This 'Cherry Orchard' thunders along

New production hews to a brash interpretation of the Chekhov classic

January 14, 2009|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE - Of all the tricky things about staging the works of Anton Chekhov, getting the tone right is the trickiest. Like a sunset, a fire opal, or a shimmering mist, a Chekhov play makes even the strongest impressions through the accretion of a thousand tiny variations in shade. Push any one color - comedy, tragedy, oddity, romance - too hard, and the thing congeals into a caricature of itself.

Earlier generations overstressed the tragic; even the archetypal Chekhov interpreter, Konstantin Stanislavsky, made "The Cherry Orchard" more maudlin than its creator desired. These days we seem to be veering more toward the comic end of the spectrum, perhaps out of a desire to avoid the lugubrious excesses of the past. But surely it's possible to find a range of tones instead of hammering away at just one.

George Malko's new translation of "The Cherry Orchard," commissioned by the Nora Theatre Company for its current production at the Central Square Theater, weaves its way deftly through these challenges, with a delicate attention to elegiac nuance that doesn't slight the eccentric comedy, either. As it plays out, however, director Daniel Gidron's production too often abandons subtlety to pound hard on a dramatic effect. Even when, for example, the script has a character "weeping softly," on this stage she's shouting through sobs.

That character would be Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya, the mistress of a Russian estate who's just returned from self-imposed exile in Paris to find her lands about to be sold out from under her to pay the family's heedlessly accumulated debt. Ranyevskaya is one of Chekhov's finest creations, a heartbreakingly frivolous creature who mysteriously attracts our sympathy even as she's infuriating us with her refusal to face reality.

It's an irresistible role, and the charming and charismatic Annette Miller seems like a natural for it. But with every moment underlined - with a monstrously fixed smile here, a raging bout of weeping there - Chekhov's faintly ridiculous, faintly tragic fading aristocrat seems to live closer to Old Hollywood than Old Russia. Of course Ranyevskaya is self-dramatizing, but if we can't see beyond her grand gestures to her broken heart, there's nothing at stake for us.