the timboucher experience

Last night saw our first semi-public performance of Anton Chekhov’s “modern classic”, The Cherry Orchard. Written in 1904, some forty years after the emancipation of the serfs in Russia and one year before the Russian Revolution of 1905, this Russian drama depicts an aristocratic family whose fortunes have fallen to the point where their ancestral estate is about to be sold at auction. Half a dozen or so characters of other classes color the action, including an increasingly wealthy middle-class businessman, familial servants and civic officials (I play the postmaster).

Though it’s been interpreted otherwise, Chekhov called this play a comedy. But it’s the kind of comedy where you’re laughing one second only to be crying the next, and vice versa. As such, the writing demands a lightness of touch in its transition to the stage: a mixture of exceptionally precise timing cues to heighten emotional transitions and the acting weight and softness to pull the whole thing off. I may be biased, but I happen to believe that our production, which opens this Friday night at the Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, happens to have all that and more.

The other night I had a bit of an epiphany about not just the action in this story, but partly how drama itself works. One of the characters, Gayev, references billiards shots at odd intervals throughout the play. It occurred to me that the action of billiard balls striking one another is not unlike how people interact: one person sort of rolls into the next person, which causes them to careen off into the next person and so on and so forth. So that one person’s actions end up triggering an almost automatic series of responses across a whole group of people who suddenly find themselves and their positions on the “table” of life totally re-arranged.

Within the game of billiards, this is exactly what you’re after. But within human life such catastrophic re-configurations of life roles and relationships tends to lead to chaos. This, I believe, is the essence of the slice of life which the Cherry Orchard depicts: humans whose inherited social situations and institutions have been turned upside down. Some prosper, like Lopakhin, within the new environment, while others flail about, finding their actions ineffectual and their attitudes antiquated. At one point in the play, the eldest member of the household, a manservant named Firs openly equates the current “troubles” with “the freedoms”, presumably referencing the emancipation of the serfs - hearkening back to a simpler era when all was right in not just the human order, but with the natural order as well, because everyone knew their place, their role and their purpose. This, I think, is what makes Chekhov’s play modern: that it directly confronts the loss of clarity, the angst and ennui pandemic to society even still a hundred years later.

Within just under a year of The Cherry Orchard premiering at the Moscow Art Theatre, some 80,000 workers went on strike across in St. Petersburg. At the height of that action, imperial troops gunned down around one hundred unarmed demonstrators in a massacre that would come to be known as Bloody Sunday and which would trigger larger unrest across Tsarist Russia. In August of 1905, Nicholas II agreed to the establishment of a national legislative assembly, the Duma. A few months later, the October Manifesto was signed by the Tsar, granting such basic rights as “…freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association; a broad participation in the Duma; introduction of universal male suffrage; and a decree that no law should come into force without the consent of the state Duma.”

Situated as it is within such a tumultuous time in Russian history, the Cherry Orchard acts as a living historical document about not just allegorical class struggle, but the individual choices and conflicts real people go through as their world is turned upside down. Additionally, the play’s emphasis on the fall from grace of the uber-wealthy comes at a very poignant time for contemporary American audiences, what with the massive bank-bailouts and the social and economic catastrophes they seem to presage. The way forward, it seems, may best be understood and delineated by looking at similar moments in history: still points teetering between upheavals.

• Strange Device Relieves Back Pain Instantly
• Postal Carrier Joseph Krause on His Bicycle
• Cherry Credits Now Available in 7-11
• How To Place In 3 of Top 10 Google Search Results In One Day
• Bit Parts