Anton Chekhov (Playwright) was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father, Pavel, was a grocer with frequent money troubles; his mother, Yevgeniya, shared her love of storytelling with Chekhov and his five siblings.

Through stories such as “The Steppe” and “The Lady with the Dog,” and plays such as The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov emphasized the depths of human nature, the hidden significance of everyday events, and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Chekhov died of tuberculosis on July 15, 1904, in Badenweiler, Germany.

From the late 1890s onward, Chekhov collaborated with Constantin Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theater on productions of his plays, including his masterpieces The Seagull (1895), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904).

In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress from the Moscow Art Theatre. However, by this point his health was in decline due to the tuberculosis that had affected him since his youth. While staying at a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany, he died in the early hours of July 15, 1904, at the age of 44.

Chekhov is considered one of the major literary figures of his time. His plays are still staged worldwide, and his overall body of work influenced important writers of an array of genres, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Henry Miller.

Paul Schmidt (Translator), whose translations and/or adaptations of Phaedra, The Bacchae, and In the Jungle of Cities were staged at the American Repertory Theater in past seasons, was one of the most influential critics, translators, and playwrights of his time. His translations, including plays by Chekhov, Gogol, Genet, Brecht, and Marivaux, have been produced by such directors as Robert Wilson, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Peter Sellars and have won awards in France, Italy, and the United States. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Dr. Schmidt, who held a PhD in Slavic literature from Harvard, was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Texas and at Wellesley College. He also taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Yale and lectured widely in the United States and abroad. His critical essays appeared in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and Delos. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dr. Schmidt was the author of Meyerhold at Work, and editor of The Complete Works of Arthur Rimbaud and The Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov. His collected translations of Chekhov’s plays were published in 1997.

The ecodramaturgy of Chekhov’s cherry orchard – undeniable geographies:

We never “see” the cherry orchard in Chekhov’s last penned play before his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1904. Even in Act II, set out of doors in a crumbling chapel atop an old cemetery rather than inside the failing fortress of a passing landed gentry, the cherry orchard looms as an unsettling echo and dark scenic presence just out of reach. Similar, perhaps, to the longevity Chekhov’s last work would have and his prowess as a playwright that he would ultimately be unaware of. Gravely ill when The Cherry Orchard premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov was only able to see the last two acts on opening night before he would be whisked off to Germany for his final days spent in the Black Forest village of Badenweiler.

For Chekhov, the land lived and died in him. His happiest years were spent on his Melikhovo estate, nothing like Madame Ranevskaya’s fictive sprawling acreage, but enough to bring him tranquility, lyricism, and a lasting impression of the land that years later would inspire him to write to Stanislavsky “about his vision for the first act of The Cherry Orchard.” An act he would only see realized on paper, with “blossoming cherry trees [that] can be seen through the windows, an entire garden of white…and the ladies will be in white dresses” (Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, 193). The cherry orchard was an embodiment of the land he grew up with, that he experienced as being altered by ravage and revolution, and that he wanted to pen into permanence. In his play about the death of an old Russia based on (unequal) land ownership, he creates for us a narrative about people undeniably connected to and taken from place.

For, like Chekhov, the landscape lives differently yet palpably for each of these characters and thus for us, the audience. Although we never actually see the orchard, through them we can feel it, hear it, taste it (especially in the case of Firs as he recounts all the different types of cherries that were grown and processed here), maybe even smell it if we breathe in deeply and imagine its essence into being. The cherry orchard is the center of the play’s agon – its protagonist and antagonist, its conflict, its tension, at times its life, and through its destruction, the play’s final (re)solution.

So why does earth matter so much on stage and why the prevailing of a play whose nostalgic and myopic sense of land ownership and preservation is still such an important narrative to present? What is it about the (eco)dramaturgy of imagined geographies, written over a century ago, that should still render importance for us today?

In climate futurist Alex Steffen’s words below, I believe, are not only deep resonances of a swiftly changing past but the future implications found in this story. That this family, their former and present employees, their friends and hangers-on are all in their own way “…experiencing the shock that comes from recognizing that [they] are totally unprepared for what is already happening.” Like us today as we slowly (or quickly or reluctantly) come to terms with the careening effects of climate change, human impact, war and destruction, like them as they hear the unsettling twanging of broken branches and the untimely chopping of trees that cuts them to their very cores, we are experiencing a repetitive shock that is not just undeniable but, at the same time, totally recognizable. We’ve seen it all before. Something that could have, perhaps, been avoided, if they (we) just looked, if they (we) just saw, if they (we) just took a moment more to listen. The geographies – lands and communities – of this particular region, and across the world, are undeniably being forever scarred and lost. Is Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard yet another chance for us to “see” better, to look, to listen, to feel, to shake ourselves out of a complacent shock of being totally unprepared for what is not only quickly passing but happening right now, in this present?

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

~ Karin Waidley, dramaturg

What’s fascinating to me about The Cherry Orchard is that it contains intense contradictions: contradictions in style, theme, and action, and highly contradictory characters. It fully occupies a tragicomic perspective that is always moving, shifting, turning on a dime – whipping from the profound to the farcical, the spiritual to the absurd. And sometimes both at once.

Indeed, the dominant exploration of the play is on how the ground shifts under our feet. In this way the play is a meditation on change: its inevitability, its griefs, our excruciating anticipation of it, and how we dread it especially if it requires us to let go of something. That dread then converts into fulsome (and futile) acts of denial. Certainly, much of the action of The Cherry Orchard is a comic dance between reality asserting itself and its characters’ compensatory efforts to push it to the margins. And it’s in those acts of denial that we see their follies and their eccentricities: we’ve got mumbling old men, former circus performer ventriloquists, compulsive candy eaters, squeaky shoe stumblers, gluttonous narcoleptics, and perpetual nose
powderers…

That is, this play, despite its chord of grief, has color, vitality, and humor. It is a play filled by a delightful crew of freakazoids who manage to be both entertaining and deeply human. The central aspect of their humanness is that they must face and endure the inevitability of change. Time will not stop for them, and its passage requires they let go of the old to step into the new. And that is a monumental task in its way, because I suppose, on some level, we are all aware that the ultimate act of letting go is the letting go of life itself. In this way the play really is a meditation on death; on the beauty and pain and ridiculousness we feel when we confront the fact of our own transience.

~Daniel Cantor, Director

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