking everywhere, trying to see what else there was to see, feeling certain I’d missed something (as I frequently found I had), and being battered by one “effect” after another.

Surely there’s a difference between telling a story, and hitting the audience over the head with it.

Will the play draw more people because seeing it is like being inside a computer? The answer ought to be “no,” but I’m not sure, or rather, I’m not sure the show’s creative team didn’t think so. There’s a general assumption right now that “everybody” loves computers, that “everybody” has smartphones, that “everyone” knows all the features of their devices and wants to be up to date.

Then, perhaps, does The Orchard want to alert us that high tech is the future? Is it saying, “Get used to it – this is what theater will be like from now on”? Maybe – but I have a feeling that this blitz of technology is already a cliché. Maya Phillips’ review of Hamlet certainly suggests that’s the case, referring, in the passage quoted above, to “the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech.”

Surely there’s no question that high-tech multimedia effects can enhance a play, particularly when used to define and depict a space. We’ve known that at least since the efforts of James Hull Miller (1916-2007) to get theaters to use projections that there’s really no limit to what a stage setting can be. Beyond that, though, what are we accomplishing by piling technology on top of a play?

Reviews of The Orchard made many of these points. Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times (16 June 2022) wrote that “the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly.” Examples of this when I saw the show were occasional tiny stutters in the projections, which called even more undesired attention to them.

Jonathan Mandell, in New York Theater (16 June 2022), says that “Considered individually, Golyak’s directorial choices struck me as fresh, if not always straightforward, but taken together they felt at odds with one another — a series of touches that become distractions.  I was impressed by the stage production, but I wasn’t always engaged with it. “

Mandell greatly preferred the online version of the show, which includes a quick look at the theater, Baryshnikov appearing as Chekhov, and a question-and-answer period in which some production choices apparently are explained (justified?).

I didn’t watch the online version, although it sounds worthwhile, because as long as live theater is an option, I prefer it. I began the COVID shutdown watching a great deal of theater online (and producing some), and eventually became seriously tired of it.

Zachary Stewart, in TheaterMania (16 June 2022), is excited about the show’s technology, but he reviews the online, not the in-person, version of the production. Stewart says the production offers “the next step in live theater,” an idea about which people, I would say, will have to make up their own minds. Is a barrage of technology (I’m putting it unfairly, of course) the “next step” in theater, and if so, is that a good thing?

The director Igor Golyak’s biography on The Orchard’s website says he is “a global leader in the virtual theater movement.” Is it possible then that the live performance I saw was for those who are left behind in the “movement” – those of us too primitive to take advantage of online technologies?

Were we in the theater in fact basically seeing a studio production, meant to be viewed remotely? (In that case, why were we sold tickets?)

One more possibility occurs to me as a justification for The Orchard’s approach. In one short but powerful scene, Ilia Volok  portrays a Passerby as a belligerent and frightening soldier or ex-soldier, in a convincing demonstration of the old saying that “There are no small roles, only small actors.” Volok is large – at least in my recollection – and downright terrifying in the scene, bellowing at the actors frozen with terror around the base of the machine.

Both Volok and Igor Golyak, the director, are from Ukraine, now deep in a grisly war with Russia. Is it possible that The Orchard demonstrates that a production can be essentially an embodiment of a director’s personal feelings, applied to a more or less appropriate script? Is the wild world of The Orchard a theatrical image of the horrors that many in the Ukraine – or elsewhere – are facing right now?

My own basic assumption is that everything in a performance should serve the play. Perhaps Golyak would say that in The Orchard, everything does – because the lives of both the characters in the play, and our own lives, are lives of chaos, brutality, and danger. If we say, “My life’s not like that,” perhaps Golyak challenges us to look deeper.

Does this rationale satisfy? It only occurred to me days after seeing the play. Would it be possible for a production to express the same feelings without all the technology . . . is it appropriate, does it “work,” to represent chaos in a chaotic way? Or do the rest of us have to adjust because that’s the way things are going to be?

And I did get to see Baryshnikov.

[In my afterword, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Kirk’s analysis.  My guest-blogger asserts, “Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand.”  He follows this statement by suggesting that “the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were ‘something special.’”

[This rumination put me in mind of an essay by theater critic, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (b. 1927), “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times of 6 November 1988 (republished on ROT on 10 March 2011 (Rick On Theater: “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”). 

