The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov, 1904 [Translation by Ann Dunnigan] ★

What a Bringdown

Chekhov did comedy like Capone did Valentine’s Day.

Further proof of this comes in the form of The Cherry Orchard, a play so non-comedic it was advertised as a tragedy in its Moscow debut, causing Chekhov to blow up.

Seeing death, destruction, and despair aplenty, the director, legendary acting instructor Konstantin Stanislavski, knew it was beyond even his powers to get his cast to play funny. “But Anton Pavlovich, you have them crying many times in the stage directions,” he pointed out.

Chekhov disagreed vehemently, declaring his play “happy” and ruined by the premiere’s tragic approach. Shortly after, Chekhov died at the age of 44. It was one way to end a debate, though I think the play’s performance history reflects Stanislavski’s view. The play may still be called a “comedy,” but most people know it’s not.

At least I know it’s not.

A scene from the 1904 premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre shows the large cast and ambitious staging, designed to accommodate several simultaneous interactions. The trees of the cherry orchard seem to come out of the wallpaper behind them.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cherry_Orchard

An aristocratic matriarch, Madame Ranevskaya, returns to her provincial Russian estate after running out of money in Paris. She has two daughters, a pair of servants, and much debt. Her bank is about to foreclose on her estate and its famed acres of cherry trees. She does not care.

LOPAKHIN: Both the cherry orchard and the land must be leased for summer cottages, and it must be done now, as quickly as possible – the auction is close at hand…. Once you definitely decide on the cottages, you can raise as much money as you like, and then you are saved.

MADAME RANEVSKAYA: Cottages, summer people – forgive me, but it’s so vulgar. [Act I]

The play’s core theme is collapse. While Madame Ranevskaya drifts from apathy to lethargy, we see her social order falling apart as former serfs gain power and greedily upset the order of things. Nowhere is this situation clearer and more tragic than the fate of that cherry orchard.

TROFIMOV: Don’t you see that from every cherry tree, from every leaf and trunk, human beings are peering out at you? Don’t you hear their voices? To possess living souls – that has corrupted all of you, those who lived before and you who are living now, so that your mother, you, your uncle, no longer perceive that you are living in debt, at someone else’s expense, at the expense of those whom you wouldn’t allow to cross your threshold… [Act II]

Trofimov is the cast’s proto-Marxist, marking his own proletarian place between the lazy aristocrats who prove poor stewards of the cherry orchard, and a peasant-turned-land-baron named Lopakhin who wants to tear everything down for fast money. Trofimov expresses a vision of “advancing toward the highest truth, the highest happiness attainable on earth,” though he adds he may not see this happen with his own eyes.

Chekhov with his wife Olga Knipper, in 1901. Olga was an actress who performed in many Chekhov plays, including the premiere of The Cherry Orchard, where she played Madame Ranevskaya.
Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/booklover-fjolsvior-anton-chekhov-and-olga-knipper--457045062164531225/ 

He is so dedicated to his egalitarian vision that he fancies himself above love, shrugging off the proffered affections of Madame Ranevskaya’s daughter, Anya. Madame Ranevskaya’s other daughter, Varya, has been matched by her mother with Lopakhin, but neither is really interested in marrying the other.

VARYA: I’ve washed my hands of him, it makes me miserable to see him… Everyone talks of our wedding, they all congratulate me, and actually there’s nothing to it – it’s all like a dream. [In a different tone.] You have a brooch like a bee. [Act I]

A lack of emotional investment in every exchange is statement itself: If tragedy is when bad things happen to good people, comedy is when they happen to people we don’t care about. Maybe Chekhov had a point.

Reading Uncle Vanya, I struggled similarly with the characters, but at least there I understood what they were doing and felt for them a bit. In The Cherry Orchard, lack of direction seems the sole point. Madame Ranevskaya has a tragic backstory, a young son who drowned in the river running by the estate, and she refuses to face any unpleasant reality, whether it be the boy, the foreclosure, or the fact her deadbeat lover back in Paris is using her as an easy rider.

MADAME RANEVSKAYA: I love him love him… It’s a millstone round my neck, I’m sinking to the bottom with it, but I love that stone, I cannot live without it. [Act III]

The 13-member cast from a 2016 Chekhov Collective staging in Toronto presents an idea of the varying social types on display, not to mention the heavy stage traffic the director must handle.
Image from https://www.mooneyontheatre.com/2016/01/30/the-cherry-orchard-the-chekhov-collectivetheatrus/

Another problem this play has for me, beyond those of tone, characters, and situation, is that Chekhov crams too many people in it. In addition to Madame Ranevskaya, Trofimov, Lopakhin, and the two daughters, there is an inept uncle, a leechy neighbor, a governess that performs magic tricks, a maid who fancies a snotty manservant who wants to go back to Paris, and a clumsy clerk who bumbles around the background swallowing down the contempt of everyone around him:

YEPIKHODOV: Every day some misfortune happens to me. But I don’t complain, I’m used to it, I even smile. [Act I]

There is also a comic rustic, an old servant named Firs who now and again explains how this wasn’t the way in the old days. No one is pleasant to him either; the manservant even tells him to drop dead; jokes about his deafness and being out of step pass here for laughs.

I found myself liking only one of these characters, the ex-peasant Lopakhin. I didn’t want him taking down those trees, but given the family who owned them, it was clear they were heading for the lumber mill anyway. Lopakhin does seem to care about the family’s fate, enough to urge they lease their land to forestall foreclosure and keep control. While Lopakhin doesn’t exactly radiate sincerity, he seems a good egg, being above-board in his dealings, but it clear from his smug asides that we the audience should not like him. “I bought the estate where my father and grandfather were slaves, where they weren’t even allowed in the kitchen,” he exults in Act III.

An outdoor scene from a 2016 Broadway staging which featured Diane Lane as Madame Ranevskaya and Joel Grey as Firs. Modern productions can veer wildly in their staging, with this one opting for a more abstract design.
Image from http://exeuntnyc.com/reviews/review-cherry-orchard-american-airlines-theatre/

Russia was riding an entrepreneurial wave at the dawn of the 20^th century. Having liberated 23 million people with passage of the Emancipation Reform of 1861, the country now reaped an economic benefit in the form of new capital and more private land ownership. In the last decade before the Mensheviks and then the Bolsheviks changed everything, Russia’s future was up for grabs, which this play reflects.

As a historical document, The Cherry Orchard thus has some interest, and might have more going for it if it made a clear point about anything. For all Trofimov’s posturing about a better path, it is not clear he has anything to offer. He has nothing to offer Anya, anyway, while vexing her mother talking about her dead son and her faithless lover. When Lopakhin rags on him for being an “eternal student,” it strikes home.

If Chekhov is pointing out the hollowness of Trofimov’s elitist common-man pose, he could do a better job explaining why, perhaps by letting another character present something other than the most selfish perspective. Is the overarching message that the more life changes, the more it endangers the natural goodness of the earth? Or that rich people get too much from life? Madame Ranevskaya tells us she is happy enough without her estate, but adds the money she got for it won’t last long. Everything dies, we are reminded.

I was unmoved. Not curiously unmoved, being as it is a Chekhov play, but even for him The Cherry Orchard has something hard and undigestible at its core. My challenge in reconciling his place at the summit of modern drama continues for another day.