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Rough justice

Theater

Dying breeds

THE CHERRY ORCHARD: A sharp, colloquial, very American translation buoyed by accomplished actors.

Not that all is Keystone Kops as strapped landowner “Lovey” Ranevskaya, her brother Gaev, and their dependents philosophize and make merry while their world slips away. Columbus, who majored in Russian at Yale, has penned a sharp, colloquial, very American translation in which the freed serfs are called what they are: former slaves, at least one of whom, mumbling of the 1861 liberation as “the disaster,” is a no-nonsense old Aunt Tom (the magisterial Barbara Meek as ancient retainer Firs). And Lopakin, the child of slaves who badgers the gentry to save themselves by turning the cherry orchard into cottage plots for “summer people” and in the end does so himself, is played by African-American actor Joe Wilson Jr., whose burst of incredulous triumph as Lopakin realizes that he has bought the big house to which his father and grandfather were not admitted “even through the kitchen” is but the production’s boldest bold move. This splendid actor moves from dazed half-sympathy for the vanquished to irrepressible bounces, then little jumps, falsetto yelps, and near-hysterical command.

Early in the play, Gaev delivers an absurd encomium to a 100-year-old bookcase. Chekhov’s play too has passed the centenary mark and is far worthier of praise than old furniture. Still, Columbus’s broad, sometimes frenetic approach might fail had he less accomplished actors than the vigorous Trinity lot who, like Chekhov, render their characters comical and humane. Phyllis Kay is perhaps too red-blooded for lovelorn blueblood Lovey. But she seems to the manor — and her rich, vivid costumes — born. And she and Brian McEleney, as the garrulous Gaev, nail the Peter Pan in the backward-looking pair. There are good turns, too, by Anne Scurria as German governess Charlotta, whose party tricks mask a need for identity; Fred Sullivan Jr. as neighbor Pishchik, who puts a hand under every turnip he meets, hoping for blood; Stephen Thorne as the obligatory Chekhovian intellectual, dreaming of a finer future; and Emily Young and Crystal Finn as Lovey’s daughters, idealistic and pinched.

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