[I wrote on that article before I republished it on my blog; my interpretive post was “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage (18 September 2009; Rick On Theater: Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage; originally written on 11 and 19 November 1988), and I’ve invoked Brustein’s essay numerous times in discussing various performances.

[I won’t recap Brustein’s essay or my examination of it, but I want to point out that both he and I talk about the very phenomenon that Kirk addresses in “The Orchard”: In Brustein’s words, “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays.”  For ROTters who wish to see what Brustein and I actually wrote, I’ve provided the links to both posts.  The Times article is also posted on the paper’s website at STAGE VIEW; Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip? - The New York Times (nytimes.com), as well as through many libraries if they subscribe to ProQuest newspaper databases.)

[What Kirk means by “something special” in connection with stage productions is what he described in an earlier post, “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019), as “radical notions about how to stage a play—sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors.” In that article, Kirk called this the “Bright Idea,” a term he attributed to theater critic, scholar, and editor Eric Bentley (1916-2020).

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what the department tech director at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  Bentley introduced the term “Bright Idea” in a 1952 essay from the New Republic, “I Have a Bright Idea” (reprinted in What Is Theatre?), and defined it thus:

A Bright Idea is an invalid idea which has more appeal to the semi-literate mind than a valid one . . . .  It is a thought which can’t bear thinking about; but which is all the more influential on that  account; it surprises or reassures, it flatters or inflames; if it cannot earn the simple epithet “true” it frequently receives the more characteristically modern eulogy “intriguing” or at least “interesting.”  At the very worst it is praised as “cute.”

[Neither Brustein nor I was writing specifically about adding technology to a performance text, but the implication is the same.  The justification for doing it, in Kirk’s view, is “that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.”  I said “that some directors of classic plays distrust modern audiences so much that they feel they have to [enhance the play] to make it comprehensible to us.”

[In another post, a report on a production of Amadeus I’d seen, I applauded the director for a statement he made in the program: “The older I get, the less interested I am in saying something than I am in letting the play speak for itself and in letting the audience take what it will from the experience.”  I congratulated and thanked him because he “showed me that he trusts his audience to see what is going on.”

[Should a play present something that’s a little “difficult to understand,” Kirk asks “[I]s there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit?”  In an Off-Off-Broadway staging of Macbeth I saw, the director had a point to make, and he carried it off with cleverness, a modicum of subtlety, and no glaring spotlights.  I’d had to figure it out myself.  I reported: “The director had a message for me, and I got it.  And he never needed to explain it to me.”

[For me, then, the answer to Kirk’s query is ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with the audience stretching itself a little.’  Indeed, I summed up my Macbeth experience by asserting, “This may have required a little astuteness, but it wasn’t really all that hard.  It was also fun, and gave me a sense of accomplishment.”

[As Kirk states, “everything in a performance should serve the play.”  A Bright Idea, as Bentley and Kirk use the phrase—and Brustein implies in his discussion of directors who needlessly “enhance” their productions of classic plays—doesn’t do that.  It serves the director’s ego and sense of superiority (because he can understand the play while we spectators can’t).

[Perhaps these sentiments are why Bentley, who’d turned down an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a symposium on directing, wrote in a couple of letters to the organizer’s president in 1986 that “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre,” and threatened to “remove” directors from the theater.

[He ended his correspondence by asserting:

A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.

[If you replace ‘resetting the play’ with ‘inserting elaborate technology,’ you have the same issue with which Kirk takes exception in “The Orchard.”  QED.]

More Off-Broadway Plays from the Archive

 

THE CHERRY ORCHARD
by Anton Chekhov
adapted by Tom Donaghy
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
29 June 2005 

I saw the Atlantic Theater Company’s Cherry Orchard, which Charles Isherwood reviewed poorly back on 16 June [2005] (“ineffective production”; “it fails more or less equally at eliciting laughter and tears”), on Tuesday night, the 28th, and I think Isherwood nailed it, if a bit generously to the company. 

First, Tom Donaghy’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s text: I found it more than just “blunt” and “unobjectionable,” as Isherwood put it.  There are numerous expressions and turns of phrase that stuck out as way too contemporary.  In one instance, for example, young Anya says of Ranevskaya, “Mama doesn’t get it.”  Now, maybe teenagers in 1904 said that about their parents, but somehow I doubt it. 

