Studying The Cherry Orchard (2)

I found the playbill to The Cherry Orchard staging at Northeastern Illinois University, which I wrote about previously in Studying The Cherry Orchard (1).

Beth Ann Smukowski in front and center as Madame Ranevskaya

Lily Stephens affords us comic relief as the housemaid Dunyasha

Mark Dodge as the pragmatic but often dismissed Lopakhin

I really appreciated director Dan Wirth's notes, as they illuminate not only the world of the family, but also the staging of Chekhov:

Chekhov's plays have a reputation of being sad, slow, tedious, and boring. There is a problem with that because Chekhov isn't any of those things. Those sorts of performances are conducted by people that have a misapprehension of Chekhov, and perhaps they themselves are sad, slow, tedious, and boring. Chekhov himself always claimed (even protested) that his plays were comedies, and who am I to take issue with that? He is the one that wrote them. He should know, after all.

Wirth has a point well taken.  But, you see, how a director stages this or any other play is, to whatever extent, inevitably a reflection of him or her.  It is always autobiographical in one way or another.  Sad and slow is one thing, but tedious and boring means a failed staging of the play.

My first exposure to Chekhov was a production of his play Uncle Vanya. I was in college in Michigan and took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Canada where it was playing. I really had no idea what I was in for. I was introduced to a collection of confused and contradictory people who were often unaware of both their best and worst qualities. They either had plenty of ideas about what to do to make life better or they had no ideas at all, but either way, they lacked the capacity to take action to do anything about it. Their struggles were very frustrating - and very funny.

I suppose that kind of inertia, in Chekhov's handling of it, can be frustrating for the action-oriented, practical sort and funny for anyone who can see a certain absurdity and farce in life itself.  Somehow The Myth of Sisyphus comes to mind for me.

My first experience with The Cherry Orchard occurred a year or so later when I was in graduate school. My classmates and I were enjoying a unit on Chekhov and we were reading his four major full-length plays. I went to the library and listened to an audio recording of a performance of the play. It was a production from The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, featuring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, directed by Tyrone Guthrie.

As I sat listening I realized I was having the same experience I had with the production of Uncle Vanya. Here again was a collection of deeply flawed and deeply human characters. They were caught in a trap and were struggling to get out, but they themselves had made the trap, and they alone would be able to devise a way out. However, they couldn't see that. They thought the trap was their fate. Some couldn't even see the trap.

I have argued in my Theory of Algorithms that he must grasp reality as it is and things as they are, if we are to solve whatever problem we face.  That reality and those things speak to our human nature, what I have come to call The Human Algorithm, that is, the elemental essence of who we are and what we are made of.  So just as with Shakespeare, Chekhov helps us understand the characters he has created and the nature of our humanity as a whole.

This is how it is with Chekhov's characters. It's as if they are wearing blinders and can only see certain things. And when it comes to their own flaws, they either beat themselves up over them or project them and make others guilty of the very things they dislike in themselves. In either case, nothing gets done about them. When his plays are done well, the audience has sympathy and empathy for the plights of the characters, and they also feel annoyance and frustration because the characters are often so unbearably stupid. Audiences feel sad when the characters lose, and at the same time they laugh at how ridiculous they are.

Much has been written about the gloominess of the Russian people, the so-called Russian "cult of suffering," as though the people of Russia have the market cornered on being sad and mopey and depressed. It is an interesting stereotype, and as with all stereotypes there may be a grain of truth to it, but I think Chekhov was writing about all of human-kind, not just Russian human-kind. In viewing Chekhov's plays, we are viewing ourselves - our foibles, our denial, our strengths, our weaknesses, our victories, and our defeats. I think of Chekhov's plays as a mirror held up to our souls. The mirror has some Russian trimming around its edges, but the center reflects us back to ourselves just as we are.

Reference indeed Theory of Algorithms. 

At one time or another perhaps all of us have said or will say goodbye to our own personal cherry orchard.

Very well said, Dan Wirth.