Stage:

...calls them, into followers of Umbanda, a cult that, according to Antoon's program note, still flourished in the forests at the time...

...In our century, when the director has taken on a much greater role in interpreting and guiding a play," say Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland in Shakespeare Alive!, "there are as many different approaches to Shakespeare's work as there are people to think them up...

...It becomes a gesture out of nineteenth-century melodrama...

...even when a pair of them comes together, their joining is all straight lines, no curves- kisses and hugs without tenderness...

...Brook watchers know that the process may cause the play (opera) to be cut and its surface transformed (The Tragedy of Carmen) or to be moved into a space that the dramatist could never have conceived (the gymnastic A Midsummer Night's Dream), but the enormity of such changes does not invalidate Brook's point...

...Parry's Lyubov reacts to his news by clutching herself as though her pain were physical, bending in an odd curve to one side and, as Chekhov's stage direction suggests, catching the furniture to keep from falling...

...It is significant that the performances I most admired were of peripheral characters-Mike Nuss-baum's Pishchik and Linda Hunt's Charlotta...

...Bahia and Shakespeare are already beginning to pull apart...

...This is not the woman I know from Chekhov's text, soft and self-indulgent, dangerously helpless yet tough enough to survive pain and loss...

...In one important instance, Natasha Perry as Mme...

...I had no sense of such a "group" at the Majestic-not even a disintegrating group...

...Of the major modern dramatists, Chekhov is the one who most delights and distresses me...

...The rude mechanicals, whom Antoon describes as "a group of native Brazilian workmen," are more Bronx than Bahia, and they make their scenes at once cute and leaden...

...Even if we accept that the play is about dispersion (it begins with an arrival, ends in departure), the many entrances and exits that Chekhov calls for need not be turned into mini-journeys into the far reaches of the theater...

...Brian Dennehy, whose gently abrasive Lopakhin has been interesting up to this point, throws himself full-length at Parry's feet...

...But even in Josephson's case his collapsing speeches sometimes fail to suggest Gaev's vagueness and suggest instead a performer whose words are being eaten by space itself...

...The lovers act like kids at recess, all push, pull, punch, poke...

...Usually, one settles for bits, hints, suggestions of the whole...

...A. J. Antoon is presumably the thinker-up for A Midsummer Night's Dream, the first in the Shakespeare Marathon that promises to present the complete canon at Papp's Public Theater...

...One can imagine the Publickers brainstorming...

...Following her cue, he goes for melodrama himself...

...Lyubov is certainly capable of self-dramatization, but at this point her distress must be real if Lopakhin is to have anything to play against...

...A single scene can indicate how Brook's journey of discovery takes an unlikely turn-the marvelous final moment of Act III when Lopakhin, a little drunk and very excited, at once sorry and triumphant, returns to announce that he has bought the cherry orchard...

...Lopakhin may be in love with Lyubov (at least with the memory of the young girl who bathed the bleeding nose of the "little peasant") and he may regret that she did not let him save the estate for her, but he is far too aware of the distance he has come to prostrate himself as though he were his grandfather, the serf...

...His plays are beautifully realized on the page, but except for the Michael Redgrave-Laurence Olivier Uncle Vanya, which I saw on television not on the Chichester stage, no production has ever been completely satisfying...

...Antoon's production is a perfect case of Brook's "directorial conception" in action...

...There is no reason why Parry should play my Lyubov, but the play needs someone's Lyubov at its center...

...Tightness is all...

...The houses in Chekhov are enclosures...

...Even when the characters go outside-the estate park and the croquet lawns in The Sea Gull, the garden in The Three Sisters, the meadow in The Cherry Orchard-they are still trapped in their society and in themselves...

...GERALD WEALES...

...By the end, when all the plots merge in a high-energy revel,.the production does stir up its own sense of fun...

...The BAM Majestic, which set off The Mahabhar-ata so well, proved uncongenial to Chekhov...

...Hope springs eternal for the Chekhov lover, but Brook's Cherry Orchard dampens that hope, offers only fragments of consolation...

...Clearly a hot night in Bahia...

...Still, it brings less illumination to Dream than Moonshine's lantern does Pyramus and Thisbe, and I doubt that Jorge Amado would recognize this Bahia...

...plays can be illuminated by the most unlikely lights...

...wouldn't it be interesting (and an excuse to use some good black performers) to move Dream to Bahia at the turn of the century and convert "the tiny sweet playful fairies," as Shakespeare Alive...

...STAGE DIMINISHED CLASSICS 'CHERRY ORCHARD' & 'DREAM' In The Shifting Point, Peter Brook differentiates between a "directorial conception," which is imposed from the outside, and a "sense of direction," a process of discovery: "form is not ideas imposed on a play, it is the play illuminated...

...Elizabeth McGovern, as an exasperated Helena, does well by her venomous lines, but for the most part the verbal exchanges areas lost as the lovers...

...They certainly do in this production...

...Erland Josephson is the only principal who has his character (Gaev) in hand...

...Some of the Shakespeare transformations under the Papp imprimatur-the 1972 rock version of Two Gentlemen from Verona, for instance-had a kind of integrity of their own, whatever they did to Shakespeare...

...Hers never takes shape for me...

...She holds the pose too long...

...The performers rattled around the immense playing area, unanchored in place or time...

...For Chekhov enthusiasts there was great promise in Brook's gathering an elegant group of performers to do The Cherry Orchard, but the production seems formless, short on illumination...

...It makes a hash of the scene and smashes the complexity of Lopakhin's reaction to what he has done...

...Chekhov's characters are in business for themselves, none of them capable of giving more than glancing attention to the others, but they are apart together, bound by love, affection, habit...

...There are Shakespeare scholars who will admit that the original has built-in disconnections of its own, that the young-lovers' plot, the fairy tale, and the rude mechanicals fit uncomfortably in the same play...

...There is so much space in the Majestic, such openness, such color (in the rugs that Brook is so fond of) that the characters cannot help appearing to float free unless the actors can impose narrowness on the vastness...

...The play opens when tall and handsome Patty Holley, as Hippolyta, oozes onto the stage in a provocative net gown, sinks down, hoists a leg up across the other knee and contemplates her bare foot with mild disinterest...

...I am imperfectly informed about the rituals of Umbanda, but that makes little difference for these fairies, in the dances Garth Fagan has designed for them, are straight out of Hollywood's version of Rio at carnival time...

...So send in Theseus in planter's white to remind this lazy tigress that "our nuptial hour/Draws on apace...

...But this A Midsummer Night's Dream is simply a patchwork...

...They fail to do so here...

...Ranevs-kaya, the playing is simply confusing...

...It is difficult, as Antoon discovered, to make the exotic transplantation grow in Shakespeare's English ground...