Every time it feels as if we’re nearing a state of Chekhoverdose, a great production rolls around to remind us of the Russian writer’s uncanny power to pull us into his fold.
Andrew Scott’s solo performance of “Vanya” at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which the New York Times’s critic Jesse Green called “a reset,” seems to have that effect on many.
For me, it’s Benedict Andrews’s electric take on “The Cherry Orchard” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which left me so emotional, happy — from being reminded of the power of theater to surprise and thrill — and plain revved up that I struggled to fall asleep that night.
A brief recap for those who can’t tell their sisters from their seagulls: “The Cherry Orchard” is the one in which the head of a once-wealthy family visits her estate for the first time in five years, and everybody confronts the reality that the beloved piece of land in the title must be sold to settle debts.
Usually that matriarch, Ranevskaya is the play’s magnetic center, a grande dame whose efforts to come to terms with her world’s downfall embody the changes brewing in an entire society. In Andrews’s adaptation and staging, Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss, all melancholy grace and understated charisma) feels more like a part of a true ensemble. When not doing a scene, she and the other characters sit in the audience, calmly watching the proceedings. The in-the-round staging reinforces the feeling that we are them and they are us.
Chekhov plays lend themselves to almost infinite variations and approaches, and Andrews’s is relatively mild compared to some radical deconstructions that mauled Chekhov beyond instant recognition.
At first glance, it’s as if Andrews merely tried to incorporate every item (except for video) on the current checklist of with-it directing: modern dress and speech, updated talking points (the 1 percent, climate change, social-justice warriors), a rocking live trio, a touch of gender-bending casting (Sarah Slimani plays the male servant Yasha, now a personal assistant puffing on a vape).
There are even a few nonintrusive interactive touches. A theatergoer becomes a bookcase. Ranevskaya’s brother, Gaev (Michael Gould), asked me to name a price for the orchard. (Full disclosure: At intermission, Gould rewarded my input with a lollipop.)
It’s what the show, which first ran at Donmar Warehouse in London last year, does with all those elements that is so bracing. It’s as if a juggler somehow kept a bunch of soap bubbles in the air: They’re all so fragile that they could pop at any time, yet they continue to float.
Andrews is a lot more successful here than in his flashy productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” with Gillian Anderson (2016) and “The Maids” with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert (2014).
For example, he keeps the actors who are onstage in near-constant motion. They amble or subtly reposition themselves to face different sections of the audience, giving the impression that the story (which, ironically, is partly about a social class in stasis) is always flowing.
The overall effect feels shambolic at times. Someone is always about to laugh or cry, passionately argue or storm out, warble (the actors perform songs by Nick Cave and Will Oldham, among others) or go off the rails. But that chaos is extraordinarily controlled and in service of the characters, who remain compelling in their contradictions.
The “eternal student” Trofimov (Daniel Monks), for example, is still so annoyingly self-righteous that you can’t quite blame Ranevskaya for calling him “a killjoy, a whack job, a freak.” But his lucid tirades drew gasps at the performance I attended — “we’re being held hostage by proto-fascist tech oligarchy while they amass obscene wealth, rob the rest of us blind, so they can fly off to Mars leaving us on a dead planet,” and so on.
As for the brash nouveau riche Lopakhin (Adeel Akhtar), Ranevskaya may look down on him, but he, too, knows which way the wind is blowing. When he suggests that the family could make money by building and renting out country homes where the orchard is, Ranevskaya shudders haughtily. “Dachas filled with tourists,” she says. “Sorry but what a nightmare.”
The tension between Akhtar’s coiled energy and Hoss’s elegant, pained resignation provides a good part of the show’s crackle. Hoss, a German actress best known in this country for “Tár” and “Homeland” — but with sterling stage credits that include “Returning to Reims” at St. Ann’s in 2018 — at first appears to portray a hesitant figure who is holding back. Maybe this Ranevskaya is too imperial to show emotion, or too impervious to the reality of her family’s situation.
She is neither, we ultimately realize. At one point a homeless urchin, played by Kagani Paul Moonlight X Byler Jackson, wanders in, asking in to cut through the property, as well as for money. The boy sings John Prine’s “Angel of Montgomery,” eventually facing a sobbing Ranevskaya. “Just give me one thing / That I can hold on to,” the lyrics go. What will she hold on to as her world crumbles? The moment is as transcendent as any onstage this year.
The Cherry Orchard
Through April 27 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.
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