Arts Review

The Cherry Orchard

Runaway spending. Mounting debt. Loss of the family home. Fear of unemployment. The crises discussed onstage in the Oscar G. Brockett Theatre right now feel very much of the moment, and to listen to the people they've afflicted talk about them, you wouldn't figure them for Russians living more than a century ago. They don't sound the part – or look it, for that matter. They're decked out in fashions of the 21st century, with accessories and hairstyles and the like that reflect our society, our time. They look like us and talk like us, and their problems sound like ours.

That contemporary feel to this staging of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard by the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance comes very deliberately from its director, department chair Brant Pope. He's chosen as his text a late Nineties translation by Paul Schmidt that was written for the American ear. "You people drive me crazy," shouts a frustrated Lopákhin at the insolvent brother and sister who refuse to heed his advice to chop down the family's mammoth orchard and develop the land with vacation homes. It's the sort of modern and energetic turn of phrase that pervades Schmidt's take on the script and hauls it from the Russian provinces into our own backyard. Without the formal language that characterizes many older translations of Chekhov or the stately period dress of traditional productions, the distance that we sometimes feel from Chekhov's characters as remnants of some old, dead Russian aristocracy closes. We see more of ourselves in them.

There are times when that works well for Pope's production. At one point, Madame Ranyévskaya has no sooner finished lamenting her sins, among which she counts her wastefulness with money, when she hears an orchestra in the distance and suggests throwing a party that she clearly cannot afford. Guest artist Lauren Lane not only makes credible that abrupt emotional U-turn from sincere remorse to reckless extravagance but also delivers it with a blitheness and blindness to her own self-contradiction that recalls the indifferent spendthrifts of our financially troubled times. And while John Smiley's Lopákhin may not have the clipped, well-heeled look of a successful self-made man, his sober focus on the development deal and dazed euphoria after outbidding a business rival for the prized cherry orchard reeks of today's dealmaking Wall Street elite. In these moments and others like them, we feel a chill of recognition that goes beyond what we might experience from a staging truer to the period.

Another contemporary attitude in the production, though, is less affecting: a lack of urgency of the sort one hears in conversations ending with "whatever." We feel a depth of emotion when Lane's Ranyévskaya breaks down in grief over the memory of her drowned son, and as Várya, the adopted daughter who's been running the estate in her mother's absence and carrying a torch for Lopákhin, Liz Kimball draws forth the character's moods of yearning, hope, frustration, and disappointment in vivid colors. But a surprising amount of the dramatic conflict here is missing that quality of pressing importance. Characters may express anxiety over money or romance or disagree about what will happen with that damn orchard, but they do so with little punch behind it or tension to sustain it. It leaves the impression that they're not that deeply invested in their fate, that they can shrug it off. Perhaps that's intentional – a commentary on our own disinterest in fighting for the things we claim to value and what we stand to lose because of it. Given the precariousness of the economy and the intransigence in our political scene, that may make this worthwhile as a cautionary tale, but it doesn't impress itself on us with any force. Without a sense that it matters to the characters, it won't matter much to us.

As this is Pope's first directorial production for the department since taking over as chair in 2010, it comes weighted with expectations. What do the choices he's made say about his priorities as an artist, about the way he approaches theatre, about the direction of the department? I'd like to read his decision to stage this period piece not just in modern dress but as more of a rehearsal production, without a designed set or costumes, as a sign to his master's candidate actors that once in a while you need to strip away the other production elements and focus on the text. For a department that has historically devoted so many resources to production values and design, that would be a pretty bold statement and one I'd support. In this instance, however, the production elements included seem to muddy that message: set pieces and props just fancy enough to suggest something more than the basic items employed in rehearsals but so worn or inexpensive that they read as shabby versions of what they're supposed to be. We're left somewhere between a fully realized vision of a Cherry Orchard in our day and a truly bare-bones version that calls on our imagination to fill in the gaps.

I won't pass any final judgment on Pope's work or his leadership of the department based on a single project. I look forward to seeing more from him. But here's hoping for some stronger choices in the future. Chekhov's characters remind us here of what we lose when we're indecisive.