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October 19-21 at 8 PM, October 22 at 2 PM
All seating is General Admission.
The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard captures a people, a family, a community—and a world—in transition. First produced in Moscow in 1904, The Cherry Orchard stands as one of the great plays of the modern era written by one of history’s greatest playwrights, Anton Chekhov.
Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard takes place in Russia around 1904, in the midst of one of the country’s greatest social transformations. About four decades earlier, Tsar Alexander II had enacted the Emancipation Reform of 1861, which freed the country’s serfs—who at the time constituted over a third of the Russian population—from their landlords’ ownership. Naturally, the Russian gentry opposed the proclamation, feeling themselves robbed of their labor source and vulnerable to a potential peasant uprising. On the whole, the liberation of the serfs remained relatively peaceful, but without its authority over the servant class, the Russian nobility would see its social status decline to the point of destruction by the turn of the century. In the story of Lyubov Ranevskaya and her family’s return to their fabled orchard to forestall its foreclosure, The Cherry Orchard presents us with a picture of humanity in all its glorious folly.
The Cherry Orchard kicks-off our 2017-2018 “Home Season” by asking whether home is place, people, collection of memories, or something more profound. At a time when displacement is a dynamic ruling our world, the play digs into the effects of becoming rootless. Displacement includes moving for careers, global refugees supplanted from their homes, globalization and commerce that dissolves roots and the results of capitalism that keep us at work and away from our hearths—and perhaps our hearts. What happens to us as “home” takes a back seat to these competing dynamics? What is lost?
Production Credits:
By Anton Chekhov
Direction Lane Savadove
Movement Dawn Bazemore