Review: ‘The Cherry Orchard’ at Goodman Theatre is the perfect final play for Robert Falls
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Had I been asked to predict Robert Falls’ final show for the Goodman Theatre, following a 35-year run as artistic director, I’d have guessed Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” the greatest play ever written about the pain — maybe also the opportunity, but mostly the searing pain — of leaving something you deeply love.
No stage director in the history of Chicago, if not America, has revealed in their art a keener awareness of their own narrative trajectory. Falls was never going to go quietly and, frankly, it would have been a colossal disappointment had this giant of Chicago theater chosen to go out with, say, some dumb farce about persons other than himself.
That’s not to say the man does not have a sense of humor. He does, along with a deep sense of irony about his own significance in this most ephemeral art forms, as practiced in a city perennially teetering at the edge of cultural centrality. So, of course, did Chekhov, a writer with an acute sense of the peskiness of the provincial, which is why the two long have been such a fine match. But never better than in the show you can now see on Dearborn Street.
Simply put, “The Cherry Orchard,” as adapted by the director and performed by many of Falls’ favorite Chicago actors (the ones still alive, at least), is everything I had hoped it would be. Everything and more.
For many in the Goodman audience, the show will seem like rich, lively, emotionally intense Chekhov. But for anyone who has paid close attention to Falls and his body of work at the Goodman? This show has more Easter eggs than a Taylor Swift concert.
I’m in the latter camp, of course. Pray, then, your indulgence. I even wondered if Todd Rosenthal had deliberately built the stars of the Chicago flag into his set design and costumer Ana Kuzmanic had incorporated elements of past Falls shows. It is that kind of night.
The most obvious Fallsian figure in this allegory is Lyubov Ranevskaya, played by Kate Fry and conceived by Chekhov as a once wealthy woman unable to resist the passage of time and the arrival of Lopakhin (Kareem Bandealy), a man of much humbler parentage who now has the resources to buy her beloved cherry orchard out from under her and force her to vacate the premises.
“The Cherry Orchard” is about how Ranevskaya is forced to leave, along with her mostly unaware daughter Anya (Raven Whitley), her savvier adopted daughter Varya (Alejandra Escalante) and her brother, Leonid (Christopher Donohue), an ineffectual eccentric who manages change very much like Connor Roy in the HBO show “Succession.” Meaning, better than most. There’s a deceptively complicated set by Rosenthal that comes and, most notably, goes.
Of course, Ranevskaya (not unlike Falls) is surrounded by a retinue of economic dependents, including a governess Charlotta (Janet Ulrich Brooks), a maid Dunyasha (Amanda Drinkall), a perpetual student Petya (Stephen Cefalu), a neighbor (Matt DeCaro) and the house butler Firs, played with enormous sadness and gravitas by Francis Guinan. These could be artistic associates, all searching for new lives. Charlotta at least has some tricks to pull out for the new boss.
The ever-formidable Fry is a sight to behold here. Falls, no doubt aware of the dangers of hubris, has conceived her much like a clown in the final company of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, a once-elegant woman now descending with every beat and smear of her makeup into a kind of self-imposed madness, a tragicomic King Lear on a Russian heath of the nonprofit American theater. With a plethora of fools at her side.
Bandealy offers a shrewd performance as the harbinger of drastic change in this theater — his work signals both delight and internal guilt, as well it should.
At one point during Monday night’s opening, my head left the Falls issue for a moment to marvel at something else: How could a nation that gave the world the humanistic nuance of Chekhov now be in the thrall of that warmongering bombast Vladimir Putin? Think about that, and whatever is occurring at the Goodman recedes in importance.
Falls, who once spent much time in Moscow, was also conscious of that most undesirable of changes, just as he was his own inability to stop time or return to life his longtime creative partner, Brian Dennehy, who surely would have been on this stage in this of all shows.
To end all these decades of reviews of Falls’ work at the Goodman, you’ll have to forgive me some spoilers: I don’t think they’ll undermine your enjoyment.
At one point, Ranevskaya leads her crew in a long moment of the loudest silence I ever felt in this theater; experience it and you will see what I mean, and what it means.
And, of course, there is the famous ending of the play where the old butler Firs gets accidentally left behind, a denouement that in this metaphoric universe suggests either (a) that Falls now will be discarded under dust covers or (b), that an ever-aging Falls and the weight of his reputation will be sitting in the front row as the new Goodman artistic director, Susan Booth, forges ahead.
Falls does not discourage (b) in the slightest: Firs reappears in a place you don’t expect.
Elvis has left the building.
And if you believe that, you’re a fool.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “The Cherry Orchard” (4 stars)
When: Through April 30
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $25-$80 at 312-443-3800 and www.goodmantheatre.org
