“Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of The Cherry Orchard? Don’t say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen ‘inspired’ productions, ‘competent’ productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov’s talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul on stage.” –Buddy Glass, Franny and Zooey

You don’t have to do much to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. All the play needs is some space and good acting, and the Bridge Project—a partnership of leading New York and London theater talents that just launched at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—certainly provides those. Sam Mendes’ theater direction is as reliably competent as his filmmaking, and Tom Stoppard’s witty new adaptation of the iconic work is inspired. So why does this version of The Cherry Orchard not match up, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy? Or is that asking too much? For Mendes’s second attempt at the play (he also directed it when he was 24), he chose a more upbeat, even slapstick approach, which is what Chekhov, who conceived the play as a farce, intended. In the first act, Trofimov (Ethan Hawke) stumbles and falls about the stage, while the careless spending of Ranevskaya (Sinéad Cusack) is a source of amusement. But as the mood grows more serious, Mendes’s attempts to keep things light begin to work against the production.

Directors have always struggled with the shifting mood of the play, which Chekhov wrote over several years, during periods of both happiness and frustration. Perhaps Mendes is afraid modern audiences won’t be able to read between lines as old as Chekhov’s; in the final acts, rather than letting us roam through the house observing the characters’ complicated relationships, he leads us by the hand, steering us from nuance to nuance. But this is a small criticism in a play that is otherwise overwhelmingly good, featuring memorable performances from veteran stage actors Simon Russell Beale and Richard Easton, as well as Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona). The same ensemble will tackle Shakespeare’s similarly tragicomic The Winter’s Tale under Mendes’s direction, beginning next week.

The Cherry Orchard runs though March 8th at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=700

KEYWORDS: Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Hall, Sam Mendes, Sinead Cusack, theater