by David Anthony Fox

The Cherry Orchard

McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, NJ, through April 16, 609-258-2787

For Anton Chekhov, the world ended neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with the simple chopping down of trees.

In The Cherry Orchard (his last play, written in 1903), Lyubov Andreyevna, after a sojourn of several years in Paris, returns to her adored Russian home. There she is surrounded by family (brother Gayev, daughter Anya, adopted daughter Varya), friends (tutor Petya Trofimov, neighbor Semyonov-Pishchick), and retinue (ancient butler Firs, clerk Yepikhodov, valet Yasha, maid Dunyasha). Together the group lives in a world of dreams and reality, past and present. Charmingly guileless Lyubov seems barely aware that the family is approaching financial ruin, and that the house — along with its celebrated cherry orchard, the largest in the area — will soon be sold to pay their debts.

There is a simple solution, proposed by her friend, the businessman Lopakhin: subdivide the land and live on a smaller piece. But for this family, moderation is incomprehensible. So amid tears, laughter and profligate spending (emotional and financial), the beloved estate is lost.

The beauty of Cherry Orchard is that Chekhov bestows no blame. The aristocratic Ranevskaya, the bourgeois Lopakhin, the proto-revolutionary Trofimov — all are treated compassionately. Few plays are funnier or more poignant. But the McCarter’s Cherry Orchard, directed and adapted by Emily Mann, is misguided in almost every significant respect. I can do little but catalog what goes wrong, in the hope that audiences left unmoved and unconvinced about the play’s greatness will realize the fault lies not with Chekhov:

1. On the most fundamental level, this Cherry Orchard, is dead on arrival because we never believe the characters are talking and listening to one another, nor even inhabiting the same world. Seen here, they are not members of a community but a collection of international vaudeville acts: a borscht belt comedian (Pishchick), a horror-movie psycho (Gayev), a dippy contemporary girl (Anya), etc. Consequently the play’s emotional arc is unfulfilled: The actors make crying sounds, but we don’t believe them.

2. The action is punctuated by crude physical schtick. Lopakhin literally jumps for joy at acquiring the estate, and later gropes Ranevskaya. Dunyasha unzips Yasha’s fly and seems about to fellate him. When Ranevskaya learns that the estate has been sold — the play’s saddest moment — she lurches backward like Margaret Dumont. Poor old Firs can’t expire gracefully in a chair — he has to crawl around on the floor. And on and on.

3. Presiding over the visual staging is the unwritten ghostly image of Grisha, Lyubov’s dead son. This is wrong on two counts: There’s something perverse about finding pathos not in the dialogue but from an invented directorial conceit; and the loss of Grisha is significant but by no means the play’s overarching metaphor, as it becomes here.

4. Mann’s non-traditional (as separate from color-blind) casting — African-American actors in the crucial roles of Lopakhin, Varya and Firs — purposely invites us to think of American history. It is false resonance, at least making us think of the wrong world, at worst leading us far astray: While both societies were based on servitude, the longing for a return to the antebellum American South is too charged to convey the ambiguity of Chekhov’s take on Russian nostalgia for an earlier time.

5. Much of the acting is inadequate. It’s fine to want Lopakhin to have some dignity, but Avery Brooks doesn’t embody the role so much as orate it, in round, buttery tones — he seems to be narrating Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. John Glover’s Gayev recycles his creepy bad twin mannerisms from Love! Valour! Compassion!. As the pious, repressed Varya, Caroline Stefanie Clay rants and flails. Several others are equally egregious, and a few promising performances (Barbara Sukowa as Charlotta, Rob Campbell as Trofimov, Jefferson Mays as Yasha) are sunk by their surroundings.

Amid the chaos, there is consolation in Jane Alexander’s Ranevskaya. This actress is incapable of a dishonest moment, and in her monologues — left largely to her own good instincts — she manages to find genuine emotional connection to the material. It is by no means adequate compensation for all that’s going wrong around her, but that Alexander emerges with dignity, even suggesting what she might accomplish in better circumstances, is little short of miraculous.

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