Inspiration
The Old South was a place of stately white plantation manors and fashionable high-society built on the institution of slavery. The bright Southern sun and natural beauty of the plantation lands did nothing to disperse the cruelty and dysfunction of human society. After the Civil War, formerly wealthy white plantation owners were forced to come to terms with the loss of their fortunes and slaves, while the former slaves struggled to create a new, better place for themselves in society.
Likewise, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard places characters struggling to escape, or return to, an exploitative past against the backdrop of the natural, vibrant beauty of the cherry orchard. This production will offer a perspective on the play in which Gone with the Wind meets Anna Karenina.
Concept
This production of The Cherry Orchard will be set in 1875, on a plantation somewhere near Charleston in order to explore the parallels between the decline of the Russian aristocracy in the early 20th century and the fall of the Southern plantation owners after the Civil War. This setting also emphasizes the class struggle in the play by pitting Lopakhin, a young black man on the rise who's father was a slave, against the Ranevsky's, representatives of the old order desperately clinging to the past. By emphasizing the class struggle in the play, we highlight the similarities between these two different times and places. This production also serves to explore an often overlooked period of race relations in the South, and in a more abstract sense explores how those struggles are still in action today, just under a different guise.
This production of The Cherry Orchard will use vibrant, saturated colors reminiscent of the beauty of the cherry orchard in bloom as a visual contrast to the melancholy and misery of the characters. This contrast highlights the subtle irony of the setting throughout the play, as characters such as Lubov frequently mention the beauty of the trees then in the very same speech complain of how wretched they feel. They may be surrounded by natural beauty, but that doesn't protect them from heartbreak they've created in the human world of technology and progress. By demonstrating this contrast in the design, the production offers a statement on the irony of their situation and a visual representation of the beauty that will be lost in the name of progress when Lophakin cuts down the cherry orchard at the end of the play.