Hooray!

Theatre South Carolina's production of The Cherry Orchard is over, and the set is struck. Completely. There ain't so much as a broomful of dust remaining onstage from that piece of literary schmutz. It could have gone well--it could have been the best show we ever did. But it didn't, and it wasn't. It was horribly directed, weakly designed, unattended, and intellectually uninspiring. The actors slogged through and did their absolute best with what was given them to perform. I'm almost certain the number of tickets sold did not cover the price of building the set. If you couldn't make it to the show, count yourself among the lucky.

I devoted over six weeks of my life to this steaming pile of road apples. Not that I had much of a choice, but that was six weeks I could have been out playing and laughing and drinking--I turned 21 in those six weeks--and, y'know, behaving like a normal university aged student. but instead I carried around everything from children's toys to guns to shoes to bookcases and helped avert crises before they occurred. I allowed myself to be yelled at for nothing in particular while my director tried to make me feel stupid for not taking care of things that were neither my problem nor my fault. I spent five hours every night staring at the wall and trying desperately to stay awake. Don't get me wrong--I joined this stage management team willfully, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. My PSM (primary stage manager) and co-ASM (assistant stage manager) were (and are) wonderful people who i value as coworkers and as friends. The cast and crew were friendly and hardworking, and all very capable with their tasks. But no matter how you excuse it, this show did not meet its theatrical potential.

The Cherry Orchard, for any reader who may not be familiar with this Russian text, is about the downfall of the aristocracy in light of the industrial revolution. Written by Anton Chekhov, the play follows six months in the lives of the members of the Ranevsky household--Lyubov Andrevena and her daughters Varya and Anya, Lyubov's brother Gayev, ex-serf and self-made millionaire Yermolai Lopakhin, and a small entourage of friends, neighbors, and employees--as they run out of money and eventually lose their estate on account of their own frivolousness and their inability to comprehend that the world around them has changed.

This is not a tragic story. The family has every opportunity to avert their fate long before the deadline--the estate going to auction--but they don't. They choose not to. And then they're surprised when they lose the house, the land, and everything they've always had to the young upstart--the money-grubbing Lopakhin, who intends fully to tear everything down--the house, the workbuildings, and the entire cherry orchard--to build a neighborhood of villas to be rented by members of the emerging middle class.

This is very much a comic story. The characters who lose are morons, and the right thing happens to them at the end. As a reader i felt the Ranevsky's got what was coming to them. My sentiments at the end were somewhere between "poetic justice" and "well its about damn time." This story is unique in that none of the characters undergo a change--they all end the way they began: stupid. What changes is the world. To use a trite term for it, the family did not learn to swim and go along with the tides of change, so they sank.

Chekhov could have very easily written the play as a tragedy. He could have had the world move forward and crush their lifestyles in spite of everything they did to save it. He could have made the world to blame. But he didn't. The characters must work to prove that they don't deserve their beautiful house, their disused cherry orchard, their river or their leisurely lifestyle. There is not a single likable character in the entire play, so the audience is obviously meant to Enjoy the fact that they fail and industrialism arises.

BUT

at Theatre South Carolina, directors are not expected to read and thoroughly interpret plays before they produce them. So our good buddy the director--an elderly faculty member with few friends in the department--played it Tragic. He tried to instill a feeling of loss, of sadness, and to encourage the audience to pity these poor, pathetic creatures. He didn't use the underlying meanings of each line to their fullest potential--or, it seems, to any extent at all--and instead played the scenes exactly as the diction of the text would imply. He skated along the surface of the play and failed to dig any deeper than to add recorded opera and blue lighting to the more boring speeches and play up slapstick humor when it was unavoidable in the text. What resulted was chaos. The audience had no coherent idea of what the atmosphere of the play was or what they were supposed to get out of it. And the end of the play truly proved that the director had absolutely no idea what the play was about--when the old head servant, Firs, dies--sick and alone in a locked house fated for demolition--the house falls apart around him and the last standing image of the play is a series of structures, made mostly of shadow, which indicates that nothing is left but the stark, cold, painful reality of industry.

Chekov did not write this ending. The ending in the script reads "Then silence, broken only by the thud of an axe on the trees far away in the cherry orchard." Thud of axes. People cutting down trees. People clearing away the last traces of the bourgeois. People working. Industrialism was a dream come true to 99% of the population. Finally--they were free from serfdom and had an opportunity to work and make their own way in life. Yes, the system collapsed after a few years, factory working conditions were horrible and people died of varying forms of cancer encouraged by harsh chemicals and textile dust, but Chekov didn't write Cherry after the fact. He wrote it about the downfall of the aristocracy and the uprising of the common man. It was a Good Thing.

A better ending tableau might have been the house falling down and a number of ruddy, healthy, brown-clad lumberjacks cutting the trees. Maybe one would pause to wipe his brow with a handkerchief and then return, and we could watch the dead trees fall. Or perhaps the old wall could collapse and behind it would be studwalls of several small houses with green lawns and a seedling cherry tree each. Or the stage could fade to black and you would hear the chopping, and maybe someone whistling, or the choppers singing a work song. Or something implying progress or at the very least work. Not this angular, ugly black shadow looming in the future. It undermined the entire play--the entire reason Chekov wrote it. The Cherry Orchard Celebrates the downfall of the dominant class. Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. Theatre SC failed miserably in its pursuit of honest portrayal of an important, historic piece. I wasted 6 weeks.

BUT ITS OVER!!!!