A Matter-of-Fact ‘Orchard’ : Stage review: South Coast production of Chekhov’s last work is neither a farce nor a tragedy, just a long, long play.

COSTA MESA —  Written while the playwright was ill, “The Cherry Orchard” was Anton Chekhov’s final work, having its premiere at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater only months before the writer’s death in 1904. The play is a eulogy for a gentry whose day is passing. Stanislavsky called it a tragedy; Chekhov called it a farce. At the South Coast Repertory, director Martin Benson has delivered neither one.

While there’s nothing terribly wrong with Benson’s “Cherry Orchard,” there’s nothing wonderfully right about it either. This is a prosaic production, featuring performances bad, good and indifferent, but not one of them complicated or deeply interesting. And without layers, “The Cherry Orchard” is simply a long, long play.

Madame Ranyevskaya (Megan Cole) returns from a reckless but heart-felt love affair abroad to her family estate and ancestral home. She lends money to neighbors, throws parties, and gives exorbitant alms to beggars even as she refuses to recognize her own impending bankruptcy. She is about to lose her estate and its cherry orchard, which represents to her all of her history, all of her social position, and all of her youth. Madame Ranyevskaya must be touching as well as maddening. Her inability to be practical stems at least in part from an inability to be unkind, and from a noblesse oblige based not just on etiquette but on true generosity.

Despite her silky voice, deep and appropriately grande-dameish, Megan Cole gives a stubbornly repetitive performance. Her exhortations about her lost childhood are theatrical and showy rather than genuine. She comes off as a manipulator who doesn’t know what she is doing, since she winds up with almost nothing. Luck Hari is Madame’s petted daughter Anya, who, it is said in the play, resembles her mother quite a lot. Benson has cast an actress who looks nothing at all like Cole, not merely because Hari’s complexion (she is Indian) is darker than Cole’s (who is white). Hari is small with a tiny face and dainty body. Cole has a large, strong-boned face and a muscular physique. There is not the slightest resemblance in the way the two women move or speak. Confusingly, Madame Ranyevskaya’s ward, the ever-practical Varya (Cindy Katz), very much resembles her.

Benson’s casting seems symbolic of the director’s failure to fuse his “Cherry Orchard,” almost as if he were choosing to stack the deck against himself and his cast in their unrealized attempt to create a group wherein the most subtle shifts in mood and feeling reverberate.

As Madame’s effete brother, who makes passionate speeches to bookcases but finds human beings outside of his family offensive, Raye Birk gives us a Leonid Gayev who is both pompous and pathetic. It is a performance of some richness.

In the all-important role of Lopakhin, the businessman who tries in vain to help the family, John Vickery is at first good--uncluttered, a man with a purpose, newly rich without being gauche. Unaccountably, his performance falls apart in his big scene. When he cries, “The cherry orchard is mine! Mine!” and laughs maniacally, it looks as if Ed Wood has stepped in to direct the third act.

Paul Schmidt’s translation is at some points jarringly modern, decades more contemporary than Walker Hicklin’s lovely costumes. Ming Cho Lee’s whitewashed set is also lovely; he gives us a room too large to be useful. Lee also indulges in a bit of editorializing: Two tall doors have been cut off about half-way, with only the bottom half opening, as if the human race had shrunk since the house was in its glory. Michael Roth’s sound design is subtle and unusually sensitive to the play’s shifting moods, particularly in the final scene. That scene finds Firs, the faithful and tremendously old butler, getting left behind after the family has gone. In his later plays, Chekhov depicted frail, elderly servants waiting on healthy young people, a wordless comment on an ostensibly orderly class system that functions only if it can ignore its own flaws.

Alan Mandell plays the servant with a familiar, strangulated old geezer voice, but his physical presence is striking. His white hair flows off of a bald pate and wizened eyes stare from on top of a permanently bowed torso. Age has given Firs the freedom to speak whenever he wants to, but nobody listens to him. Now he is left behind, locked in, forgotten. He is Chekhov’s final comment on the cast-off remains of a class who only knew how to live when they were taken care of and didn’t know how to take care of anyone else, or of themselves. Mandell embodies that image, after what can only be described as an interminable prologue.

* “The Cherry Orchard,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends July 2. $26-$36. (714) 957-4033. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

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Megan Cole: Liubov Ranyevskaya Luck Hari: Anya Cindy Katz: Varya Raye Birk: Leonid Gayev John Vickery: Yermolai Lopakhin John Walcutt: Petya Trofimov Richard Doyle: Boris Semyonov-Pishchik Fran Bennett: Carlotta David Fenner: Semyon Yepikhodov Amanda Carlin: Dunyasha Alan Mandell: Firs Jon Matthews: Yasha Art Koustik: A homeless man Christopher DuVal: The Stationmaster Daniel Cordova: The Postmaster A South Coast Repertory production. By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Martin Benson. Sets by Ming Cho Lee. Costumes by Walker Hicklin. Lighting by Peter Maradudin. Music and sound by Michael Roth. Production manager Michael Mora.