The Cherry Orchard (Play)

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    Review: In High-Tech ‘Orchard,’ It’s Hard to See the Forest for the Trees

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    Jessica Hecht, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Chekhov himself too often get overwhelmed by this ambitious Arlekin Players Theater adaptation.A black-clad figure shuffles a curving path through the cherry blossom petals carpeting the ground. Ancient, dignified, slightly stooped, he is searching for his cane in this strange and beautiful landscape where almost everything, including the cherry blossoms, is a shade of swimming-pool blue.The opening moments of “The Orchard,” Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” belong to Firs, the serf turned servant who has been attached for generations to the same house in the countryside, and devoted to the same frivolous family now in peril of losing their beloved home. It is Firs who reliably pierces our hearts at the end of “The Cherry Orchard,” so to start with him here is fitting — all the more so because he is played by Mikhail Baryshnikov with the ineffable magnetism and captivating grace that have always made him a riveting performer, and that now make him the quietly scene-stealing anchor of this ambitious and cluttered production.We don’t know it yet, but that brief interlude — with a single line of dialogue about the weather, and the pleasure of watching Baryshnikov whirl when a wind whips up — is the last we will have before this show starts obstructing our view of the actors with video frequently projected on its transparent downstage scrim.It is extraordinarily frustrating, like trying to watch a play through a black-and-white film: a film that is often showing a close-up of what is happening on one part of the stage while blocking something else — such as Baryshnikov making a choreographed movement that we can’t see clearly even though he’s right there in the room with us. And this theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center is a fairly intimate space; we are not in need of a zoom lens.Baryshnikov, as the servant Firs, and Hecht as Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house.Maria BaranovaA clue to the root of the chaos is the giant robotic arm sitting center stage in Golyak’s production for the Massachusetts-based Arlekin Players Theater, where he is artistic director, and its Zero Gravity Virtual Theater Lab. “The Orchard” is a hybrid, meant to provide one experience to in-person audiences and another, more interactive experience to online audiences. One of the show’s multiple cameras, none particularly well deployed, is on that robotic arm. There is also a robotic dog, who is surprisingly charming. (Robotics design is by Tom Sepe.)Experimenting with virtual theater is how Arlekin made a bigger name for itself during the industry shutdown; Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht, the other star in this cast, first worked with the company online.But the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly, which hampers both incarnations. Seeing it in person is better, or certainly it was on Wednesday, when I caught the matinee at the theater and watched the virtual version — which is also live, and supplemented with activities like touring virtual rooms inhabited by Baryshnikov as Chekhov — from home at night. As intended, online viewers miss the beginning of the stage performance; why this would seem like a good idea I cannot fathom.It turns out that those close-ups on the scrim can be helpful if you’re watching the show on a laptop. On the other hand, the online video jerked and stopped so often on my screen, and for so long, that there were whole chunks of action I heard but didn’t see; the video feed cut out before the curtain call; and the scripted online ending mysteriously failed to appear. The ending I watched in person, though, didn’t entirely come off, either, because the final, vital projection never happened.A robotic arm gathers some of the video that is projected live onstage and shown online. In person, the images often prove distracting to a viewer captivated by the performers.Maria BaranovaWhat about the play, though? Well, that’s exactly the problem: You have to hack your way through an enormous amount of distraction merely to get to it, and even then the production doesn’t have the storytelling clarity the play needs to land. On the sidewalk after the matinee, I overheard some audience members who had never seen “The Cherry Orchard” and were left none the wiser, in terms of plot, after “The Orchard.”This disjointed production gives the impression of not being especially interested in comprehensibility. For all its projections (designed by Alex Basco Koch), significant passages of dialogue in American Sign Language, Russian and French go untranslated.Still, it is pretty to look at, with Anna Fedorova’s set ravishingly lit by Yuki Nakase Link, and the actors clad in Oana Botez’s elegantly contemporary take on period costumes. And Hecht is a gorgeously frothy Madame Ranevskaya, the lady of the house: sentimental and self-absorbed, with a decorative layer of ever-pleasant femininity and a spritz of teasing sexiness.During Wednesday night’s performance, when Hecht broke off to take a few live-chat questions from the virtual audience, she remained in character as a viewer reported a long-frozen computer screen.“I am so sorry,” she said, noting that a solution would require someone versed in such things. “I can only speak of matters of the heart.”One would think that this production might speak eloquently of matters of the heart — not only because Chekhov’s play does, but also because the Kyiv-born Golyak and his Arlekin, with its immigrant origins, are no strangers to the reality of having to leave a beloved home and build a life elsewhere.Aside from Madame Ranevskaya’s less-favored daughter Varya, played by Elise Kibler with a touching hopefulness, there’s not much in this production beyond sweet, funny, delicate Firs to suggest a heart at all.But, ah, Firs — so certain all his life that if he looked after this family, they would do the same for him. When the truth dawns at last, with the shock of disillusion, he collapses into human wreckage. Even in utter stillness, he is fascinating.The OrchardThrough July 3 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan, and online; theorchardoffbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Chekhov Two Ways, With a Robot and Baryshnikov Along for the Ride