I find that I can’t remember lines from this production—which may be a comment on the text, or the acting (more about which later)—so I can’t cite any of the other anachronistic lines even though there are several.  You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess.  Sorry.  (My companion, Diana, remarked on the use of “stuff”—as in “and stuff”—but I confess that I didn’t catch that.  I might have gotten inured to the anachronistic speech by then.)

(By the way, when I went to check some things in the script, I first referred to my copy of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s translation.  The program doesn’t say so, but it looks to me as if Donaghy used—or borrowed liberally from—van Itallie’s text for his adaptation.  I looked for some of those apparent anachronisms and they’re not in van Itallie’s version—the line above is rendered “Mama doesn’t realize”—but a lot of the other language seems to be.  Hmmmm!)

Next, the set: As we all know, this is a family with no money even to pay the mortgage—it’s in the lines—and most of the family has been away, except Ranevskaya’s ineffectual brother, Gayev (Larry Bryggman), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Diana Ruppe), who have been in the house with one flibberty-gibbet maid and the ancient Firs—so how have they been keeping the place up? 

The answer should be that they haven’t been: with no money for upkeep and servants incapable of doing the work anyway, it should be like Tara during the privations of the Civil War in the middle of Gone With The Wind—seedy, stitched together, patched up here and there, and so on—showing evidence of deferred maintenance, a little forlorn and neglected. 

The Atlantic’s set, designed by Scott Pask and Orit [sic] Jacoby Carroll (names I don’t recognize at all—though Pask lists several Broadway sets in his bio, including a Tony nomination for Pillowman and a Drama Desk nomination for Sweet Charity), is pristine in its pastel-green walls with white trim (it looked a lot like a giant piece of Wedgewood!), colors that ought to show grime very clearly! 

I’ll also accept that the house and its furnishings date back before the time of the play, maybe even a century or more, but this set looks positively 18th-century—like Liaisons Dangereuses is going to be performed, say—and you know that this family didn’t just redecorate their country estate in the style of Peter the Great or something.  So the decor is either antiques, which ought to show signs of aging for the obvious reasons I already mentioned, or the set’s an anachronism on top of anything else. 

(Even the children’s furniture in the nursery in the first act is like new—and the “children” who used it are now in their 50’s: Gayev says so.  Furniture used by children—and then their children—gets pretty damn worn, especially when there’s no money for repairs and maintenance.  Replacement isn’t a solution: Ranevskaya (Brooke Adams) reminisces about several of the pieces.  Didn’t the designers ever hear of distressing?)

The program doesn’t date the setting (just the times of the year for each act—”May,” “Summer,” and so on), but I saw (or heard) no evidence that the production was moved to a different time, so, along with the questions about the set, I have problems with the costumes, too.  Many are clearly late-19th- or early-20th-century clothes, but others look like stuff from the 1930s and ’50s. 

Yasha (Erin Gann), the butler who was with Ranevskaya in Paris, arrives in a suit and tie (which looks pretty modern to me) and a little straw fedora that prompted me to lean over to Diana and remark, “Yasha must have met Sinatra in Paris . . . and stolen his hat!”  (Later, Lopakhin [Isiah Whitlock, Jr.] arrives wearing a similar-style hat.) 

When Anya (Laura Breckenridge) is awakened and comes onto the set from her “bedroom,” she’s wearing a satin nightgown and robe that looks like something Lauren Bacall might have worn in one of her old flicks.  (Additionally, the robe is opened and the neckline of the nightgown is just above her bust—not very period-appropriate as far as I can tell.  Anya’s only 17, by the way.) 

Now, if the costume designer (Theresa Squire, another artist whose work I don’t know—though I saw some of the shows in her bio) intended this blending of periods to make some kind of meaningful point, I didn’t get it; the symbolism went past me.  What it all looks like to me, though I doubt this is actually the case, is that the cast was just let loose in the costume closet and pulled out whatever looked good and fit them.  (I won’t even go into how clean, undamaged, and brightly-colored all the clothes are.  See my remarks about the set and think of Scarlet O’Hara and her dress made from curtains!)

