Review: The Cherry Orchard by University of Texas Theatre & Dance
by Michael Meigs

What was Brant Pope thinking?

That's not just a curmudgeonly expostulation.  AustinLiveTheatre has an affection for alt-versions, augmentations and re-interpretations of the classics.  Relatively small audiences have benefited from the Shakespeare riffs of the Wondrous Strange Players, their antecedent Austin Drama Club and the annual inventions of the Weird Sisters Theatre Collective.  ALT applauds the current Hedda roll -- two modern language versions of Hedda Gabler from Palindrome Theatre, the SVT's Heddatron and The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, opening next week at St. Ed's Mary Moody Northen Theatre.

For a first major outing with UT, its newly-selected chair for theatre and drama Brant Pope stages a Cherry Orchard by Chekhov that is disappointing and puzzling.  Not for lack of talent, certainly, for he has three experienced teachers of theatre onstage, two of them long-standing members of Actors Equity, working with the latest class of gifted MFA Theatre students.

How about that vision thing?  This production resembles exactly what it is: an acting workshop in a black box theatre. Pope double-casts most of the roles, so this second weekend's offering will be significantly different from that of the first. Lovely Lauren Lane, astute Lucien Douglas and slyly dogged Brooks Barr provide the rebounding posts for the pinball machine onstage.

The director situates the action in a nowhere that's only vaguely associated with Chekhov's world. Props and costumes appear to have been pulled at random out of the dusty lockers in the back of the warehouse.  A Samsonite suitcase; the clunky metal-banded wristwatch worn by Lopakhin; a confusion of times and styles. In the opening scene Mykal Monroe as the serving girl Dunyasha wears a tight-fitting eccentric  black outfit that would be appropriate for Sixth Street bar-hopping after midnight.  The four acts of The Cherry Orchard occur at different times from May through September but most of these characters don't change their costumes once, except by draping a shawl or changing a hat.

Other times Schmidt's translation goes wrong.  Uncle Leonid, however confused about a remark, is not credible when he replies, "Come again?"  And by excising references to serfs and serfdom, Schmidt cuts the ground from beneath the social structure that is the focus of Chekhov's thoughtful comedy.  The successful but still deferential Lopakhin, eventual purchaser of the cherry orchard, says that his father was a 'dirt farmer.'  There's a far leap from the land-bound peasantry to the yeoman tenant farmers of the American experience.

And how about the music used before the opening and at the intermission?  The Oscar Brockett Theatre resounded to sweeping orchestral scores so familiar that they're hackneyed -- treacly Tchaikovsky and syrupy Strauss, including The Blue Danube Waltz, evoking Viennese ballrooms and Stanley Kubrick's space station in 2001 - A Space Odyssey. In contrast, music applied during the production itself was appropriate -- usually a single lonely instrument as an accent.  And the mysterious 'breaking string' sound was exactly right.

The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov's melancholy, wryly humorous examination of the impoverished Russian aristocracy.  He himself was the son of a bankrupt provincial grocer and the grandson of a serf, but he knew very well the class he was portraying -- cultured individuals with European ideas living in the rustic simplicity of the Russian countryside, people with no business sense and with an excess of sentiment.  This production loses all of that, giving us not eccentrics but neurotics in a sort of telenovelised or soap oprified sequence of events.

That being the case, the director would have done better to go all the way with it. His leading actress Lauren Lane is a self-acknowledged refugee from the youth-obsessed showbiz world of Los Angeles, where she had a good run from 1993-1999 in 145 episodes of The Nanny. Given that her emotive portrayal of Mme Ranyevsaka suggests little fragility and a strong need for some extended personal counseling, perhaps UT could have made her an escapee from the West Coast, returning to the Hill Country where the family ranch is in foreclosure proceedings with Wells Fargo.

The acting in the piece is strong, a fact that gives one an ever greater wistfulness in the 'what if' realm.  Lucien Douglas as Uncle Leonid is graceful, distracted and handsomely vulnerable. Brooks Barr narrows old manservant Firs' scope of concentration and makes the man physically frail but despite deprecating comments of others, anything but senile. Liz Kimball as the earnest stay-behind daughter Varya is particularly noteworthy in endowing her character with a tension at the unavoidable slide toward homelessness. Dan Lendzian is the perpetual student Trofimov, tutor to the family son who drowned at a young age; in his hectoring he comes across as just what he is: a well-nourished and overconfident UT graduate student.  Mykal Monroe's 'Valley Girl' characterization of serving girl Dunyasha must have been aimed at the FaceBook generation.

This weekend's performances will have changed out nine of the actors, leaving only the 'grown-ups' and the incidental cast in place.

I had written most of these reflections out last night but then a computer glitch or perhaps a guilty twitch blew them away.  I thought briefly of simply giving up on this job, but then I remembered the students sitting next to us in the Brockett theatre, scribbling notes as this staging of The Cherry Orchard unfolded.  A parting reminder, then, to them: The Cherry Orchard is great drama, and even a bewildering production of it can open avenues of thought for you.

Review by Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle, September 22

Click to view the program sheet -- bereft of dramaturgy -- distributed for The Cherry Orchard:

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The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov
University of Texas Theatre & Dance