One of them, huge and ever-present center stage, looks like a futuristic construction crane may have a mind of its own and seems clearly to represent the destruction inherent in “progress.”
And the nine humans have to share the stage with two robots. They must perform behind a scrim on which is projected close-ups of their own images, as well as various words and charts, and amid constantly falling and accumulating blue pieces of paper, which I presume represent leaves from the cherry trees, as well as the falling prospects of the aristocracy. This makes vivid (and comic) Lopakhin’s lack of education and even his peasant roots.īut as fine as they are, the cast has some challenges, created by the director. Among the attention-getting choices in the production is the casting of John McGinty, a native user of American Sign Language, in the role of Pyotr Trofimov, former tutor of Ranevskaya’s son (who had drowned years earlier.) There is one clever scene in which Lopakhin attempts to communicate with Trofimov by using broad clumsy gestures that don’t remotely resemble Trofimov’s elegant ASL – unlike the aristocratic characters in the play, who we’ve seen sign comfortably with Trofimov. The estate has been put up for auction, since she has no money to pay the mortgage, and she ignores the entreaties of Lopakhin (Nael Nacer), the grandson of a serf who is now a wealthy merchant, to generate an income that will save the estate by chopping down the cherry orchard and creating summer homes for the newly enriched middle class.Īs I watched in the third-floor theater of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, I found Hecht beatific as Ranevskaya, Nacer a suitable gruff Lopakhin who smartly avoids performative villainy, and Baryshnikov persuasive (somewhat alarmingly so) as the feeble, dying manservant Firs. She returns after a long stay in Paris to her estate in the Russian countryside that features a renowned cherry orchard. This year, “The Orchard” employs the same two stars, but in a completely new piece – actually, two completely new pieces, because the online and the onstage version offer different experiences.Īs in any version of Chekhov’s play, Lyubov Ranevskaya (Hecht) is a loving, generous Russian aristocrat who has never had to worry about money and so is reckless with it. Last year, Golyak turned this same 1904 play about the fading of the Russian aristocracy into an online video game (“ chekhovOS” - OS as in operating system), starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht. At the end of the play, the cherry orchard isn’t chopped down via video projection, it explodes.īut these touches must compete with many others in this overly busy version of Chekhov’s play, which is conceived and directed by Igor Golyak, the Kyiv-born, Boston-based artistic director of the always-innovating Arlekin Players Theater. The moments in “The Orchard” that suggest the current Russian invasion of Ukraine would surely get the most attention in a more conventionally focused adaptation of “The Cherry Orchard”: About halfway through the production, which is both online and on stage at the Baryshnikov Arts Center through July 3, an ominous looking “passerby” suddenly appears, wearing all-black battledress with a helmet, and speaks in Russian.