There are two other small, obviously directorial, choices that troubled me—one more significantly than the other.  The former is a casting decision: Brooke Adams as Ranevskaya.  She just looks too young for the role.  Maybe too fresh is the way to put it—after all, Anya, her daughter, is only 17.  I don’t know how old Adams is—she’s not an ingénue anymore, certainly [she was 56]—but somehow Ranevskaya seems older, maybe worn down.  Of course, what may really bother me and make me consider this was Adams’s acting, which is of a piece with the rest of the company—which I’ll try to describe below. 

(There’s another casting thing, which Isherwood also mentioned, that’s troublesome: casting a black actor as Lopakhin, the son of a former serf who ends up owning the estate.  It just invokes historical American parallels that are irrelevant to the play.  Whether Scott Zigler, the director did this deliberately, or because he thought he could finesse it, I have no idea.  It certainly isn’t because the actor, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., is just so terrific that no one else can do the part; Whitlock, a member of the Atlantic, is just as wan as the rest of the company, bar one.  Unfortunate choice.)

The other little matter, which only someone like me would probably even notice, is the coffee scene in the middle of Act I.  (I wondered if the family was actually supposed to be drinking coffee—Russia’s a tea culture, not a coffee one—though, of course, Ranevskaya had just been living in Paris, and France is a coffee culture.  Anyway, I checked the Russian text—yes, I have one—and they do drink coffee.) 

So, Dunyasha (Pepper Binkley), the maid, brings in the coffee on a tray. (She carries the tray peculiarly, as if to make it more awkward for the performance: both her arms are underneath the tray, her hands grasping it from below on the side away from her body.  Needless to say, she has trouble walking this way, and even more difficulty putting the tray down without dumping it.  What for?  She carries it out the same way, and watching the actress pick it up that way—sliding her arms under the tray when it’s on a chest—is a sight to behold.  It’s an actor’s—or director’s—choice, not a character’s.) 

The thing is, the coffee’s in a samovar, with a small pot (hot water, apparently) sitting on top of it.  First of all, samovars are for tea, not coffee or any other drink.  They’re not a Russian equivalent to a hot-drink urn.  Second—and this is the error most people make if they don’t know about samovars—the “urn” isn’t for the tea—it’s filled with hot water.  The little pot on top holds tea essence (essentially very, very strong tea), kept hot by the water in the samovar. 

The drinkers pour a small amount of the tea essence into a cup—actually, most often a glass; Russians drink their tea (and their coffee often, too) from glasses—then add hot water from the samovar to dilute it to their taste.  What this cast does is run coffee out of the samovar—as if it’s a coffee urn—and then add water from the little pot.  I’ve never heard of anyone putting water in coffee—tea, yes, if it’s too strong, but not coffee. 

Now, I looked at this in the original, too, to see if the stage directions had called for Dunyasha to bring in a samovar—but the text says she brings in a kofeinik, a coffee pot.  Someone was being a smarty-pants!  So, maybe no one else would have noticed this—or cared—but to me it shrieked, “These people don’t know what they’re doing!”  (Hey, it’s a Russian play—Russians use samovars!  We should use one.)       

Okay, maybe all these cavils about the technical production are picayune—though I think they’re emblematic—but then you have the acting and directing.  Now, nothing is actually bad or embarrassing, but few of the actors seem to have a real idea what the characters are going through—or even saying. 

As Isherwood pointed out, Alvin Epstein [1925-2018] as Firs is terrific—a complete character creation that’s consistent and interesting and alive (barely, considering the character’s like 150 or something).  But Firs is mostly off in his own world anyway, so the actor can safely create his character pretty much independent of everyone else. 

The main problem with all the rest of the cast, even the members Isherwood singled out for low praise, is that they’re all in different plays.  No one really connects with anyone else, and no one feeds off of anyone else.  What it looks like to me is as if each actor has created his or her character alone, then they all assembled, 19th-century style, and blocked the action the day before they opened. 

It also sounds as if they all just memorized words without much attention to what they’re saying—or, more consequently, what they’re feeling.  Even Larry Bryggman as Gayev, who turns in an amusing performance (a little too like the loopy judge he played in Romance, the David Mamet farce I saw at the Atlantic in February [see my report posted on 21 August 2013]), seems to have been working in a bubble by himself; his work is just a little more complex and thorough than anyone else’s (except, of course, Epstein’s). 

