At St. Ann’s Warehouse, a Cherry Orchard for the In-the-Know

The children’s old nursery is a rectangle of floor, empty save for an enormous rust-colored Persian carpet. An even bigger expanse of that same carpet masks one long wall. The effect is warm if not quite cozy — the space is a little too abstract for total comfort. The only hint of a cherry tree is a single geometrical white blossom, at the center of the carpet’s pattern on both the wall and the floor. When Lyubov Ranevskaya enters — in billowy rust trousers and a silk blouse covered in white and pink blooms, herself an extension of the space, a manifestation of the flowering trees — she kneels and puts her hand to the woven image. “I slept in here when I was a little girl. When I was innocent and pure …” she says. “The orchard is exactly the same as it was then. It hasn’t changed one bit.”

How much you think Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard has changed in the production now at St. Ann’s Warehouse — a warehouse-to-warehouse transfer, coming from London’s Donmar — might depend on how much intimacy you already feel with the play, the extent to which its characters and its moment-to-moment flow of action are already accompanying you in detail as you settle in among the rugs. Director Benedict Andrews has adapted the text with a heavy, though not inelegant, push toward contemporary British rhythms and mores, and the ensemble gets the street-clothes-with-a-nod-to-character treatment. Their resting positions are seats in the audience, where each actor returns when not in a scene, and at the top of the show, you might mistake plenty of them for ticket-buying Brooklynites. There’s Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss), impractical, romantic soul and cash-poor aristocratic matriarch of Chekhov’s doomed country estate, in her flowery blouse; her brother, Leonid Gaev (Michael Gould), a sad clown at heart, in joggers and a tired old T-shirt featuring a cat in Groucho glasses. Lopakhin (Adeel Akhtar), the driven, insecure capitalist who grew up a peasant, wears the slim dark suit, gold chains, and sockless loafers of a man with money who’s trying to decide how much to perform his wealth. Ranevskaya’s 17-year-old daughter Anya’s (Sadie Soverall) fuzzy sweater has cherries on it. The not-quite-still-a-boy she’s got her eye on, the radically minded “eternal student” Pyotr Trofimov (Daniel Monks), wears glasses and flannel and goes barefoot.

All those choices feel true to the human beings of Chekhov’s play — yet if you’re hoping to start at the beginning with The Cherry Orchard, Andrews’s deliberately underdressed treatment might leave you hustling to catch up. When a contemporary director revisits such a “classic,” can both the professor of Chekhov and the newcomer be served at once? When is less more, and when is more necessary? There’s no doubt that the current fashion — especially among Brits and, in Andrews’s case, Australians — is for stripping away. You can see it all over New York at the moment: in Rebecca Frecknall’s Streetcar, in Sam Yates’s Vanya with Andrew Scott, in Jamie Lloyd’s almost self-parodying Sunset Blvd. Results obviously vary, but one truth of the trend emerges: In both its purer and its more affected forms, directorial minimalism forces an audience to listen to a play. The writer’s music surges to the fore, and whereas Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset ultimately reveals itself as not exactly worth the fuss, Chekhov’s final great play — even peppered as it is here with horseshits and fuckwits — swings straight into the sternum like the spiritual wrecking ball it is. Ultimately, Andrews and his actors find Chekhov by abandoning the paraphernalia of the writer’s universe and groping, in their own idiom, across a perilously empty stage, toward one another.

