As ever, she remains unwilling and unable to stop the sale, instead burying her head in the quicksand of frivolity and condescension. The aristocratic Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya (Krista Apple) still returns from Paris to find her beloved ancestral home in foreclosure, where it falls into the clutches of self-made businessman Lopakhin (Justin Jain).
The production retains only a skeleton of original plot. Yet this breathless reworking rarely lingers long enough in any moment to establish such connections. A thoughtful observer could draw parallels to pandemic isolation, ever-widening wealth gaps, and roiling social unrest that dominate news cycles and personal lives. Those topics still resonate today, for many reasons. Chekhov layered his original script with explorations of loss and grief, set against a shifting cultural backdrop that almost foreshadows the looming Russian Revolution. Rather than establishing character or building relationships, the actors crash about the stage in bursts of highly choreographed movement (by Jungwoong Kim) that often seem smirkingly incongruous and do little to serve the story.Ī question that remains frustratingly unanswered is exactly what kind of story Krymov and the HotHouse want to tell with this adaptation. The train sign might deliver more dialogue than any of the performers onstage, who are mostly culled from the Wilma's resident company, the HotHouse. What emerges instead are feats of technical wizardry, including a mechanical split-flap that dominates the back wall of an expansive, otherwise barren set (designed by Krymov and Irina Kruzhilina, who also did the costumes) and essentially functions as the production's narrator. By doing so, he sacrifices the work's emotional weight on the altar of experimentation, obscuring the very themes that render this 118-year-old drama timeless.
Director Dmitry Krymov slashes through the classic with craven indifference, essentially accomplishing what the developers in the play want to do to the beautiful but useless woodlet. In the Wilma Theater's pretentiously deconstructed adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov buys the farm long before the first axeblade drops.
0 kommentar(er)
