THEATER REVIEW: THE CHERRY ORCHARD

An acting ensemble shines under Malibu’s starry, starry skies.

By Ed Rampell

It’s uncanny how artists find contemporary relevance in the classics. After Hurricane Katrina, L.A. Opera presented Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, that, among other things, depicts a devastating hurricane. Now, the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum is staging a play about a storm of another kind: the mortgage and foreclosure crisis.

Loss of an estate is at the heart of Anton Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, which originally premiered in 1904 at the much-vaunted Moscow Art Theatre and was directed by the legendary Constantin Stanislavsky of “Method Acting” fame.

When it premiered, the Russian playwright’s dramedy reflected class conflicts under czarism, as displaced nobility grappled with upstart, emancipated serfs. A year after The Cherry Orchard debuted revolution swept Russia, so it can be said that Chekhov was right on the money. The Theatricum’s clever adaptation of the play by Heidi Helen Davis and Ellen Geer (who also co-stars as Lillian Randolph Cunningham, the clan’s Grande Dame) updates the action from turn-of-the-last-century Mother Russia to not today, but rather to Virginia in the 1970s.

Lillian and her brother, Gates Randolph (the dapper tippler William Dennis Hunt), are the last in a long line of landed gentry, who are unable to adapt to a rapidly changing society where their genteel world is being turned upside down. The Cunninghams are drowning in debt and deficit spending, as they have not generated new forms of income from the wealth they inherited, primarily in property. In particular, their beloved cherry orchard is being threatened with clear cutting, in order to make way for development – a subdivision, mall or, as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I recently attended the performance of another great Brecht play, Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses, and a theatergoer pointed out that despite its being set in 1930s Chicago, the Pacific Resident Theatre production did not have a single cast member of color. But there is no such “caste system” at work in this diverse ‘70s-set Davis/Geer version of Chekhov’s tragicomedy, with its integrated actors and references to the Civil Rights movement. Steve Matt plays Lawrence Poole, the grandson of one of the Cunningham’s slaves and son of one of the dynasty’s servants. Oh, how the lowly Lawrence of Suburbia has risen in the world, and the mighty have fallen, as Poole has become an economic force to be reckoned with. Chekhov, of course, is especially known for his penetrating psychological insights, and what Poole has gained in the material world has come at the cost of his soul – and soul mate (Tippi Thomas as the thwarted Velina, Lillian’s adopted daughter who has overseen the estate in her absence).

The Theatricum’s Orchard also refers to the ‘60s/’70s counterculture. In a bit of crafty casting, Willow Geer portrays hippie-ish Anna, the daughter of Lillian, who is played by Willow’s real life offstage mother. Lily-white Anna romances the perennial student, Terence Moses (Marc Ewing), an intellectual who echoes the era’s Black and Flower Power philosophies, as he rejects whitey’s Old Order, as well as Poole’s grasping commercialism.

Co-writer Davis, who has also directed productions for East West Players, deftly directs this expert acting ensemble of 16 thespians, performing in an amphitheatre beneath the stars at Topanga Canyon. As such, the open-air theatre has no proscenium arch and as the Cunninghams face dispossession a chilling moment comes after scene one. In lieu of a curtain, the lights dim and black-clad stagehands silently, swiftly remove the entire set, consisting of furniture and household furnishings, in order to literally set the next scene. While it may be unintentional, the stagehands resemble repo men, as if the Cunninghams, unable to pay their sub prime mortgage, are being foreclosed upon and rendered homeless. It is the brilliance of this production to take a 1904 Russian play and make it relevant to not only today, but to 1970s’ Virginia. Old Virginny will never seem the same again, and this Orchard is an orchid.

The Cherry Orchard will be performed through Sept. 26, at: 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Malibu.. For more information call 310/455-3723 or go to www.Theatricum.com. Picnickers welcome before and after performances.