Magnified Gestures

By C.P.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD by ANTON CHEKHOV

In Chekhov's plays extraordinary things usually happen in the most ordinary ways. Not so in the revival of The Cherry Orchard at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center. Director Andrei Serban emblazons even quite ordinary moments with extraordinary stage effects. Symbolic figures stalk in and out, backgrounds loom hugely, movement flows into patterns and tableaux. The results are bold, sometimes beautiful, but only partly successful.

Serban's best images effectively magnify the play's conflict between the old order and the bright new world that is its doom: a frieze of peasants laboring beneath modern telegraph wires, a group of aristocrats watching the setting sun silhouette a factory on the horizon. But this kind of staginess can also be distracting: an imposingly literal set of cherry trees all but overruns a house in Act I; a little girl bearing cherry blossoms self-consciously tiptoes into the old servant Firs' death scene. The high, deep stage-space forces the cast to play to a scale larger than that of Chekhov's text (here rendered into colloquial English by Jean-Claude van Itallie).

The Cherry Orchard is the most farcical of Chekhov's major works, and the cast (including George Voscovec, Raul Julia, Cathryn Damon, Marybeth Hurt and Michael Cristofer) whoops and tumbles through it with exaggerated zest. Especially delicious is Meryl Streep's housemaid Dunyasha, all borrowed gentility and sexual flutter.

The play's tragic relief is supplied by the wrenching pathos of the orchard's owner, Madame Ranevskaya. In this role the production boasts the splendid Irene Worth. Hers is a memorable portrayal -- extravagant, feckless, alluring, touchingly vulnerable. When she ritualistically halves the telegram from her erstwhile lover in Paris -- slowly, pain fully, like a bandage -- an entire life is caught between the past it cannot release and the future it cannot resist.

At such moments Serban's penchant for formalized action fuses brilliantly with an actress's, and Chekhov's, art.

At other, more overbearing moments one wishes he had taken to heart a line in the play, when the student Trofimov advises the exuberant parvenu Lopakhin: "Stop waving your arms about. Get out of the habit of making grand gestures."

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