Word: orchards
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...shoots himself in The Cherry Orchard, though at one point a clerk trips into the wings with a revolver. The traditional offstage commotion is heard a few moments later but no one rushes in to report that Semyon Panteleevich Yepikhodov has blown his brains out. Instead a character surmises that some bucket has dropped in some well, the play goes on and Yepikhodov comes back to swallow nails in the fourth...
Between Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play and first single-shot suicide, and Yepikhodov's unfulfilled promise to "shoot myself so to speak" in Chekhov's last play, something has obviously happened. Laurence Senelick, directing his own translation of Cherry Orchard, pays proper attention to the writer's final, bitter playfulness by mouthing a production that breaks through the somber fragilitv of traditional Chekhovian staging to a vital if slightly fuzzy theatricality...
This technique of direction, however, requires incredibly strong acting to keep the styles and their effects distinct. The principal problems of the Agassiz Cherry Orchard are the disturbing inconsistencies of characterization as actors fail to exploit the peculiar logic of their styles in moments of crisis and dip into the grab bag of general histrionics to carry them through. After Ken Tigar recovered from some painful timing slips in the first act he gave a striking portrayal of a serf turned manager. His nagging, casually enunciated, and loud voice move against the general strength of Marilyn Pitzele's Ranevskaya...
...helplessly exposes poorly written roles, like that of Simeonov-Pischik, a rather pointless proverb-spouting neighbor played by Reggie Stuart, and Chekhov's occasional lapses of imagination. They can no longer hide behind the Slavic fog. But at the same time, the director's shaping of his Cherry Orchard makes the play funny, exciting, and intriguing as well as traditionally poignant. The play took just under three hours and you couldn't notice it, which even in the Moscow Art Theatre would be quite something...
...runway is being lengthened. Airport officials hastened to give their facilities a clean bill. Nonetheless, twice before in the past six years the hills of Hebron have been a November graveyard for aircraft approaching Runway 18. A Boeing 727 crashed in rain little more than a mile from the orchard when the pilot miscalculated his approach during the evening of Nov. 8, 1965, killing 58 of the 62 persons aboard; on Nov. 14, 1961, two crewmen of a Zantop Airlines DC-4 freighter escaped before it exploded amid the apple trees...