The central omission, as far as I’m concerned, is the missing center of the play.  You know that little item, the cherry orchard?  Aside from being Chekhov’s central symbol for the old world that’s disappearing while the new, unknown one is forming, the orchard is also the most prominent focus of Ranevskaya and her family and household.  (Ummm . . . that’s why it’s the play’s title.) 

I mean, they let themselves go broke and have the estate sold out from under them because they won’t sell the orchard for the land and see it cleared for dachas.  They lose everything rather than sacrifice the orchard.  But the only time you know this cast is even thinking of the orchard is when the lines refer to it. 

I think you can keep the orchard center stage metaphorically without its being visible to the audience (as it was constantly in the famous Andrei Serban production at Lincoln Center in ’77), but the actors—with the aid of the director—have to accomplish this.  No one did. 

(Firs has a wonderful moment at the end, by the way, when he’s been left behind in the empty house and the workmen are chopping down the cherry trees outside—the orchard is out in the auditorium—and he stands, lost in his fog, looking confusedly out the imaginary window down front, his lips moving in silent, unintelligible monologue and his eyebrows twitching in befuddlement.  Now, that’s acting!  Total communication without a word or sound uttered.) 

The final result is that I didn’t believe any of the actors (except, again, Epstein).  Their trouble with the words may have been exacerbated by the adaptation (there were several line bobbles, which shouldn’t be happening at this stage of the run—unless, of course, the actors aren’t really paying attention!), but the missing center of the play and the lack of connection between the characters are the fault of the cast and director Zigler, one of the founders of the Atlantic, who’s staged a lot of Mamet both at the Atlantic and elsewhere, and who also teaches theater. 

Diana complained about the slapstick she felt is used inappropriately in the production, but the only character who is prone to pratfalls was Yepikhodov (Todd Weeks), who’s portrayed as inept and clumsy, so it doesn’t bother me.  But one instance does bother me—because of how it’s set up, not because it occurs. 

When Act III opens, the set includes a sofa along a wall jutting out from left center.  To the right of the sofa is a small end table—but the right end of the sofa’s at the very end of the wall, so the table’s set so that it stands out in the entranceway into the room.  As soon as the lights came up on the set, I said to myself, “Self!  (Nyuk-nyuk)  Why would anyone put a table there—it’s just begging to be tripped over.” 

Sure enough, Yepikhodov makes an abrupt exit, spinning around suddenly and stumbling right into the table, knocking it over.  (I think he also accidentally broke it—when Semyonov-Pishchik [Peter Maloney] tried to right it, it wouldn’t stand up again; one of the legs seemed to have broken off.)  Once again, Zigler seems to have selected a bit for its theatrical effect, not its fitness for the circumstances: he had to fudge the set-up to get it to happen.  

In what seems like an inapposite cross-cultural reference, the cruel nickname for Yepikhodov in Donaghy’s version is “Schlepikhodov.”  In van Itallie’s translation, the soubriquet is taken directly from the Russian: “Twenty-two Misfortunes.” 

Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think a Russian aristocratic family or its servants would come up with so obvious a Yiddish expression.  This was the time of anti-Jewish pogroms, after all.  And Yiddishisms weren’t as common among non-Jews as they are today in New York.  Small thing, maybe, but it seems wrong—a joke for the New York audience that Chekhov’s Russians would never have made.  

(Furthermore, “Schlepikhodov” isn’t even an apt joke.  The character is portrayed as inept and clumsy, but schlep means “drag, pull, heave” [as a heavy load] or “lag behind.”  In German, a Schlepper is a tugboat, but in Yiddish, schlepper means a stupid, ignorant, or foolish person.   

(A word for a clumsy person would be schlemiel or zhlub.  Of course, they don’t rhyme with ‘Yep-,’ which is why I presume Zigler/Donaghy went with the inappropriate schlep.  Ah, well!) 

Chekhov is hard to pull off, as Isherwood observes.  Having attempted it myself a few times—most notably, I guess, in a grad-student rep production of The Wood Demon—I can attest to how tricky he is.  I’ve seen a lot of mediocre—and even a few bad—productions of Cherry Orchard and other Chekhovs, and this production isn’t among the worst, by any means.  But it should be much better than it is.  

