The Cherry Orchard
Written by Anton Chekhov
Adapted/translated by John Christopher Jones
Directed by Ryan Czerwonko
236 W 73 St., Manhattan, NYC
September 18-October 12, 2025
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| Ryan Czerwonko and Megan Metrikin in The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Joey Damore. |
Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is replete with hauntings: the owner of the estate on which the titular orchard sits is reminded of the drowning death of her young son by the return of his tutor and mistakes a white shape in the orchard for her dead mother; the estate, and indeed the nation, are haunted by the memories of their exploited serfs (the play was written just two years before the First Russian Revolution in 1905); and the ghosts of indiscretions and lost youth dog multiple characters. Adult Film+Theatre's fantastic new production of The Cherry Orchard, which makes its debut after a yearlong development process, embraces and foregrounds these and other sorts of hauntings, including those of cinematic influences such as Federico Fellini, while assertively bringing the play into a present that is simultaneously the past. This sort of category collapse characterizes the production as a whole: it renders permeable boundaries not only between past and present, making the idea of anachronism irrelevant, but also between film and theater, spectator and cast, performance and non-performance spaces, and even genres, giving audiences a funny, sometimes surreal Chekhov by intensifying The Cherry Orchard's inherent tragicomedy. |
| Megan Metrikin in The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Joey Damore. |
The estate at the play's center is owned by the aristocratic Madame Lubov (
Megan Metrikin), who is returning home after having been, to borrow her brother Gaev's (Simón Fortin) word, "naughty" in Paris. Returning to the estate with her are her seventeen-year-old daughter, Anya (
Raina Soman); Anya's governess, Carlotta (Joshua Matteo); and Lubov's valet, Yasha (
Taylor Petracek). There to meet them are Gaev; Lobov's estate manager and adopted daughter Varya (Lauren Guglielmello); family friend and fellow impoverished aristocrat Pischik (Jay Geist); and servants Dunyasha (
Madeline Bernhard) and Epikhodov (
Matthew Zimmerman), whose hilariously squeaky new shoes are just one example of the daily bad luck with which he describes himself as besieged. Arriving later is the aforementioned tutor, Trofimov (Ethan Navarro), a student in his late twenties who sees himself as a politically oriented intellectual above the common fray of concerns like love, while elderly servant Firs (the
late John Christopher Jones in a filmed role; the show, dedicated to his memory, uses his translation of
The Cherry Orchard), in this production, hovers over the estate like a specter nostalgic for the old ways. He is another watcher in a space through which a handheld video camera periodically roves and in which the door leading upstairs, into the depths of the house, sometimes opens by itself. Over all of the characters' interpersonal maneuverings–Epikhodov, for example, desires Dunyasha, who in turn sets her affections on Yasha, who also, one moment here implies, had something with Gaev–looms the impending auction of the debt-saddled estate. Arriviste Lophakin (Ryan Czerwonko), whose father and grandfather worked the estate as serfs, proposes turning the orchard into villas to avoid the sale and turn a profit, but his chances of convincing the aristocratic owners, used to expensive lives of leisure, to take such a bourgeois path seem slim.
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| Taylor Petracek, Madeline Bernhard and Matthew Zimmerman in The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Joey Damore. |
The production makes superb use of the intimate, nontraditional performance space on the fifth floor of Rutgers Presbyterian Church to conjure the chaos of all of these characters bouncing off one another in one place, as well as to facilitate some immersive touches and to engage in some inventive staging, such as placing actors outside the windows on a balcony or having conversations continue as characters move outside the room in which the audience is seated and down a hallway. The raised stage becomes just one more part of a performance area that encompasses the entirety of the space and keeps the actors close to the audience, seated on three sides of the room, more often than not. The physical mobility of the staging finds a thematic echo in the social mobility that marks several of the characters. Though Dunyasha is a maid, she aspires to signs of status, and comments more than once that she has the white hands of a lady. As new money, Lophakin has a bit of imposter syndrome, but he is bored by signs of status such as intellectual books and admits that he has never shed the bad handwriting that he links to his peasant origins. Trofimov stands as something of Lophakin's opposite in claiming to care only for intellectual life and not at all for money (put together with Anya's late promise to her mother that they will read lots and lots of books, one might also see abstract intellectualism as opposed to real life); and at one point, Trofiomov and Lophakin try to physically upstage one another in a contest of masculinity that highlights its own silliness. Of course, not all the mobility on display is upward: the threatened loss of the estate and its orchard can be viewed as a type of gentrifying that displaces the gentry as well as the peasantry, as well as characteristic of a Capitalocene that destroys ecology to generate profit.
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| Lauren Guglielmello and Raina Soman in The Cherry Orchard. Photo by Joey Damore. |
This
Cherry Orchard uses the rear wall of the space as a screen on which to project both recorded and live video, the former of which ranges from location setting to cinematic scenes, as of Lobov in Paris, to the transformation of the original text's reading of a poem passage into a short film that responds to the poem's content. Such use of video suggests multiple perspectives on reality, or multiple realities, perhaps especially in recursive live hand-held shots. The mostly contemporary pop music in the production also takes both recorded and, thanks to Zimmerman's piano playing, live forms (Lophakin's merely sitting on the keys as a joke again signals his lack of old-money breeding), and seems to literally take possession of people at several points. There are entertaining and expressive sequences of dance but also of choreographed movement, as when a trio of characters revolve a piano while going around their topic of conversion. Spotlights and handheld lanterns and deep ambient reds trade places with more naturalistic lighting before, as the home empties towards the play ends, the house lights come up in a way that feels like the signal to leave at the end of a concert. The cast is outstanding, and their performances make overt the eroticism implied in the play's crosscurrents of love and desire. Bernhard engagingly incarnates Dunyasha's journey through romantic excitement, jealousy, and betrayal; Guglielmello gives a sense of disciplined self-denial to Varya's frustrated affection for Lophakin; and, as Lubov, Metrikin enthralls as someone as comfortable enjoying her sexuality as attempting to use it as a tool. Metrikin and Fortin ensure that their characters' denial is affecting, much as Soman and Navarro do with Anya and Trofimov, whose future together they see as rosier than the audience does. Zimmerman and Geist are, in different ways, wonderfully funny, and Petracek's Yasha hits the perfect note of charismatic self-involvement. Matteo's German-accented Carlotta is witchy and self-possessed (she first appears with a riding crop and thigh high boots), and Czerwonko eventually and powerfully reveals a latent fury beneath Lophakin's often amusing nouveau riche persona. Adult Film's invigorating, mesmerizing
Cherry Orchard pitches all of this into a slightly heightened register, which, when combined with the language of the text, and traces of surreality, enhances the production's dream-like presentation of its characters' individual experiences, unfolding and retrospective, of their lives and nation.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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