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      When the director Igor Golyak began working on a staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” he had an idea in mind. “There was a concept,” he said, then interrupted himself. “I’d rather not talk about what it used to be, if that’s OK. The war started, me being from Kyiv and having this affinity for the Russian culture. …”Golyak’s voice trailed off. He was speaking in a coffee shop a block from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in Midtown Manhattan, where his show, now titled “The Orchard,” is set to begin previews June 7 with a cast headed by the busy stage and screen actress Jessica Hecht as the estate owner Lyubov Ranevskaya. Also onboard is the center’s namesake, Mikhail Baryshnikov, as the old servant Firs.Golyak was born in Kyiv and his family landed in the United States in 1990, part of a wave of Jewish refugees. He finished high school in Boston then studied theater in Moscow — you might say Chekhov is in his bones. But although he felt he had a handle on the Russian writer’s work, the war in Ukraine made him reconsider his approach.Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, on the set of “The Orchard,” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local,” Baryshnikov said.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“How do you do theater and Chekhov when there’s bombings and killings?” he said. “I keep asking ‘How and why and why is it important?’ But not on the theoretical level — on the level that really touches me. For me, every show is very personal. The idea in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is the loss of a world, loss of connection, loss of each other, loss of this family. It’s a story where a human being is forgotten — Firs is forgotten,” he added. “And right now human being is forgotten.”In the play, a family in financial straits must decide whether it should sell its beloved orchard. In “The Orchard” this will be starkly visualized in a parallel virtual version that complements rather than merely captures the physical one — though streaming viewers get to watch parts of the version being performed live. (Audience members can attend either or both.)The virtual world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the Baryshnikov Arts Center stands in for the orchard. There, the building, now a husk of its former self, is for sale, and virtual audience members can tour it as if they were doing a walk-through of a home on a real estate website.“It’s almost as if you’re inside this building and you find these magical rooms, and in each room, it’s like you’re finding a lost world,” the producer Sara Stackhouse said. “You’re discovering a letter or a memory, then you discover this theater where a play is in progress and you join it.”Jessica Hecht, center, with Nael Nacer during a rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis grounds the show in a historical reality — Baryshnikov portrays the playwright in the digital version, and Hecht pops up as Chekhov’s wife and his mistress — while nodding to our troubled current circumstances.“The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture,” Baryshnikov wrote in an email. “How that translates in Igor’s version remains to be seen. Obviously he speaks the language the play was written in, but he’s taking a lot of risks — technical and artistic — and avoiding clichés.”Something that definitely can’t be called a Chekhov cliché is a 12-foot robotic arm, which sits in the middle of the physical stage — it is part of the family and tries to understand humans — and was painstakingly programmed to execute such tasks as serving coffee or sweeping the floor. (The production process has demanded many hours of Zoom calls with a technical team spread all over the world.)The juxtaposition of past and future (typically, Oana Botez’s costumes for the physical version are a hybrid of period and modern), human and robot feels like yet another leap for Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater, which is based in Needham, Mass., and has been the rare company to use the pandemic as a creative spur.Until then, it had been a bit of a tough slog. As Golyak, now 43, learned the hard way, a young Russia-trained director was not a hot commodity in the American theater scene of the early 2000s.“Nobody wanted me,” he said. “For an immigrant, it’s very difficult: Where do you go? How do you start? I had an accent — and I still do, of course. I would send résumés but nobody would call me back. At some point I decided that I’m going to stop doing theater because it’s just not possible to make a living.” His day jobs included selling ads for the Yellow Pages.Eventually Golyak befriended a small group of other immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who asked him to help them work on scenes, guide them through what worked or not. He requested a nine-month commitment, and they agreed. Arlekin Players Theater emerged from that initiative, in 2009, and the troupe, which then mostly performed in Russian, developed an esprit de corps.From left: Nacer, Elise Kibler, Mark Nelson, Hecht, John McGinty, Juliet Brett and Baryshnikov during a recent rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“We are like a family,” said Darya Denisova, 32, an actor with Arlekin and Golyak’s wife. “We celebrate holidays together, we support each other when there are emergencies. Now that there’s this awful war going on between Russia and Ukraine, we are all trying our best to support people in Ukraine. We’re looking for ways to send more money, to support, to organize more and more help.”The company quickly earned plaudits on the community-theater circuit, but it took the pandemic to give the company a decisive push into greater recognition.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Power consolidation. More