Fundamental acting and directing principles seem to have been forgotten or lost along the way: being in the world of the play, connecting to the other characters on stage with you, making the main situation of the play real for you.  These are all in Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting, for goodness’ sake!  How hard should it be for professional actors and directors to do these things?  It’s square one, isn’t it? 

Isherwood notes that the Atlantic, which performs in a converted church in Manhattan’s Chelsea [in what was christened the Linda Gross Theater in 2007], is best known for contemporary plays—though I’d debate that it has always “excelled” in this field—and they were clearly out of their depth here—but to have missed the very basics that even second-year acting students would have held on to (I hope, anyway) is almost inexcusable. 

The production might still not have worked—there are many pitfalls in Chekhov—but the result wouldn’t seem so, well, empty.  (And I probably wouldn’t have spotted all those silly little mistakes.)

*  *  *  *
MEMORY
by Jonathan Lichtenstein
Clwyd Theatr Cymru (Mold, Wales)
59E59 Theaters (Theater A)
5 June 2007 

I pretty much figured I was through with theater for the summer after the last play of Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson season (King Hedley II, which I saw in March 2007 [and reported about on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2017 in “From My August Wilson Archive, Part 1”]), but my friend Diana called me because she wanted to check out some of the plays in the Brits Off Broadway series in Theater A (the Off-Broadway house) of 59E59 Theaters, a relatively new—it’s only three years old—glass-and-steel theater building on East 59th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. 

I hadn’t really considered the series: the first show reviewed was a Welsh play that is set in four time periods during the rehearsal of a play about a Holocaust survivor, and it sounded iffy (New York Times’ Charles Isherwood: “flawed but compelling drama”).  The rest of the bill is dominated by eight (count ’em, eight!) plays by Alan Ayckbourn, a British playwright for whom I have little regard. 

(I’m being kind.  I decided after one of the three plays in The Norman Conquests back in June 1976 that I just wasn’t going to pay money to see Ayckbourn’s plays anymore.)  But Diana wanted to see the Welsh play, Memory, by the company Clwyd Theatr Cymru [now Theatr Clwyd]; Cymru is Welsh for Wales and Clwyd is a county in the north-east corner of the country (which I wouldn’t want to try to pronounce).  I agreed to go with her, so we went on Friday, 25 May [2007].  The play was in English.

Unhappily, I was right about the play.  The New York Times review had been mixed but essentially positive (especially about the acting), but I found that Isherwood oversold the play even with his misgivings.  (He called it “engrossing throughout.”) 

Besides that, unfortunately, I have a problem with Holocaust stories, fictional or documentary: I get so angry that I get uncomfortable with the my own reaction.  Usually, I just don’t watch movies or TV shows on the subject—but I hadn’t considered the problem in this case.

The play—directed by Terry Hands, onetime artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—is set in a theater where a diegetic play, also called Memory, is in rehearsal.  It’s about a 70-something Holocaust survivor in her East Berlin apartment in 1990 (the year Germany and the city of Berlin reunified—in October—and communist East Germany ceased to exist) where her grandson, Peter, whom she’s never seen, is coming for a visit to hear her stories of heroism and escape during the Nazi regime. 

When scenes from Eva’s past are being rehearsed, the time is the 1930s-’40s in Berlin; when the actors are just chatting among themselves, it is 2007 in Britain (the specific locale isn’t designated, but since the cast, who use their real first names as the diegetic “actors” and “director,” are all Welsh, I assume the play is being staged somewhere in Wales, probably Mold, the company’s hometown (150 miles north of Cardiff). 

The fourth locale is Bethlehem in 2006 where a young Israeli bureaucrat is trying to get a stubborn Palestinian to move out of his house which will be destroyed to make way for the “security fence.”  Author Jonathan Lichtenstein (b. 1957) sees parallels between the various times and locales: there’s a wall going up in Palestine in 2006; there was a wall that came down in Berlin in 1989 (a piece of which Peter brings his grandmother—who inspects it for blood and bullet holes). 

People in Palestine are being displaced from their homes in the land of their birth; Jews in Berlin are being displaced from their homes to a series of temporary “allotments.”  In all four times and places (1930s and ’40s Nazi Germany, 1990 East Berlin, 2006 Bethlehem, 2007 Britain), someone is a pianist—an artificial parallel that has little consequence dramatically, as far as I could see.  Maybe I just missed it.

