David Ganly and the ensemble in The Cherry Orchard. Photo: Amir Hamja

“How we wept!” Konstantin Stanislavsky exclaimed in a telegram he sent to Anton Chekhov in fall 1903. The Russian director had just read Chekhov’s new play, The Cherry Orchard, which offered a stunning vision of the decline of Russia, the end of an era, and a vision of the future. It had moved Stanislavsky and his company at the Moscow Art Theatre to tears. “Your best play yet!” he raved.

“But it’s a comedy! The Cherry Orchard is a comedy!” Chekhov fired back, with intense irritation. Weeks later, the company began rehearsing the play. Though his health was declining rapidly, Chekhov hurried up to Moscow from Yalta, where he was convalescing, to attend rehearsals and protect his vision. He and Stanislavsky fought every day. “A train in Act II?” he wrote to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, the company’s dramaturg. “Stanislavsky must be stopped!” Performed on his birthday in January 1904, the play would be Chekhov’s last. He died that July at the age of forty-four.

This most recent revival of Chekhov’s final work comes to St. Ann’s Warehouse after a successful run at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Director Benedict Andrews, who has also written this new version of The Cherry Orchard, has tried to honor the wishes of the playwright: namely, that it be a comedy. In Andrews’s production, there are plenty of laughs, but does it truly illuminate Chekhov’s remarkable vision?

From the moment you enter St. Ann’s, you feel two intentions of the director: 1) to “shake things up,” and 2) to have fun along the way. Seats surround the empty rectangular playing space, and if you’re in the first or second row, the seat next to you may soon be taken by one of the actors in the ensemble, who might even strike up a conversation. It’s almost as if the director is gathering audience and actors together for an experimental study of Chekhov’s play rather than a performance. “What would it be like if we were to update the play and take it out of its original context?” Andrews appears to be asking. “What would we learn?”

Then the actors rise from the audience to tell the story of Lyubov Andreevna (Nina Hoss), an elegant, impoverished landowner who returns after five years in Paris to the family’s large estate in the Russian countryside, which features a renowned cherry orchard. She is warned by a local admirer, the capitalist (and former peasant) Lopakhin (Adeel Akhtar), that unless she sells to a developer who will convert it into summer dachas, the estate will be auctioned to pay off her debts. Incapable of letting go of the past and its illusions, she and her brother Gaev (Michael Gould) resist facing a truth that will have a life-changing effect on everyone in the household, including her daughter Anya (Sadie Soverall) and adopted daughter Varya (Marli Siu), who has been managing the home in her absence. But the inevitable happens, and the estate is auctioned off. Lyubov will close the house and return to her lover in Paris, while her daughter will go to Moscow to study with Trofimov (Daniel Monks), a radical student who predicts a huge change to come in Russia.

The performances are uniformly excellent and the ensemble work is engaging and passionate. Other members of Lyubov’s coterie include Dunyasha (Posy Sterling) and Yasha (Sarah Slimani), a pair of young servants; Firs, an ancient butler (Karl Johnson); Yepikhodov, a bumbling town clerk (Eanna Hardwicke); Charlotta, a governess and magician (Sarah Amankwah); and Pishchik (Scott Shepard), an impoverished neighbor.

The problem is that the ambiguous updating and attention-getting directorial choices distract us from the play’s larger meaning. The actors never exit, but simply sit down in the audience after they play a scene, continuing the “classroom” atmosphere. Moreover, they turn to members of the audience and identify them as offstage characters to whom they are referring, or even use audience members as set elements. Gaev invites a stunned viewer to rise and join the action onstage, addressing him as a bookcase. Later, Lyubov does the same to other audience members whom she calls a table and a chair.  These choices engender laughs—but not the kind Chekhov intended.

The empty stage (set designed by Magda Willi) is covered with multicolored patterned rugs that also drape the back wall of the playing area. Their cultural origins are not identifiable, so we’re not sure where or when the play is taking place. Yes, there’s a coup de theatre when they all disappear at the end, but that calls attention to the design team’s cleverness more than to the meaning of the moment.

