This is not a perfect production. In Gammons's uncluttered, mostly sinister staging, the singing, dancing loonies engaged by Ferdinand to drive his sister to distraction seem to have broken out of an asylum on Sesame Street. But the performances are credible, with Jason Bowen a four-square Antonio Bologna, the anti-Malvolio who wins the duchess's heart, Michael Forden Walker a sulking, animalistic Ferdinand, Joel Colodner a very creepy cardinal in fishnet stockings, and Marya Lowry fierce in two roles.
Ah, but the play — presented rarely enough that theater aficionados will want to see it, whatever its failings. The Duchess, especially in its second half, hurtles toward a ludicrous excess that's impossible to play down, however ritualistic the staging. True, the work bespeaks a bleak modern sensibility: compare Bosola's "We are merely the stars' tennis balls" to Gloucester's "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods." But though written at the tail end of Shakespeare's career, it shows Webster more a contemporary of the Titus scribbler than of the man who wrote King Lear.
A gentler, more familiar landscape is The Cherry Orchard (at Central Square Theater through February 1). No new interpretive trees are planted in the Nora Theatre Company's solidly acted production of Anton Chekhov's final masterpiece, which is heard here in a colloquial new version by Russian speaker George Malko, whose previous translations include Chekhov's complete short plays. The rhythms — with their alternation of political or poignant speechifying with non sequitur — are recognizably Chekhovian. Director Daniel Gidron whips the requisite element of farce into the pathos. And a cadre of Boston actors, tucked into Arthur Oliver's period costumes, pull off the playwright's near-symphonic 1904 ode to expulsion from a questionable Eden with sincerity, respect, and, occasionally, daring.
Chekhov has rightly been celebrated as the most humane of playwrights, building a heartbreaking absurdity into his characters as, in The Cherry Orchard, they fail in their diverse ways to respond to the painful clarion call of change. Madame Ranyevskaya, newly returned owner of the estate on which the title arboreal treasure is located, and her brother, Gaev, are as chained to sentimental memories as they are to their old nursery, scene of two of the play's four acts. She spendthrift and decadent, he lazy and snobbish, the two refuse to face the inevitable loss of their property and standing, even when it's mapped out for them by arguably insensitive businessman Lopakhin, the descendant of peasants who ultimately buys the place. But the other characters, too, are disconnected from reality — from old servant Firs, still railing against the "catastrophe" of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, to perpetual student Trofimov, who champions work as the key to a glorious future but does none.
Gidron respects Chekhov's directions, right down to doddering old Firs's placement of a pillow beneath the feet of the newly arrived Ranyevskaya as she sips her middle-of-the-night coffee. And he seems attuned to the way in which no one in the play — from the servants imitating the ways of a bankrupt gentry to fired-up youth standing still while extolling progress — seems to wake up and smell the political coffee. But this general sensitivity makes the director's missteps, among them a brute open-air sex scene for callow valet Yasha and maid Dunyasha, the more jarring.