My problem with Memory, aside from my difficulty with Holocaust tales, isn’t that I have no sympathy for the Palestinians or that I like the idea of the security fence.  Dramatically, however (not to say politically as well—the Palestinian circumstances are not equivalent to the Holocaust), the parallels Lichtenstein (who, despite his name, is Welsh) depicts are all superficial and obvious.  The events and circumstances he portrays have all been used—overused, I’d say—in literature (prose, plays, films, TV) for decades and he doesn’t say anything new or revealing about any of them. 

Some of them even seemed contrived and artificial.  For instance, in the Nazi-era Berlin stories, Eva (Vivien Parry) and her fiancé/husband, Aron (Simon Nehan), have a German friend, Felix (Daniel Hawksford), who becomes Aron’s business partner.  As the Nazis gain power and start their “race” policies, Felix slowly becomes a party functionary—even an SS officer (like, we’re going to be surprised when a guy in an SS uniform turns nasty!)—and a willing activist in the expulsions and transportations. 

In Bethlehem, Isaac (Oliver Ryan) first comes to Bashar’s house to persuade him to move with no emotional commitment; it’s just a task to perform (that is “orders” to “obey”).  But as he continues to meet with the recalcitrant Bashar (Ifan Huw Dafydd), the Israeli bureaucrat begins to like and even admire the Palestinian man who just doesn’t want to leave his home. 

The mirror images—both also clichés—are just too perfectly matched.  Not one incident in the play, in any of the time periods, is unpredictable.  The only adjustment that didn’t make immediate sense—but isn’t very convincing, either—is Eva’s attitude towards her grandson, Peter (Lee Haven-Jones).  She not only doesn’t want to talk about her actions when she tried to escape Germany in the ’40s, but she’s generally hostile to Peter from the moment he arrives at her apartment, soaked from a hard rain outside. 

Why is Eva so angry at Peter?  What had he done, if anything?  Well, nothing, really.  He just didn’t visit for a year after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (he had to save up for the trip).  Apparently she’s angry because he didn’t come sooner—though she never says so (I’m supposing this, it’s just a guess on my part—otherwise I have no clue at all). 

As I said, it isn’t very convincing.  It struck me as just something Lichtenstein threw in to make Eva a little mysterious—aside from her reluctance to talk about her escape.  The key to that turns out to be another cliché.

Eva’s legend in the family is that she had been protecting two boys who were the sons of another couple.  When her own daughter—Peter’s mother—was born, she was able to get her out of Germany on a Kindertransport, but could only afford one passage.  The story was told that when she, Aron, and the boys were boarding a train to try to leave Germany, she protected the boys with her own body when a Nazi soldier threatened to shoot them for crying. 

The truth, it turns out, is that the boys weren’t saved at all—the soldier shot them both through the head with a single bullet.  While it’s understandable that Eva wouldn’t want this story revealed—or even to remember it—the story itself isn’t a new one—it’s been used many times before and I, at least, saw it coming long before Eva tells the truth.

In the end, what with all the clichés and overused plot elements, I never really figured out why Lichtenstein, whose own father apparently escaped Germany in a Kindertransport, wanted to tell—or retell—these events.  The most poignant idea in the play is how Eva contends with acknowledging to herself—through Peter—what really happened 45 years earlier. 

The tag-line in the program is “The recovery of memory is a present-day activity.  It’s not the past.  Memory occurs in the present.  Memory must live in the present and it must be truthful.”  But that’s not a new idea, either—and the exploration isn’t very deep.  Making the events part of a play in rehearsal—also not an uncommon tactic—doesn’t make them new or revealing. 

It doesn’t even add distance because, first, the actors are so emotionally wrapped up in their characters that the empathy Bertolt Brecht fought to avoid is nearly inevitable—it certainly isn’t being eschewed; and, second, the conceit of the rehearsal is dropped after one or two scenes, and the play-within-the-play unfolds with only the interruptions of shifting to Palestine and back to Berlin.  

I felt cheated, even at only 90 minutes.  I was misled by relatively positive reviews (Marilyn Stasio of Variety was also generally complimentary: “emotionally devastating production,” “finds fresh meaning in past atrocities”) which, as I said, I think oversold the play.  Yes, the performances were nice—but not special.  Just good, solid, repertory acting. 

