Word: lopakhin
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...beginning of the American Repertory Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard, Yermolai Lopakhin rouses himself in the middle of the night to greet a train. Although the businessperson wakes up, he seems to wake into a dream in which everything is slightly off-balance. Director Ron Daniels' airy, sweetly comic production emphasizes the imblances of Chekhov's picture of a changing world...
...other actors lend more weight to the production, particularly Jack Willis, whose Lopakhin is the perfect voice of reason in a household adrift. However, Lopakhin's business sense has left him no time for would-be wife Varya, played with appeal and sympathy by Miki Whittles. In her interpretation of Varya's sister Anya, Karen Phillips comes across as flaccid and boring. For the first scene, she inexplicably delivers her lines directly to the audience. This bland performance renders the affection of dire, serious Pyotr (Royal Miller) for Anya unlikely...
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...
...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...
Both as a directorial conception and as a casting decision, having Terence Kelly play Lopakhin is a mistake. Urbane, almost unctuous, he seems like an insurance man offering Mme. Ranevsky a real estate policy of cutting down the trees for a housing development. There should be a hush surrounding the regal presence of Mme. Ranevsky when she sweeps into a room. Carole Shelley resembles a '40s movie starlet posturing to capture a producer's eye. All this merely taps the defects in this production. Chekhov preached that the salvation of Russia lay in work. The Shaw Festival might...