Then there’s the music. At one point, a young boy—playing the role Chekhov meant for an intruding passerby—enters, singing “Angel of Montgomery” by John Prine. Why a child, and why that song? We don’t know. In the ballroom scene (Chekhov’s original Act III), cast members dance with audience members accompanied by an onstage rock band, while Charlotta works a smoke machine that covers the stage. Yes, it’s entertaining, but is it Chekhov?

Full disclosure: I’m a published translator of Chekhov’s complete dramatic works, and I was initially impressed by Andrews’s general adherence to the original text. (I don’t know if he’s a Russian speaker or if he worked from a literal translation; it’s not mentioned in the program). And the added contemporary references (to climate change, etc.) didn’t bother me; those tend to be common with new versions of the classics. But the original had no profanities; why add twenty-three instances of “f—k” and nine of “sh-t”? (I counted.) And what about phrases like “Time for some shut-eye” or “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya” or “no sh-t, Sherlock” or “sweet dreams, kiddos.” Why use them—just to emphasize that it’s an updated version?

One particular liberty that Andrews takes is a significant expansion of Trofimov’s passionate speech in Act II about the culture in decline. It’s clear how it pertains to today, but since we don’t know where we are in this version, or when, it feels disconnected and without a context.

Above all, where is the cherry orchard? I don’t mean to suggest that there has to be an actual visual representation of an orchard on stage. After all, Peter Brook’s great 1988 interpretation featured only a large Oriental rug, just as Benedict Andrews’s production has done today. But whether it’s a symbol or an idea, the orchard is essential to the play’s profound meaning.

And what’s missing here is what the cherry orchard means. For Chekhov, it was a vision he had of an actual cherry orchard while convalescing on Stanislavsky’s estate in the summer of 1902. It was a beautiful, profound vision of the Russia that he loved, its past, its tenuous present, and its unknown future—as well as his own. It represented Russia at a time of huge change: the decline of the landed gentry, the migration of the former serfs from the countryside into rising industrial centers, and the seeds of Marxism. All these elements are suggested, very subtly, in the play that Chekhov knew would be his last. But none of those themes are suggested here—only an ambiguous sense of unease. The actors often gaze around. But where are they? And what are they looking at—or for? Russia is mentioned a few times, but we feel no connection, no context.

Fortunately, Andrews has preserved the most significant moment in Chekhov’s original Act II, when the ensemble sits on a hill watching the sunset one evening before the estate is auctioned off. A sharp sound disturbs their silence; in the original, it’s called a breaking string. (The sound designer is Brendan Aanes.) It’s repeated again in Act IV at that final, unforgettable moment when Firs, the ancient servant, is left alone in the empty home, forgotten (Karl Johnson is marvelous). Both times, it is deafening, signifying the historic moment when the past is breaking away and the future is unknown. Following the recurrence of the breaking string, Chekhov specified the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. In this version, we hear a buzz saw, but it’s so brief that it’s hard to identify. If only the director had connected these definitive sound cues to the updated action in his version, somehow, so that we might understand more clearly the meaning of their warnings and the brilliance of Chekhov’s vision.

A final thought: I don’t mean to disparage Benedict Andrews’s attempt at The Cherry Orchard. He’s an excellent director. The audience enjoyed it enormously, and the company who performed it was superb. But it leaves an impression of being a “cool” Cherry Orchard, an adventuresome evening designed to entertain contemporary audiences with a new approach to Chekhov for actors who want to have fun playing his wonderful roles. Perhaps they should have called it (a la the 1996 film about Richard III): “Looking for The Cherry Orchard”?

I’m going to be teaching a class of acting students at NYU/Tisch this week who will see this production as their first Cherry Orchard. As actors, I’m sure they will love the performances, as well as envy the fun that the cast is having. But will they see what Chekhov truly saw, when he wrote his final play?

“Goodbye, old life,” cries Anya at the end. “Hello, new life!” cries Trofimov. The first Russian revolution came in 1905, the year after the play was written; the second in 1917. That is the extraordinary prophecy of The Cherry Orchard.