“What makes a great play,” says Carey Perloff, “is that the issues it raises, and the world it evokes are so redolent of our own, that it gives us a perspective we don’t have when we write literally about our own time.”
The topic is Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” set at the turn of the 20th century. San Francisco resident Perloff—artistic director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater from 1992 to 2018 and now a freelance director—is staging the play for Marin Theatre in Mill Valley. It opens in previews on Jan. 29.
She commissioned the translation by Paul Schmidt when she was at ACT, wanting a slightly more modern translation than others she’d read.
While Chekhov (1860-1904) considered “The Cherry Orchard” a comedy, his director, Konstantin Stanislavski of the Moscow Art Theatre, begged to differ. Now we know that, like all of Chekhov’s plays, it is both comic and tragic.
“I am constantly astonished at what a radical playwright he was,” muses Perloff, who has directed Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” and “Uncle Vanya.”
“He never passes judgment on his characters or tells us what to think. There are no heroes or villains or victims. People are both cruel and kind and caring and careless all in the same go.”
In “The Cherry Orchard” (which premiered in 1904, shortly before Chekhov died of tuberculosis), the characters include central figure Liubóv (played by Liz Sklar), who has returned home from Paris to deal with the problem of her beloved cherry orchard, which is up for foreclosure; she can no longer afford the mortgage on the longtime family estate. She is accompanied by her 17-year-old daughter, Anya (Anna Takayo) and Anya’s eccentric governess, Carlotta (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong).
Among the idiosyncratic others who eagerly greet Liubóv are her beloved brother (Anthony Fusco); an adopted daughter (Rosie Hallett); an emotionally overwrought maid (Molly Ranson); the old family retainer (Howard Swain); a perpetual student (Joseph O’Malley); and a neighbor (Marin Theatre artistic director Lance Gardner) with a plan that will save the property but includes destroying the orchard.
The all-star cast also includes locals Jomar Tagatac and Danny Sheie.
Perloff says “The Cherry Orchard” has “everything but it’s not naturalism … but that’s really fun … psychologically, I think it is profoundly real. …. Formally, it doesn’t have to follow the rules of the ‘well-made play.’ Crazy things happen. People walk offstage in the middle of a conversation. Memories bubble up. The old retainer walks around talking to himself the whole play.”
Among the particularly entertaining parts of the play are the quasi-surreal elements. For example, the morose Carlotta is an amateur magician and ventriloquist. Her sleight-of-hand tricks are created by longtime local magician Christian Cagigal. The waltzing scenes are designed by choreographer Val Caniparoli, formerly a dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, and include life-sized puppets.
Sklar, fresh from Perloff’s production of “Waste” at Marin Theatre last year, jumped at the chance to play Liubóv. Actors love Chekhov, she says, because his works are like playgrounds— or treasure hunts.
Describing a recent rehearsal of the play’s last, heartbreaking act, she says the cast worked hard to keep Chekhov’s beautiful rhythm going and to figure out how to waffle between the characters’ conflicting urges: the intention to go, the intention to stay. “You expect it to go one way and it changes on a dime,” she says.
“Not a single word is there for no reason,” she adds.
In playing the iconic character, Sklar says, “I’m trying to make it personal and connected, down to earth.” What is my experience of loss? she asks herself, thinking of Liubóv’s loss of the orchard, emblematic of other losses in her life as she faces the inevitability of change.
The past feels visceral in “The Cherry Orchard,” which reflects Russia’s changing social structure; serfs had been freed in 1861 during the lifetime of its characters.
Perloff points out that death and loss and culpability hang over every moment of the play. As the perennial student Trofímov tells Anya, “The voices and faces of human beings hide behind every cherry in the orchard, every leaf, every tree trunk. And owning human beings has left its mark on all of you.”
Perloff adds, “One of the tasks of humanity is to pay attention to each other. These characters seem congenitally unable to do so—all are essentially guilty. This is what happens—this loss, this grief, this tragedy—when people don’t pay attention, this is what Chekhov was saying in this, his last play.”
“The Cherry Orchard” runs Jan. 29 through Feb. 22 at Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $15 (student) to $59 at marintheatre.org.