Theater Emory opens Chekhov’s final play
Opening tomorrow, Theater Emory takes on Anton Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard. Director, professor, resident artist and chair of the department of theater and dance at Emory, Tim McDonough, talks about the mix mentorship of having professionals alongside student actors, the sadness surrounding Chekhov’s somewhat comedic deathbed play, and what they are doing to make it a stand out production.
Q. In Emory’s description of your production of The Cherry Orchard it appears that you have taken the play back to its humorous roots. So many took the Stanislavski route and imbedded tragedy where there should have been farce, what made you take it back to its origins?
A. This is a complex question, because there is in fact pathos in the play, and strong moments of passion that are not comic. The play is in fact a hybrid, what we now refer to as tragicomic or seriocomic. Chekhov may have set out to write a comedy, but there is nothing comic about Ranevskaya’s grief for her drowned severn-year-old son, for example. We have attempted to find the comedy, even absurdity, while doing justice to the rest of the play. There are, as you say, elements of farce — so many entrances and exits, and moments that are comic bits that might be in one of Chekhov’s early comedies: but there are also serious moments about the passing of an age, about mortality, about time and its erasure of everything.
Chekhov knew he was dying as he wrote this comedy about letting go and about death. It is at certain moments a peculiarly contemporary kind of “comedy”: the last scene, for example, of an old man locked in an empty house, is a flash forward to Beckett.
Q. Emory’s program has touted that it includes both student and professional actors in the shows it produces. Was the same done for this production? And does this act as almost a mentor program for the students?
A. Our cast of 13 is comprised of six professionals and seven students. Of course the students do learn a great deal by playing with professionals — and by playing age-appropriate roles with actors who are credible as older characters. Our professionals do in fact mentor students — not only in the work at hand but on the fringes of rehearsal, when they may engage in conversations about the acting business, career choices, etc.
It is also true that professionals find our rehearsal processes refreshing and substantive. For one thing, rehearsals are generally 4-5 weeks, and not abbreviated for budgetary reasons. And because our rehearsals are also a training context for our students, the exercises and explorations are nurturing and stimulate discoveries, for pros as well as students.
John Gielgud once remarked that younger actors can do things that older actors can no longer do. He was referring not to physical strength or energy, but the fact that younger actors are free in the sense that they have not yet been boxed in by conventional choices and ingrained habits. I daresay that professionals sometime learn as much from our students — you can do that! — as our students learn from pros. I know that has been true in my own experience of acting with Emory students.
Q. So much about The Cherry Orchard is based on letting go. While taking on this classic Anton Chekhov play, what elements did you wish to hold on to and which did you let go of and make fresh?
A. I wanted to let go of the traditional setting of a realistic set and four different locations. My hope was to develop a world defined by elements that are imagistically related to the central themes of the play: nursery furnishings, gravestones, and luggage (which is emblematic of the transitory nature of life — and of every moment in this play, in which the tone changes constantly. Sara Culpepper, our set designer, created an art installation that is a dream-like of a place already long gone. Into this illusion walk realistically dressed characters.
Q. The Cherry Orchard was influenced by his own experiences with financial misfortune and the effects of having to leave a home behind. Did you find that there were many modern day tie ins to this arc of the story and did that effect your vision?
A. I don’t especially have such personal connections to a lost home. But I know many people do, and during rehearsals I have had conversations with cast members and others working on the production who are personally affected by this story of leaving behind a place with many associations that are part of one’s personal history and identity. I had a phone call from a former colleague who explained that she would not be able to see the production because her home in Atlanta is currently on the market and stripped of all personal belongings — and the play would be unbearable in the circumstances.
Q. For those who haven’t experienced a production at Theater Emory, what makes it stand out and why should audiences attend this show?
A. This production is an attempt to capture the thematic and stylistic complexity of the play — and not to let the play’s incongruities be smoothed over or hidden. A play with so many eccentric misfits — who have so much difficulty relating to one another — should not be disguised as an ordinary drama. And the elements of farce and social comedy clash with outpourings of passion.
One particular aspect of this production that is original is the presence of Chekhov as a character.Playing Chekhov in our production, Donald McManus, has a great deal of professional experience as a clown, and he brings a particularly Chekhovian energy to our production.
