Studying The Cherry Orchard (1)

As part of writing The Room, a play on housemaid abuse, I study iconic plays.  I had the pleasure and privilege of studying drama and comedy, along with poetry and Shakespeare, for a year each at Northwestern University.  So we read the likes of Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit), and Joe Orton (What the Butler Saw).  I've watched film adaptations and stage productions of these plays over the past two years.

But what else?

Enter The Cherry Orchard. 

I read Three Sisters at the university, and my wife and I saw a production at the Goodman Theater in Chicago years ago.  But I had otherwise not read Anton Chekhov.  The Cherry Orchard sidled into my radar, as a play within the film Henry's Crime, and I was intrigued.  So I found this staging at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago from a year ago:

The following are notes from my journal on The Room: 

I like how this production plays up with the audience, in a natural way, that is, in the flow and theme of the play. There is existential humor to this play, clearly. For instance, one character wants to talk to somebody, but bemoans that she doesn’t have anybody to talk to.

I want to make sure sound from the actors is clear throughout the play. I have to work out the enters and exits of the characters. I thought about billiards as a metaphor for what happens to people in a play I can write. What about a title like The Sampaguita Orchard?  The sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines. 

The house is a metaphor for an era, and its sale because of unpaid debt is the end of that era.  The cherry orchard is a kind of mythic reference for the family, but the fabric of their lives together is actually stitched inside the house.