THE CHERRY ORCHARD
In the play, the genteel Madam Ranevskaya is in danger of losing her beloved family estate and its ancient cherry orchard. She and her family are unable to confront the situation, ignoring the sensible advice of Lopakhin, a family friend. A onetime peasant who became a successful businessman while Ranevskaya was abroad, Lopakhin ends up buying the estate–the place where his father was once a slave. For him this is both a joyous liberation and a stunning betrayal of Ranevskaya, the woman he worships.
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Zasadny suggests that Ranevskaya and her people have lost their land because they’ve lost any spiritual connection to it–that they’ve been cast out of the garden. While that’s an interesting idea, it seems to me these people lack not a spiritual connection with nature but any sense of reality. Ranevskaya loses the cherry orchard in part because she’s reluctant to chop it down. So Zasadny’s grand theatrical gesture of placing a Gypsy onstage–representing this spiritual link–to observe the action and dances between acts seems merely inappropriate, like so much of the humor and so much of the suffering here. Veering from buffoonery to high tragedy, this production misses entirely the tightrope that Chekhov stretched so brilliantly between the two. It’s time directors stopped interpreting Chekhov and started trusting him.
