GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE OCTOBER 29, 1993

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ENTERTAINMENT

Masterful staging captures Chekhov's vision, but production ultimately fails

The Cherry Orchard Great Lakes Theatre Festival

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

The Great Lakes Theatre Festival production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is very close to being a masterpiece of staging and design. Director Gerald Freedman and designers John Ezell (scenery), Lawrence Casey (costumes) and Mary Jo Dondlinger (lights) work with a very narrow palette of colors, predominantly greys, browns and beiges and use a different key accent for each act. The pictures they create float before the audience, fragile and faded, like a set of hand-tinted photographs from a past we hardly remember.

Act I is a study in grey and brown with faded sky blue highlights and touches of white. There are no walls to the room, the nursery on Madame Ranyevskaya's country estate. Furniture and a large doorway at center delimit the space. Behind and over the stage we see the sweep of the branches of the blossoming cherry trees. A model of the room with walls and furniture hovers at the upstage. left corner of the space. The costumes pick up the blue highlights of the set in a tie, in a jacket, or in the trim of a dress. Ranyevskaya is set off from the others in a dusty rose lace gown.

The set for the Act II is dominated by a large oval bas-relief picture of the rocky countryside with religious monuments and a

chapel. A few grey rocks on the stage are highlighted with a rust colored moss, and there are telephone poles in the distance. The vivid rust color reappears in pants, ties, vests and other costume details. A huge arch draped, with faded and stained red curtains, serves as the entrance from the salon to the offstage ballroom of Act III. The branches of the cherry trees again sweep across the back of the set, and a model of the ballroom with a crystal chandelier floats in the upstage left corner of the space. Red is the theme color worked through motifs in the costumes. It is not a vibrant red, but rather a red with some purple in it. The last act returns to the nursery, but the furniture is covered with grey cloths, and the model room is bare. The costumes work with a faded magenta and greys.

Freedman's staging subtly plays with the pictorial beauty of the delicate colors. Images form, dissolve, and form again before our eyes. It is a kind of visual music with a different theme and variations for each act. With so much mastery of visual style and stage composition, I regret saying that the production is not completely successful. This is largely due to a rather flat and uninteresting performance by Piper Laurie in the focal role of Madame Ranyevskaya. It is rather like having a gaping hole torn in the center of an otherwise perfectly realized picture.

The rest of the acting in the production is generally excellent except for a rather broad rendering of Simeonov-Pishchik by Jim

Hillgartner. I especially liked Reno Roop's fussy, childish, self-indulgent and ineffectual Gayev. John Woodson plays Lopakhin as a well-established businessman, warmhearted and sincere, who will be the new ruling class. This interpretation deemphasises the traditional focus on Lopakhin's peasant background. Tisha Roth's Varya is finely poised between the character's affection for and distance from her adopted family.

I found an interesting queer sensibility in the interpretation of Gayev, Madame Ranyevskaya's bachelor brother, and in the mannish governess, Charlotta Ivanova, played by Sarah Burke. The way the two parts are played is distinctly queer. There is even a hint that Gayev may have seduced the servant, Yasha, when he was a youth. The evident queerness of the characters is clearly understood and tolerated, but not acknowledged, which was often the case in high society in the late 19th century.

Chekhov's vision in The Cherry Orchard is bitterly comic. He portrays the triviality, waste and failure in the lives of his characters. But there is a poignancy to Chekhov's comedy, and he seems to have a compassion for the very real humanness of people he portrays. Freedman and his designers practice an art of the theater that is as subtle and finely wrought as Chekhov's writing and come very close to capturing his unique vision. This makes the ultimate failure of the production all the more heartbreaking.

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