![]() That kind of nuance is missing in the far broader characterizations here. The last major New York production of this play in 2009 (adapted by Tom Stoppard and directed by Sam Mendes) was uneven but often affecting - nowhere more so than in the complex gravitas that Simon Russell Beale brought to the role of Lopakhin, his feelings a tug of war between tenderness and resentment. The certainty that Ranevskaya and her family will never view him as an equal adds a veil of sadness over his fruitless efforts to get them on board with his plan to save the failing estate. Her sweetness to him as a child, after his drunken father had bloodied his nose, still softens his view of her, making him willing to overlook her phoniness and condescension. Lopakhin in particular is as eager to receive the approval of the glamorous landowner Ranevskaya ( Diane Lane) as he is to expand his business empire. Chekhov wrote about the rising new middle class with a lingering affection for the elegant society of their former masters. But perhaps because of the allusions to American slavery - deliberate or not - the conflicts so inherent to Lopakhin here just rob him of dignity. Perrineau is a fine actor, and it’s good to see him back on a Broadway stage after a long absence. Her pleas for financial responsibility are as poignant in their futility as her hopes of a marriage proposal from the upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Harold Perrineau), whose father was a serf on the estate. And Celia Keenan-Bolger captures the frustrated helplessness of Varya, the landowner’s adopted daughter, now serving as housekeeper on the debt-ridden estate. Joel Grey marries farce with sorrow as the faithful elderly manservant Firs, who yearns for the old order in which masters were masters and servants were servants, his refusal to change leaving him ultimately forgotten. That dichotomy is largely limited here to the production’s two most satisfying performances, both in secondary roles. When Chekhov cast his gaze over turn of the 20th century Russia and its chilly winds of socio-economic change, he spread his sympathies with admirable even-handedness between the doomed aristocracy, clinging with stubborn blindness to its obsolete status, and the former servant class, grappling with its newfound prospects for wealth and elevation. What’s missing, primarily, is the fundamental element of pathos. Its cast of accomplished actors scurries on and off the stage in a continuous blur of dramatic inertia and purposelessness, with very little sense of who they are and even less cohesion. The bulk of the blame should be apportioned to Simon Godwin’s production, which is clumsily directed and unattractively designed.
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