Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

As it happened, some of the productions I saw in the weeks after my return from London have been productions I had heard about a lot while I was in London. I’ve already commented on Vanya, so I’ll focus on the others.

Benedict Andrews’s staging of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (at St. Anne’s) and Rebecca Frecknall’s staging of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (at the Harvey) both are played on essentially empty spaces. Most of the action of Streetcar takes place on a raised square; Cherry Orchard is played on a large Persian rug surrounded on four sides by the audience. There is no furniture in either production. (In fact, during the famous passage in Cherry Orchard when Gaev extols the virtues of a bookcase, a playgoer is drafted to stand and represent it.) In both productions, when a prop is needed for a scene, a member of the company simply steps to the edge of the playing area and hands it to the character who needs it.

If you’ve been following my posts, it won’t surprise you that working with a minimum of scenery and only essential objects appeals to me. As I’ve written many times, I like metaphor in theater. I like, as a member of the audience, to be asked to work a little, to imagine what is missing. To participate rather than sit passively. If you have a strong text and resourceful actors, I don’t need much more. I was particularly delighted that the designers of The Cherry Orchard felt no need to indulge in virtuosic lighting. The four acts were mostly illuminated by a large white box suspended over the stage. The intensity of the light from the box changed a little, but for all intents and purposes the action played in general lighting, not dissimilar to watching a daytime performance in the Globe Theater on the Southbank. (You may remember that when the Globe brought Richard III and Twelfth Night to Broadway with Mark Rylance, even though the production played in a conventional Broadway theater, the lighting was designed to replicate daylight.) I doubt that anybody watching this Cherry Orchard gave a thought to the simplicity of the lighting. I can be delighted as anyone by the dazzling lighting in productions like Sunset Boulevard and The Life of Pi, but I am as likely to be thrilled by a production whose lighting plot is lights up, lights down, curtain call and out. For me, content and performance carry the greatest weight.

Both Cherry Orchard and Streetcar are masterpieces, but they are not remotely easy masterpieces. I have seen my share of disappointing performances of both. There are some plays that are made so that if the actors speak clearly and don’t bump into the furniture they will work. Hearing the lines is sufficient. But adequate actors are inadequate for Chekhov and Williams. The richer the subtext, the more is demanded, and Chekhov and Williams are masters of subtext. There is always some deeper game going on under the literal meaning of the lines. I remember my first encountering the non-proposal scene between Lopakhin and Varya in the fourth act of The Cherry Orchard on the page. I couldn’t understand why the two talked of banalities when there were more important things to address. It was only when I saw a Cherry Orchard directed by Arvin Brown at Long Wharf that I finally understood the power and the heartbreak of the encounter. The avoidance was the point of the scene. Something which should happen was not going to happen. Hoped died. Nobody talked directly about it, but that’s what, in a good production, an audience understands.

Benedict Andrews’s production is a very good one indeed. Headed by Nina Hoss as Ranevskaya and Adeel Akhtar as Lopakhin, this Cherry Orchard keeps its ensemble in a constant state of motion, moving with great energy but ultimately unable to outrun their fates. Ranevskaya, as the head of the family, cannot meet her responsibilities and constantly looks to be rescued. Lopakhin, the rich younger man who adores her and whose father was once a serf on the estate, offers good if unappealing advice on how to hold onto her property. She ignores what he urges. When it is revealed that he has impulsively bought the cherry orchard (and will soon chop down the trees to build crummy holiday cabins), we understand that in a sense he has been trying to save her from himself. This has always been in the play, but it emerged with particular pathos in this version.

The previous stage productions of Streetcar I have seen have been complicit with Blanche in at least initially trying to protect her from the judgment of the audience. In the Times, Jesse Green suggested that Rebecca Frecknall’s interpretation is a Streetcar “as if staged by Stanley.” When Mitch turns on a harsh light and sees that Blanche is older than he’d thought, the effect isn’t as shocking as it usually is because our view of Blanche before this has hardly been one softened by shadows and pastel colors. But, as clever as the phrase “as if staged by Stanley” is, if it were staged by him, wouldn’t there would be more sympathy for him? If we are less seduced by Patsy Ferran’s take on Blanche than we usually are (Vivien Leigh’s Blanche triggered rescue fantasies), Paul Mescal’s Stanley is more savage than most. It has to be conceded that Stanley has a case – he has what he sees as a happy home, with a passionate marriage, and a group of indulgent friends to blow off steam with. In comes Blanche to challenge his setup and to casually insult him with every other phrase. But Mescal’s Stanley does little to show us the boyish charm that usually disarms us a bit when we first encounter Stanley. Ferran and Mescal are both driven to have their ways. Of the two, I sympathize with Ferran’s Blanche more, but it’s hard to make a case for why anybody would welcome her into their home.

The one objection I have to both productions is the over-dependence on music. A drummer punctuates the key moments in Streetcar and electric instruments rumble underneath much of the second half of Cherry Orchard. In both cases, the audience is being cued as to how to respond. The productions are good enough not to need to goose us like that. I remember Steven Spielberg talking once about how Clint Eastwood as a director tends to use way less music in his films than he. And I remember thinking that, on this point, I was with Clint.

Sarah Snook won the Olivier award for best actress in 2024 for playing the title role (and all of the other roles) in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, written and directed by Kip Williams. The production intends to be a dazzler and it is. Snook shifts characters, sometimes from line to line, and also plays with multiple pre-recorded images of herself gliding across the stage on moving screens. Running two hours, it requires extraordinary timing and stamina. The language is mostly Wilde’s, but the effect is markedly distinct from Wilde’s original. Wilde wrote a cautionary fable, one designed to make readers look into themselves (no matter how much Wilde pretended not to be concerned with moral issues in his work). Snook and Williams give us a high-spirited theatrical event, a celebration of the transformational ability of a star and the magic that can be accomplished if you have access to vast technical resources. The best passages of The Cherry Orchard and A Streetcar Named Desire celebrate restraint in the use of effects. This Dorian Gray overwhelms the audience with fireworks. I found much of it thrilling. I was also exhausted a good half hour before the show ended. If you have the opportunity to see it at a reasonable price, it’s well worth seeing. Whether you agree with what is being attempted, I expect you’ll be intrigued by it.