Theater review
There is no orchard in Simon Stone’s The Cherry Orchard, at least not one we can see. Instead, in the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, there is a house: transparent, immaculate, triangular, and faintly absurd, as if a wealthy family had commissioned a modernist aquarium and then forgotten that everyone outside could look in.
That is the first good joke in Stone’s Korean-language reimagining of Chekhov’s final play, and it is also the evening’s governing idea. The Song family believes itself to be private, exceptional, protected by money and memory. Saul Kim’s glass house says otherwise. Every room is visible. Every retreat becomes an exhibition. Even the architecture knows what the family does not: there is nowhere left to hide.
Stone, working with dramaturg and translator Yi Dan-bi, has moved Chekhov’s doomed landowners from turn-of-the-century Russia to contemporary South Korea, where the aristocratic estate has become the property of a chaebol family, the sort of corporate dynasty that can mistake inherited wealth for a permanent law of nature. The setting sounds radical on paper. Onstage, it feels almost unnervingly natural. Chekhov’s old problem was always less about serfdom or cherry trees than about people who cannot imagine that the social order might continue without them.
Here, that blindness belongs most vividly to Song Do-young, played by Jeon Do-yeon with a brightness that keeps cracking at the edges. Do-young has returned to the family property carrying the air of someone who expects affection, money, forgiveness and time to replenish themselves automatically. Jeon gives her a mercurial charm. She can turn from girlish delight to cruelty, from sentiment to panic, in the span of a few lines. The effect is not to make Do-young sympathetic exactly. It makes her legible. She is addicted to the feeling that the past is still available on demand.
Opposite her is Hwang Doo-sik, played by Park Hae-soo, the self-made businessman who understands the family’s financial danger because he understands money as a fact rather than a mood. Park gives Doo-sik an impatient physical energy, as if he is constantly arriving from a faster play. He proposes solutions. He explains consequences. He tries to translate catastrophe into something that can be managed. The family listens to him the way the doomed usually listen to practical advice: politely, intermittently, and far too late.
Stone’s adaptation is funny, sometimes aggressively so. The family’s vanity, drunkenness, sexual cross-currents and extravagant self-pity become a kind of social choreography. The performers snap in and out of rooms, up and down Kim’s steep staircase, across the lawn of dark gravel surrounding the house. Because the dialogue is in Korean, with English captions projected above the stage, the audience must divide its attention. At first this can feel like watching two plays, one in words and one in bodies. After a while the split becomes productive. The captions give us information; the actors give us temperature.
The production’s scale occasionally works against it. Chekhov depends on tiny failures of attention: a remark ignored, a love declaration mistimed, a practical warning smothered by nostalgia. The Armory can make intimacy look monumental. A silence inside this enormous room is not the same thing as a silence across a parlor. Stone compensates with speed and with the glass walls, which turn domestic space into cinema. We watch simultaneous fragments of life: one person talking in the kitchen while someone else collapses in a bedroom, a party gathering force while another character hovers outside the frame. It is less a drawing room than a split screen.
There is also a productive cruelty in the decision to make the family so rich. In more traditional productions, the loss of the estate can register as the collapse of an entire way of life. Here the Songs’ ruin is more ambiguous. Their fear of losing status does not mean they are about to become poor. This weakens some of the pathos, but it sharpens the satire. Stone is interested in the emotional habits of privilege: the conviction that inconvenience is catastrophe, that inheritance is identity, that a house can somehow remember on your behalf.
The best passages occur when the production lets that satire darken without announcing the change. A story about the cherry trees acquires a historical weight connected to Korea’s past under Japanese occupation. The family property stops being merely decorative and becomes a container for memory, class and national trauma. The production does not overdevelop this thread, perhaps wisely, but the moment complicates the evening. Nostalgia is not simply foolishness. Sometimes the thing people cannot relinquish is bound up with history that deserves to be remembered, even when the property itself cannot be saved.
Chekhov famously insisted that The Cherry Orchard was a comedy. Stone takes him at his word, but he does not confuse comedy with lightness. The laughter in this production often comes from the distance between what the characters think is happening and what is actually happening. Their world is ending, and yet they flirt, drink, bicker, fantasize and complain about the subway. The joke is that life refuses to arrange itself according to the dignity of a crisis.
That makes the Armory an unusually apt place for the play. The Drill Hall swallows ordinary scale. Kim’s house, enormous in any conventional theater, looks almost like a model placed inside it. The family’s treasured world is reduced by the room around it. The visual argument is blunt but effective: wealth can seem absolute from inside a house and temporary from across the floor.
Stone sometimes pushes too hard. The contemporary references can feel eager, and the production’s velocity occasionally brushes past the ache that gives Chekhov his peculiar aftertaste. But the cast keeps recovering it. Jeon’s Do-young becomes most moving when her charm finally fails her. Park’s Doo-sik becomes most interesting when victory reveals itself as another form of loss. Neither character gets the satisfaction of being entirely right.
By the end, the transparent house has changed meaning. What first looked glamorous begins to look exposed, then fragile, then already abandoned. The family’s tragedy is not that change comes. Everyone knows change is coming. The tragedy is the fantasy that knowing it is the same as being prepared for it.
That is why Stone’s relocation ultimately earns itself. Modern Seoul is not a decorative update to Chekhov’s Russia. It gives the play back its sense of a society moving faster than the people who once assumed they owned it. The old orchard has disappeared. The people under glass remain.
The Cherry Orchard, directed and adapted by Simon Stone, ran at Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall through Sept. 26. Performed in Korean with English captions.
