9 Brooklyn Academy of Music presents The Cherry Orchard Xt. Of P BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC Harvey Lichtenstein, President and Executive Producer presents The Cherry Orchard by ANTON CHEKHOV English Translation by ELISAVETA LAVROVA with (in alphabetical order) ROBERTS BLOSSOM BRIAN DENNEHY HOWARD HENSEL LINDA HUNT ZELJKO IVANEK ERLAND JOSEPHSON KATE MAILER CHRIS MCNALLY REBECCA MILLER MIKE NUSSBAUM NATASHA PARRY DAVID PIERCE STEPHANIE ROTH JAN TRISKA Set and Costumes Designed by CHLOE OBOLENSKY Lighting Designed by Incidental Music Composed by JEAN KALMAN MARIUS CONSTANT Production Stage Manager Casting by ROBERT BENNETT RISA BRAMON and BILLY HOPKINS LISA PETERSON MARIE-HELENE ESTIENNE Directed by PETER BROOK Joseph V. Melillo, Associate Producer Michael O'Rand, General Manager Paul E. King, Production Manager BAM Majestic Theater This program has been sponsored by grants from eon & © New York Telephone INCORPORATED A NYNEX Company glib. CHASE 0 1; GRENADIER REALTY CORP. of STARRETT CITY IMP , I . managing agent Arts. Additional funds have been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the The BAM facility is owned by the City of New York and its operation is supported, in part, with public funds provided through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The principal capital funding for the BAM Majestic Theater with the was provided by the City of New York through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs special assistance of the Brooklyn Borough President's Office and the Office of the Mayor. CAST OF CHARACTERS (in order of appearance) Lopakhin BRIAN DENNEHY Dunyasha KATE MAILER Yepikhodov JAN TRISKA Firs ROBERTS BLOSSOM Anya REBECCA MILLER Lyubov NATASHA PARRY Varya STEPHANIE ROTH Gaev ERLAND JOSEPHSON Charlotta LINDA HUNT Pishchik MIKE NUSSBAUM Yasha DAVID PIERCE Trofimov ZELJKO IVANEK Passerby HOWARD HENSEL Stationmaster CHRIS McNALLY Understudies: LUDMILLA BOKIEVSKY (Lyubov/Charlotta/Varya); HOWARD HENSEL (Lopakhin/Pishchik/Yepikhodov/Gaev); CATY LAIGNEL (Anya/Dunyasha); CHRIS McNALLY (Trofimov/Yasha/Passerby); MIKE NUSSBAUM (Firs) ACT I The Nursery ACT II A Field ACT III The Drawing Room ACT IV The Nursery PROGRAM NOTES The people I fear are those who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing else. That is why I cultivate no particular predilection for policemen, butchers, scientists, writers, or the younger generation. I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies. October 4, 1888 Keep in mind that the writers we call eternal or simply good, the writers who intoxicate us, have one highly important trait in common: they are moving towards something definite and beckon you to follow, and you feel with your entire being, not only with your mind, that they have a certain goal, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, which had a motive for coming and stirring Hamlet's imagi- nation. Depending on their caliber, some have immediate goals -the abolition of serfdom, the liber- ation of one's country, politics, beauty, or simply vodka[ . ] -while the goals of others are more remote-God, life after death, the happiness of mankind, etc. The best of them are realistic and describe life as it is, but because each line is saturated with the consciousness of its goal, you feel life as it should be in addition to life as it is, and you are captivated by it. But what about us? Us! We describe life as it is and stop dead right there. We wouldn't lift a hoof if you lit into us with a whip. We have neither immediate nor remote goals, and there is an emptiness in our souls. We have no politics, we don't believe in revolution, there is no God, we're not afraid of ghosts, and I person- ally am not even afraid of death or blindness. If you want nothing, hope for nothing, and fear noth- ing, you cannot be an artist. November 25, 1892 Anton Chekhov Passages from Chekhov's correspondence originally published in Letters of Anton Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinsky. Copyright © 1973 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Chekhov always looked for what's natural; he wanted performances and productions to be as limpid as life itself. Chekhov's writing is extremely concentrated, employing a minimum of words; in a way, it is similar to Pinter or Beckett. As with them, it is construction that counts, rhythm, the purely theatrical poetry that comes not from beautiful words but from the right word at the right moment. In the theatre, someone can say "yes" in such a way that the "yes" is no longer ordinary -it can become a beautiful word, because it is the perfect expression of what cannot be