Samovars Without Stereotypes THE CHERRY ORCHARD

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Midway through Chekhov's last play, written as he was dying, a plangent twang is heard by the members and hangers-on of a once grand family on the verge of eviction from its estate. Everybody perceives the sound, which Chekhov likens in the stage directions to a snapping string, but each has his own sense of what it meant. To one, it suggests the call of a heron; to another, an owl; and to a third, a cable breaking in a distant mine shaft. In most productions the moment is a throwaway. In a few it hints at the theme of an encroaching Industrial Revolution to which this doomed family cannot adapt. In the splendidly insightful version now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the incident becomes a central metaphor. Just as the characters cannot resolve the objective truth of what they heard, so they cannot arrive at a shared truth about their moral dilemmas, or even realize that they are not confronting them together but instead in juxtaposed yet separate lives.

Director Peter Brook's work in the 1980s includes an 80-minute condensation of Bizet's Carmen and a 9 1/2-hour adaptation of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. He is probably best remembered for his 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream, which uncovered weighty conflicts of the sexes and social classes in what had been seen as amiably airy farce. That production, gymnastic and visually abstract, signaled a revolutionary intent from the first glance. This time Brook's method is less obtrusive: though there are no sets to speak of, the costumes are in period and the air is abuzz with patronymics. Still, once again he has revisionism in mind.

The standard interpretation of The Cherry Orchard is, in the phrase of Critic Robert Brustein, as a "melodramatic conflict between a despoiler and $ his victims." The purported despoiler is Lopakhin, an upstart peasant turned real estate developer who plans to raze the family's mansion and orchard to create a cottage camp for vacationers. In place of this tragic vision of culture under attack, some Soviet productions have hailed Lopakhin as a visionary forerunner of the people's state. Either way, the play becomes didactic, and its undeniably comic moments work at the expense of its humanity.

Brook meticulously undercuts or complicates every stereotype with a welcome particularity. The crucial performance is by Film Star Brian Dennehy (Silverado, F/X) as a benevolent yet diffident Lopakhin, less a brash parvenu than a man poignantly conscious of his humble origins and clumsily trying to fit in. He is in his own way just as dreamy as Lyubov (Natasha Parry), the estate's spendthrift owner, whom he constantly upbraids for her impracticality. She ignores the impending auction of her home because any available means to "save" it would change and therefore destroy it. When Lopakhin cannot recruit her to his scheme, he plunges ahead, basing his gamble less on business acumen than on a burbling belief in the benefits of universal home ownership.

Among the supporting players, who include Erland Josephson, a veteran of eleven films by Ingmar Bergman, as Lyubov's ineffectual brother, the most affecting performance comes from Zeljko Ivanek. He plays Trofimov, a recurring Chekhovian type: the perpetual student who cannot organize his own life yet feels superior to both Lyubov and Lopakhin because he reveals to them unwelcome "truths." He opens the audience's eyes more than those of his friends. But his unflinching honesty emerges as just another self-deception to live by, in a world where people do nothing because there is nothing to be done. -- W.A.H. III