KICKING UP DUST.(Anton Chekhov)(Biography)

Of all the modernist playwrights whose work is still performed in repertory, Anton Chekhov is generally considered the most modern. In his five best-known plays--all written between 1887 and 1903--the winds of change are never gentle; they mercilessly expose the avaricious behavior of the newly moneyed, who grab at Russia's dawning industrial age like greedy children at the golden straw. And, of course, it is that greed--which Chekhov knew a great deal about, having had to support his cruel merchant father and other loutish family members for much of his adult life--that accounts for the "drama" in his plays, which are rarely dramatic. That is, the drama that Chekhov presents to us is an undercurrent of emotion and intention; he leaves it to the director, the cast, and the audience to draw that current to the surface, to find the play's meaning in their own interpretations of the action. In this way, Chekhov presaged much of today's more adventurous theatre; he crafted his plays as events, "happenings," in which his characters' interactions were more or less unchoreographed. (Some seasons back, the avant-garde director Elizabeth LeCompte and her admirable company the Wooster Group used Chekhov's "Three Sisters" as a jumping-off point from which to dissect the nature of performance in general.)

As it happens, Chekhov was quite aware that he was up to something new when he stopped writing the short "vaudevilles," or sketches, he initially became known for. In an 1887 letter to his oldest brother, who longed to be a writer, too, Chekhov wrote, of his first full-length drama, "Ivanov," "Modern playwrights begin their plays with angels, scoundrels, and clowns exclusively. . . . I wanted to be original: I did not portray a single villain, not a single angel (though I could not refrain when it came to the clown), did not accuse anyone, or exculpate. Whether this is well done, I do not know." This is modernism in both thought and action: Chekhov is unsure whether he has created a new form while being absolutely sure that new forms are what artists should create. To that end, he was fortunate to be matched in his daring by his director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, who worked with actors and text in a way that was intended to make theatre an organic, realistic whole--no longer a place for "angels."

It's odd to consider all this in light of the strange and inconsequential version of Chekhov's last play, "The Cherry Orchard," currently on view at the Atlantic Theatre Company. As directed by Scott Zigler, from an adaptation by Tom Donaghy, the production is far from modern. Instead, Zigler has put together a stiltedly old-fashioned show, full of male bombast and female fluttering, with every moment of silence taken up by mugging or sight gags. And while Zigler has cast the show with a number of adults--including the fine film actress Brooke Adams--it is ultimately a high-school production, amateurish and gleaming with anxious, doomed hope.

At the play's start, Madame Ranevskaya (Adams) returns from Paris, where she has survived a disastrous love affair, to her family's estate in the Russian countryside, accompanied by her daughter Anya (Laura Breckenridge). There are many family retainers there to greet the two women, including Ranevskaya's adopted daughter, Varya (Diana Ruppe), who is also the estate's majordomo--a role that gives Ruppe the opportunity to wear black and look perpetually pained. Assembling in the family nursery, Ranevskaya and her brother Leonid (Larry Bryggman) begin their customary trip down memory lane--a journey that holds more charm for them than any movement forward, beyond their own solipsism.

As they reach for the past, they ignore the future, which appears in the form of Lopakhin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), a local businessman, who dresses like a carpetbagger and whose roots lie in the peasantry. While Ranevskaya tries to remind Lopakhin of the time they spent together as children, he's much more interested in what he can see now: the impending sale of the estate and its beautiful cherry orchard, which the family's financial carelessness ...