'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.]