The little personal problems of the actors at the rehearsal—one’s worried about feeding the parking meter—didn’t add to the drama, by the way.  It was just another gimmick.  But even this element had its curiosities: Peter, the grandson, is a music-school drop-out, and when Eva gets him to play for her—as I said, each scene has a pianist; Bashar also has a piano in his house—the actor, Lee, doesn’t play.  The (diegetic) director (Christian McKay) does, and Lee stands next to the piano! 

Now, the first time this happens, Lee complains that he’s a piano teacher, so he should be playing.  We never learn why this odd set-up happens.  I have no guess—except maybe that the actual Lee Haven-Jones isn’t a pianist—but then why make the fuss over the character Lee being a piano teacher?  Got me! 

This is not the only inexplicable occurrence in the production.  Near the end of the play, Peter brings a Hanukkah menorah on stage and sets it on the floor down center.  There’s no dialogue to accompany this act, as he lights all the candles.  (I was glad to see he did it correctly—lighting the shamus first then using it to light the other eight candles—but he never says the broche.)  I have no idea why Lichtenstein or Hands, whoever made the choice, put this in.  There’s no indication that the 1990 scenes take place at Hanukkah—and we certainly don’t need the reminder that Peter and Eva are Jewish.

I don’t know why this play exists or is staged.  (That’s the basic dramaturg’s question: Why this play, why now, and why here?)  and I certainly don’t know why it got such positive reviews (though a few papers—the Post, Daily News, and Newsday—didn’t run notices at all).  Diana suggested that plays about the Holocaust get a bye from critical examination—they’re untouchable.  I don’t know if that’s true—I’ve never noticed it one way or the other before. 

I can tell you, like it or not, that if I were still writing reviews, I’d be harsher on this play than the three critics I read (Andy Propst of the Village Voice was the third: “potent exploration,” “compelling tales,” “a theatrical blow that sends us reeling”). 

Diana said that plays about gay people also get special treatment—though I’m pretty sure that’s inaccurate.  (I remember, however, that back in the ’80s I was writing reviews for the New York Native, the major gay weekly in New York for a few decades before it went bankrupt in the ’90s, and was assigned to write up a new Robert Patrick play.  He was a darling of the gay community then, still riding the high of Kennedy’s Children—he was a local gay writer who made it to Broadway! 

(Well, I felt that Patrick had been writing the same lousy play for years by this time—and I said so in my review.  But I was concerned enough with my criticism that I called my editor, Terry Helbing [1951-94]—who had been artistic director of the Meridian Gay Theatre when I was auditioning around the city, so I had known who he was before I took the reviewer job. 

(I warned him that I was going to pan the play by a gay icon and I didn’t know how his readers would react.  As far as I know, though, no one objected when the review was published [“Hello, Bob,” 29 October 1990].  Patrick’s was one of only a few gay plays I saw for the Native—another was a lesbian, radical feminist play that I admitted I didn’t understand [The Rug of Identity, 15 May 1989]: I said I didn’t think I was the audience they expected to play for!—but not understanding and panning are two different things.)

All in all, Memory was very disappointing.  Isherwood remarks that the time-shifting is like “a playwright randomly changing channels” and the Village Voice interprets the Bethlehem and Berlin scenes as two different plays in rehearsal.  There’s nothing in the text to bear this latter out and neither the Times nor Variety cops to it—and I didn’t see it that way at all. 

Everyone remarked especially, after noting the casualness with which the cast approached the circumstances, on Vivien Parry’s transformation, without the aid of make-up and elaborate costuming, from a young woman to a septuagenarian recluse.  Okay, she was good at that—but it’s a trick a lot of actors have accomplished over the past few years—always to the same astonishment from reviewers.  It’s damn near an actor’s stock in trade—especially good ones.  

Any actors with some talent who went through college theater found themselves playing the old people—we (yes, it happened to me a lot) had the chops to pull it off!  I’m sorry (no I’m not) if that sounds like an ex-actor’s sour grapes—maybe it is, but it’s also true.

(I will add, too, that listening to the Welsh dialect is delightful.  The Welsh accent is really very lilting.  I have a friend, an actor, who’s of Welsh extraction and he’s been learning Welsh—an amazingly hard language, I gather; the spelling alone is daunting—and it’s quite beautiful to hear.  That’s all irrelevant, of course.)