expressed in any other way. With Chekhov, periods, commas, points of suspension are all of a fundamental importance, as fun- damental as the "pauses" precisely indicated by Beckett. If one fails to observe them, one loses the rhythm and tensions of the play. In Chekhov's work, the punctuation represents a series of coded messages which record characters' relationships and emotions, the moments at which ideas come together or follow their own course. The punctuation enables us to .grasp what the words conceal. Chekhov is like a perfect film maker. Instead of cutting from one image to another - perhaps from one place to another -he switches from one emotion to another just before it gets too heavy. At the precise moment when the spectator risks becoming too involved in a character, an unexpected situation cuts across: nothing is stable. Chekhov portrays individuals and a society .) a state of perpetual change, he is the dramatist of life's movement, simultaneously smiling and serious, amusing and bitter- completely free from the "music;' the Slav "nostalgia" that Paris nightclubs still preserve. He often stated that his plays were comedies-this was the central issue of his conflict with Stanislaysky. But it's wrong to conclude that The Cherry Orchard should be performed as a vaudeville. Chekhov is an infinitely detailed observer of the human comedy. As a doctor, he knew the meaning of certain kinds of behavior, how to discern what was essential, to expose what he diagnosed. Although he shows tenderness and an attentive sympathy, he never sentimentalizes. One doesn't imagine a doctor shedding tears over the illnesses of his patients. He learns how to balance compassion with distance. In Chekhov's work, death is omnipresent-he knew it well- but there is nothing negative or unsavory in its presence. The awareness of death is balanced with a desire to live. His characters possess a sense of the present moment, and the need to taste it fully. As in great tragedies, one finds a harmony between life and death. Chekhov died young, having travelled, written and loved enormously, having taken part in the events of his day, in great schemes of social reform. He died shortly after asking for some champagne, and his coffin was transported in a wagon bearing the inscription "Fresh Oysters?' His awareness of death, and of the precious moments that could be lived, endow his work with a sense of the relative: in other words, a viewpoint from which the tragic is always a bit absurd. In Chekhov's work, each character has its own existence: not one of them resembles another, parti- cularly in The Cherry Orchard, which presents a microcosm of the political tendencies of the time. There are those who believe in social transformations, others attached to a disappearing past. None of them can achieve satisfaction or plenitude, and seen from outside, their existences might well appear empty, senseless. But they all burn with intense desires. They are not disillusioned, quite the contrary: in their own ways, they are all searching for a better quality of life, emotionally and socially. Their drama is that society-the outside world - blocks their energy. The complexity of their behavior is not indicated in the words, it emerges from the mosaic construction of an infinite number of details. What is essential is to see that these are not plays about lethargic people. They are hypervital people in a lethargic world, forced to dramatize the minutest happening out of a pas- sionate desire to live. They have not given up. Peter Brook From The Shifting Point, by Peter Brook, A Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book, Harper & Row, Publishers. Copyright © 1987 by Peter Brook. BIOGRAPHIES ROBERTS BLOSSOM (Firs) worked with BRIAN DENNEHY (Lopakhin) began his act- Peter Brook in The Physicists on Broadway and ing career on the New York stage, appearing in at BAM as Knut Hamsun in Ice Age, for which many off-Broadway plays before starring in Mike he won an Obie Award. His films include Close Nichols' award-winning Broadway production of Encounters of the Third Kind, Resurrection, The David Rabe's Streamers. Other stage productions Great Gatsby, Escapefrom Alcatraz, and Handle include Galileo, The Rat in the Skull, Bus Stop, with Care, among others. Two other Obies were Julius Caesar, Ivanov and The Front Page. Well awarded him for his work in Alan Schneider's recognized in contemporary American cinema, production of Do Not Pass Go and in Shaw's Mr. Dennehy made his film debut in 1977 in Village Wooing. He will appear soon in Robert Michael Ritchie's football comedy-drama Frank's film about greed, Candy Mountain and Semi-Tough.