"The Cherry Orchard' at Villanova

After the staging of his penultimate play, The Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov told a correspondent that "The next play that I write will be, without fail, funny, very funny." He talked about it as a "four-act vaudeville" where "the devil is running loose."

Most directors don't see The Cherry Orchard that way, but Harriet Power, in her third Chekhov production for the Villanova Theatre, takes the author at his word, or at least his intent. And the result is funny: The opening night audience in Vasey Hall laughed hard and often at the play. But is it Chekhov?

Well, yes. Karl Marx famously remarked that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

By the time Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard, he had already sounded his distinctive dramatic themes: the decline of the old order and the rise of the new; the contrast between dreams of a utopian future and the philistine reality that had already overtaken them; the heartbreak of human relations in such a conjuncture and the cruelty of Cupid's darts in general. This was indeed tragic, at least in the modern sense, where tragedy was a function of wit, and the audience was invited to laugh through its tears.

You can play The Cherry Orchard for tears, but you're missing something if you do— something that comes out only with a harder, more driving edge: the startling modernism that makes this play, as much as anything by Ibsen, the opening gun of the 20th-Century stage.

Frustrated young, idle old

The set-up of The Cherry Orchard is nearly identical to Chekhov's other major plays: a country house under siege, its feckless owners facing dispossession; the frustration of the young and the idleness of the old. There are the usual hangers-on of a decaying order: the scamps and layabouts who prey on the decaying estate; the alienated intellectual who sees more clearly but does nothing. But each of these familiar characters is stretched to the point of contradiction.

Madame Ranyevskaya, the estate's absentee owner who returns only to see it sold out from under her, can't help casting her money at anyone who comes along, and even just losing her valuables. Gayev, her brother, sees the situation more realistically, but makes no serious effort to deal with it.

Lopakhin, the developer who wants to buy the estate, practically begs Ranyevskaya to enter a partnership with him that might "save" it, but is brushed off like an unwelcome tradesman. Trofimov, the graduate student, pontificates about the future while his own future drains away from him, and ignores the romance under his nose.

Confused villain

The minor characters come and go, all but colliding with each other like so many random particles in Power's burlesque staging. The situation is deadly serious, but no one seems to take it seriously, or is perhaps capable of seeing it as serious— that is, as something requiring concentration, decision and action.

These are in fact qualities that only Lopakhin possesses, and even he seems loath to use them, as if the charm of the house— or its spell—has unnerved him. My dear lady, he seems to say to Ranyevskaya, stop me before I actually do this. The villain of the piece is as confused, as fated, as anyone else.

But what, in fact, should the characters do? In other words, what values should they act upon?

Senile serf

Ranyevskaya is sentimental about the estate, but chiefly in terms of the child she lost on it; in other words, as a graveyard. Firs, the ancient retainer and former house serf who is left alone at the play's end, romanticizes the days when master and serf looked out for each other, as if in tender partnership. This is merely senile; and, indeed, everything about the house declares that it is moribund, the relic of a dead order: Even the cherry orchard is no longer picked.

There's nothing to go back to here, nothing to be saved. Sentiment is merely wasted on the place.

Lopakhin, of course, has a vision: He will chop down the orchard and subdivide the estate for vacation cottages. It seems a terrible vision— down deep, Lopakhin knows it is terrible— but at least it's a plan, whereas Trofimov's empty utopianism is nothing at all.

From Chekhov to Pinter

So, what have you when you stand between a dead past and an even more deadening future? You have comedy— but comedy of the deadliest sort. And you have, as a theater director, the task of sharpening the ground between two futilities. That is what Power does.

What in the modern theater, apart from Brecht, doesn't come out of The Cherry Orchard's bleak vision? Certainly O'Neill does. So does Beckett and, at a slightly further remove, Ionesco and Pinter.

Soviet critics were quick to perceive in The Cherry Orchard a deadlock of forces between a dying aristocracy and a ruthless capitalism, and they were perfectly right as far as they went: The characters have an automaton-like quality, as if they embodied conflicted social roles rather than personalities.

The Soviets thought that the new socialist man would resolve these contradictions, and we all know how that turned out. The whole world is the cherry orchard now, and we're all engaged in chopping it down.

Cowardly dilettante

There is a scene in Act III between Ranyevskaya and Trofimov when, agitated and (as usual) looking for sympathy, she turns to him and receives the unhelpful answer that, whether the estate is sold or not, the old order is finished. This comment draws from her a scathing retort that, in a few lines, strips Trofimov's cowardly dilettantism bare.

The change in tone is startling; who is speaking here? No doubt Ranyevskaya is genuinely confused and suffering, but at the same time she wears these emotions like a costume too, or a mask to be lowered on a coldly scrutinizing gaze that spares nothing around it, including herself.

Unsheathed blade

Joanna Rotté, in the role of Ranyevskaya, doesn't try to soften the moment in the interest of character consistency; she turns on the hapless Trofimov (Tim Rinehart) like an unsheathed blade. One sees in this the essence of Chekhov's vision: that where action is blocked, character is expressed as contradiction, a lurching of impulse from side to side (for example, from self-pity to aggression) without outlet.

Something will happen; Lopakhin buys the estate, and the play ends with the sound of the orchard being put to the axe. But that solves nothing for anyone. The old order dies without anything worthy of the name to replace it.

The sound of the falling orchard is, literally, Chekhov's last word in the theater; he would shortly be dead of tuberculosis at the age of 44. A century on, it resounds for us more than ever: our crack of doom.

Student actors and professionals

It is to the credit of the student actors that they hold their own against the more seasoned performers who fill out the play's large cast. The Paul Schmidt translation emphasizes the play's wit and bite, although I have a hard time imagining Chekhov characters saying, "Oh, shut up!" to each other.

Charlotte Cloe Fox Wind's costumes were effective, as were Jerrold R. Forsyth's lights. I saw no particular reason for the cherry trees that ringed the stage, however, especially the one that cut right across my line of vision.

There's no one right way to stage Chekhov, any more than there is for Sophocles or Shakespeare. But The Cherry Orchard contributed so much to the theater of the absurd that it's fitting that a touch of the absurd be brought back to mounting it today. Harriet Power's shrewd, focused production rubs tragedy against slapstick and, for me, injected fresh energy and illumination into a play that has stamped the modern stage as perhaps no other.