Old cherry orchard, 1994, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
What do we hold fast, what do we let go? The question, like a living being, hovers onstage in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. It hovers, whirls, mutters, speaks aloud, corrects itself, mutters, as Firs—an elderly butler who has faithfully served the Ranevskaya estate for so many years, his chest covered in medals from forgotten skirmishes—is left behind when everyone departs for the train station. In the beautiful rendition of the play now at St. Ann’s Warehouse, even Firs’s voice, with its House of Lords vowels, is a murmur of an annihilated past, gone now to the carapace of lost things.
Thwack! is the sound of the ax in the cherry orchard where Lyubov Ranevskaya sees her dead mother walking in the evening among the white blossoms, the trees like angels of heaven that the gods have not neglected. My grandmother loved the theater, and when my grandfather’s hearing began to fail, she began to take me with her. I was then probably seven. About the theater she used to say, “You could get me up in the middle of the night.” When she was young, she’d been an actress in the Yiddish Theatre—somewhere there is a photograph of her playing Ophelia at the Henry Street Settlement, with her hair down to her knees. She lived for Chekhov. How many productions of The Cherry Orchard, of The Seagull, did we see together? “Shh,” she would say. I wasn’t allowed to whisper, ever, after we took our seats. “Shh,” she said, “you’ll wake the actors from their dream.”
What is the story of The Cherry Orchard? Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her family’s estate, which has within its precinct a famous cherry orchard. The estate is inhabited by characters who filter in and out: her brother, Gaev; her adopted daughter, Varya; the old servant, Firs; her drowned son’s tutor, Trofimov, who is a perpetual student, waving his rhetorical fists. The estate is heavily mortgaged, and there’s no money to pay it off; Lopakhin, a rich businessman whose father was a serf on the estate, offers to buy it and subdivide the land for holiday houses. The orchard is untended; there are no longer any serfs to turn the cherries into jam. A frenzy of regret and magical thinking ensues—the old question, wearing its fools cap: What do we let go?
A long time ago and far away, in the year when stood we stood six feet apart, washed milk cartons before putting them away, when death knocked hastily at the door, a friend who is a theater director, and his wife, a dramaturge, brought together a small ensemble of actors and nonactors to read the four major plays of Chekhov. Between the surreal first days of lockdown and that early summer, we read The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters. Our performances, such as they were, occurred about three weeks apart. On a series of evenings, each from our small lit square on a screen, we read the plays aloud. Afterward, we discussed them. Those evenings felt like small makeshift Quonset huts—structures assembled quickly with unskilled labor that provided shelter in desolate times. Chekhov is a writer of answers that lead to questions. The old riddle “Which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?” might have been his.
Last week at St. Ann’s Warehouse, in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Cherry Orchard, transferred from London, Nina Hoss as Lyubov Ranevskaya presided like a redwood tree in a bedizened orchard of saplings. The industrial space of St. Ann’s had been turned into a theater-in-the-round so intimate that the actors themselves had seats in the front row, to which they retired on the rare instances when they were not onstage, coming and going, singing, weeping, chatting, and throwing up their hands.
In this Cherry Orchard, the liveliest piece of furniture was a century-old bookcase; as Gaev tells Lyubov: “It hasn’t a soul of its own, but still, say what you will, it’s a fine bookcase!” And then, for Gaev pulls a member of the audience onstage to play the bookcase—at the performance I attended, a good-natured fellow of about fifty in a polo shirt and jeans—he addresses it directly:
My dear and honored case! I congratulate you on your existence, which has already for more than a hundred years been directed toward the bright ideals of good and justice!
The ideals of good and justice! At that the audience heaved a collective sigh. Later, Trofimov, the tutor, accosted Lopakhin with one of his many speeches: “We’re being held hostage by protofascist tech oligarchy while they amass obscene wealth, rob the rest of us blind, so they can fly off to Mars, leaving us on a dead planet!”
This line was updated, but not very much changed, from the gist of the original. The audience applauded for a full minute, with much stamping of feet. What time are we in? At a Chekhov play, it can be hard to tell. Next to me, my grandmother, dead forty years, her hair never gray, sits in her seat, leaning forward to catch every word. What is it you were saying?
In this spectral performance of The Cherry Orchard, two things stood out. The first was Nina Hoss’s performance. I first saw Hoss in 2018, onstage at St. Ann’s in the remarkable Returning to Reims, based on Didier Eribon’s memoir of identity and class, which asks: How do we become who we are, not only in work and in love but at the voting booth? Hoss is the kind of preternaturally alive actress whose every lived emotion is evident in each gesture. Ranevskaya is often portrayed as a kind of Russian Blanche DuBois, overcome by life, clinging to a fantasy. Instead, Hoss plays her as a woman of substance, with foibles and regrets, who decries the demise of her beloved cherry orchard but will put it behind her and return to Paris to her impossible, unreliable lover, who sends her beseeching telegrams. Rather than collapsing in tears, she stands by her decision, wrong-headed as it may be. “For that,” I can hear my grandmother saying to Ranevskaya, “you’re going to bang your head against the wall?” But so it goes.
In another moment—one of those theatrical snares that’s like a soap bubble, and that you can shake your head over later, a little shy at being so moved—a homeless child, almost sleepwalking (the actor is Kagani Paul Moonlight X Byler Jackson), drifted onstage, like a blossom from the cherry orchard, singing, in a high-pitched treble, John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery”:
Just give me one thing
that I can hold on to.
To believe in this living
is just a hard way to go.
What do we hold on to? The question flaps its wings. Lubov gave the child her purse, the last of her money. “What?” her daughters protested. There was nothing left but the sound of that clear, high voice. “Don’t wake them,” I hear my grandmother saying. But all of it—the rainstorm outside the theater (the actors walk out into the street, beyond the theater, to catch the train to Paris), the bookcase, the little brooch that Varya wears in the shape of a bee, Trofimov’s bare feet—are engravings in a book of hours. It has been 120 years since the first performance of The Cherry Orchard, at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. A hundred years from now, what story will it tell audiences about what they hold fast?
One of the finest Chekhov productions I’ve seen was more than forty years ago: a student production of Three Sisters. A very young Peter Sellars lined stage right and left with narrow stands of trees. An equally young Alice Goodman, with whom he would go on to collaborate on the operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, played the old nurse, Anfisa. She wheeled a huge empty black pram with, as I remember it, spiderweb wheels, and said almost nothing. The plot folded into those silences, like an origami owl eating a mouse. Like all Chekhov plays, a blueprint marking the elevations of implacable yearning, about which the collegiate audience knew very little, at least not yet.
But an astonishing thing is that one does learn with age, although what one learns is not what one hoped to learn. Instead, one learns that there’s seldom a solution to the woes that plague us; rather, life changes in an instant, and then goes on, which may in the end be the thing that’s most startling. A lit match, a wind out of nowhere, and the house and the orchard blown to smithereens.
Cynthia Zarin’s most recent books are Inverno, a novel, and Next Day: New & Selected Poems. Her second novel, Estate, is forthcoming. She teaches at Yale University.