Theater review: ART finds some farce in 'The Cherry Orchard'

Linda Alper, Michael Mendelson and Tim Blough in The Cherry Orchard

By Barry Johnson

I laughed more than I thought I would at Artists Repertory Theatre's The Cherry Orchard, adapted by Richard Kramer and directed by Jon Kretzu. It was funny, both because of some broadly played characterizations and the original wit in Chekhov's script. Not that all is jolly on the formerly great Russian estate that is headed for the auction block -- and the subdivider. No, it's a sad production, too, which makes perfect sense.

The problem that theater folk face when dealing with The Cherry Orchard  is an exchange of telegrams between the playwright Anton Chekhov and its first director, Konstantine Stanislavsky. Here's how Chekhov biographer V.S. Pritchett describes them:

There was only one jarring note:  Stanislavsky had called the play "a truly great tragedy." Tartly, and fearing Stanislavsky's possessiveness, Chekhov replied that it was not even a drama -- "It is a farce."

Pritchett eventually agrees with Chekhov: "It is a farce because the people are a disordered chorus who have lost their gods and invent themselves." As Pritchett says earlier, no one in The Cherry Orchard really listens to anyone else.

Still, when we think of farces written around the same time as The Cherry Orchard, we think of something like Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest or Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear -- both of which seem far more absurd and funny to us today.  And I've never seen a production of The Cherry Orchard played that way, like an episode of Seinfeld.  Our thinking about Chekhov is more in line with Maxim Gorky's comments arising from a Chekhov short story:

"Chekhov has been reproached with having no philosophy. The reproach is absurd... Ever more often our ears can catch in his stories the melancholy but severe and deserved reproach that men do not know how to live, but at the same time, his sympathy with all men glows even brighter."

Kramer and Kretzu give us that Chekhov, but they give the farce element a nod, too, and it makes for a livelier evening as a result. The image that sticks with me is Vana O'Brien as the strange governess Charlotta doing magic tricks, stalking about with a rifle, and asking, "Who am I?"