TT: Y’all don’t cut down that cherry tree!

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on a recent visit to the Los Angeles area, where I saw the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum‘s production of a modernized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, which is currently being performed in repertory (along with five other classic plays) in the company’s woodsy outdoor amphitheater. I liked it very much, a couple of quibbles notwithstanding. Here’s an excerpt.
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Whenever I hear about a new staging of a Shakespeare play, my first question is, “Where’s it set?” Contemporary production style all but demands that the action of Shakespeare’s plays be moved to a different time and place–but the language is never changed accordingly. On the other hand, it’s become equally common for the plays of Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen to be performed in up-to-date English-language “adaptations” that depart widely from the original Russian and Norwegian texts–but the period settings are almost always retained. Now the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum has split the difference with a biracial rewrite of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” set in Virginia in 1970. Does it work? Most of the time, and even when it doesn’t quite come off, it’s still worth seeing.
In this version, written by Heidi Helen Davis (who also directs) and Ellen Geer, the Ranevskayas, Chekhov’s impecunious Russian aristocrats, become the Randolphs, a cash-poor upper-class family from Charlottesville whose plantation estate is about to go on the block. Not only are their servants black, but so is Lawrence Poole (Steve Matt), the American counterpart of Lopakin, the ex-serf turned status-hungry businessman who buys the Ranevskaya estate and chops down its beloved cherry orchard at play’s end. This transposition gives the Davis-Geer adaptation a sharp-edged racial angle that is its most telling feature, in part because it arises so naturally from Chekhov’s original play….
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Read the whole thing here.