While it may not be entirely beginner-friendly, this Cherry Orchard is in fact deeply faithful to each unfolding beat of the 1904 play, which Chekhov famously insisted was a comedy, despite the absolute emotional kneecapping it delivers. Andrews and his actors honor this paradox, seeking out the funny and the weird right alongside the painful and pathetic. The Cherry Orchard premiered the same year Chekhov died, and in many ways, it’s the writer’s strangest, most symbolic, most stylistically on-the-cusp work. Ask any Russian and they’ll tell you it is, without question, about all of Russia, then and now, and within its folds live characters who stretch from mere provincial quirkiness toward the existential absurd. Semyon Yepikhodov (Éanna Hardwicke), with his constantly squeaking shoes and the pistol he carries around in his pocket, “can’t decide whether to drink my coffee or blow my brains out.” The total wild card Charlotta Ivanovna (Sarah Amankwah, fully embracing the role’s Everest of oddity) was raised by carnies and has no birth certificate. “Who am I? Why do I even exist?” she asks a mute cosmos between the magic tricks she performs for the gentry. People like this have begun the walk toward Beckett and Ionesco. The revolution hasn’t yet come, but Chekhov can still sense worlds crumbling and see clowns meandering haplessly through the waste. “Suddenly, a distant sound rings out across the sky,” reads Andrews’s version of the play’s most famous stage direction. “Like a string snapping in the ether.” We may still struggle to dissociate Chekhov from oversimplified ideas of the real — from couches and curtains and birches and believable falling snow — but the plays themselves transcend it. That breaking string is happening in the souls of a family, in a class, in a country, in an entire social order about to come crashing down.

Andrews clearly sees parallels in the present, though it’s hard to believe that our current aristocracy — devoid of poetry and nuance, heirs not of Ranevskaya and Gaev but of Lopakhin, the businessman intent on chopping down their orchard and subdividing the land for dachas — is headed all that gently or swiftly into that good night. But these familiar monsters loom in Chekhov too, especially in a speech that Trofimov gives, a building tidal wave of rage against the powerful architects of the world’s misery. Andrews goes all the way there in his adaptation, as Monks drives himself almost to tears ranting about everything from immigration and deportation to “education, health care, housing, and employment” to — the audience cheers — “so-called government efficiency.” Is it too easy, a sermon for the choir? Perhaps a bit — but this is who Chekhov’s fierce, pent-up young tutor has always been. And, in Monks’s charged performance, the sad self-delusions of the character are equally present. As Anya’s interest in him blooms, he retreats into intellectualism. “We’re above love,” he insists to her and to her mother, but both women can see right through him and so can we. Poor boy — so determined to cure the world, so afraid of himself.

The flow of Andrews’s stage action is so casual and intentionally unrooted that the show absolutely must depend on the heat and hurt generated by the connections between its actors. Fortunately, it’s got a crack ensemble to call on. Hoss — who’s sensual and full of sad, smiling bewilderment without ever disintegrating into ditziness — makes a mature, deeply poignant Ranevskaya. Gould’s nattering, heartsore Gaev is a gem (in a perfectly modernized gesture, Andrews has the teenagers of the play cringe and squeal “Uncle, pleeeeeeease” whenever he starts to babble, and the shrinking effect on him is funny and pitiful all at once). Karl Johnson makes an excellent Firs, the ancient servant who regrets the freeing of the serfs and who alternates between dignified paeans to the old days and mumbling streams of profanities. And Akhtar digs deep into Lopakhin’s gnawing class anxiety: He’s always itchy, always on the move. The Brits have access to some tools to show social distinction that we lack — or think we do — and it’s immediately telling when, at the top of the play, Lopakhin and the servant Dunyasha (Posy Sterling) chat with each other in broad matching accents, neither one posh. That’s the character’s tragedy right there — though I wished Andrews had made more out of his relationship with Ranevskaya’s adopted ward, Varya (Marli Siu). Lopakhin and Varya are pushed together throughout the play, but poor Varya, also born working class, will never be able to break through the part of Lopakhin that still idolizes the very nobility that oppressed his family for generations. Andrews takes the character’s lifelong obsession with Ranevskaya to an explicit place — too explicit — but doesn’t give Varya’s story equal weight or interest.

It’s a loss, but the riches to be gained in such a plainspoken, deeply feeling production are still many. As are — and this is where I feel Chekhov cracking a smile — its eccentricities. Midway through the play, a child (Kagani Paul Moonlight X Byler Jackson) enters the stage and starts to sing a song. I won’t give away the details, but the effect is totally destabilizing — at once hypnotic, sweet, severe, and gut-wrenching. He’s playing a character that does exist in The Cherry Orchard, and who does indeed wander onto the stage and recite poetry. Andrews’s vision transforms him, and through this kind of transformation, we’re invited both to listen closely and to see anew.

The Cherry Orchard is at St. Ann’s Warehouse through April 27.

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