[Kerr is an American dramatist, director, and critic who won a Pulitzer Prize for drama criticism in 1978. A long-time drama critic for the New York Times, as well as the author of several book-length studies of modern drama, he has been one of the most important and influential figures in the American theater since the 1950s. In the following excerpt, Kerr discusses the merits of Chekhov's and Stanislavsky's respective conceptions of The Cherry Orchard.]

Now, here's a curious thing. The Cherry Orchard, perhaps all of Chekhov, cannot be truly sad unless it is funny.

I had never seen a Moscow Art Theater performance of The Cherry Orchard until the company paid a courteous visit to City Center, and I went with a half-dozen contending questions in my head. Chekhov had never liked what Stanislavski did with the play: the author insisted he had written a comedy and that the director had made tragedy of it. But the quarrel had ended in a terrible irony. Chekhov's comedy had apparently been scuttled, but Chekhov's reputation had been enormously enhanced. The production had been successful against its author. Why?

What comedy was missing? And what had Stanislavski put into its place with such authority that forever after the play would be seen as he saw it, would be duplicated and imitated time and time again until the entire world would think of Chekhov in terms that Chekhov himself detested?

I couldn't hope that a performance in 1965 would answer questions first raised in 1904. Though the physical staging might still be Stanislavski's—people might dance behind archways or nestle against haystacks as he had directed them to so long ago—at least two things were bound to have changed. New actors may try hard to echo a tradition of performance; but they cannot help bringing themselves into the tradition, which means they cannot help altering it in subtle ways. And the political and social changes in Russia since 1904 must, willy-nilly, have done something to the atmosphere. An institution may be revered and told to go on doing its work as before, no matter what aesthetic is being imposed upon newer playwrights and their playhouses. But what is happening on the street, or in an auditorium five blocks away, is bound to drift in through the stage doors, if only as an awareness. A change in the climate is noticed, and felt, even by an actor who is bundled protectively to his ears. Was there any chance at all now of estimating Stanislavski's original tone—and hence Chekhov's dismay with it?

In point of fact no one can be certain how much the interior intellectual life of The Cherry Orchard has changed color with regimes. One can suspect—but not prove—that the student Trofimov has gained earnestness with the years. Trofimov looks to a nobler future and makes impassioned speeches about it. He sees stupidity and corruption about him; he will have none of the old way of life; he expects that one day mankind will march boldly into a much purer dawn. Possibly the first actor who played the part saw some humor in it, as I now feel certain Chekhov did. Trofimov is, after all, as much a prattling dreamer as the sentimental, irresponsible, wool-gathering Gayev is. By the end of the third act he is going to look a good bit of a fool as he falls all over himself and tumbles downstairs in one of his temperamental fevers. But after a revolution any character who seems to have prophesied a revolution must inevitably acquire a small halo. The part is presently played as though Trofimov had spent time in the wilderness with John the Baptist and had come back clear-eyed, an accredited visionary. Has his stature as a seer grown week after week since 1917, without orders from above or without anyone's quite noticing it? The question is probably unanswerable, and must be passed.

But there was illumination aplenty, on other scores, in the production brought us. To begin with, the Moscow Art Theater feels its way toward rather more comedy in The Cherry Orchard than we who have heard Stanislavski's edict but seen little of his work are inclined to give it in our own performances. Indeed some of the comedy is surprisingly broad: the clerk Epikhodov is not merely accident-prone, breaking a billiard cue a moment after he has picked it up; he is a Dromio, unable to leave the stage without backing successively into three pieces of furniture which are by no means in his way.

There is comedy in the complacent money-grubbing of a corpulent neighbor, comedy in the way in which a servant who has risen above himself elegantly spits out his cigar ends, playful comedy in the determination of lovers not to be spied upon at sunset. The outer edges of the play are conceived lightly; not everyone anticipates doom.

But—and here no doubt is where Chekhov's blood pressure rose—there is no fatuity, no giddiness, no transparent thoughtlessness of a gently amusing sort at the center of the piece. When we come to the brother and sister who own the estate that is to be lost, and above all when the sister, Ranevskaya, lets her temper flare at the idealist Trofimov, we come to something that is as hard and inflexible as Medea's mighty will. In the Moscow Art production, Ranevskaya does not let a world slip through her fingers out of flightiness, or charming presumption, or a womanly affectation of being unable to cope with figures. She stands sturdy as a rock, surveying her diminishing world with alarmed but far-seeing eyes, an intelligently tragic figure who knows that she is about to be bent by the wind but is ready for it. When she lashes out at Trofimov for his endless prating of things to come, the scene is not a delightfully exasperated tussle of cross-purposes, an explosion of misunderstandings. It is a showdown. Willed death confronts willed hope, with countenances of granite.

Actually, there is nothing in the earlier portions of the play, nothing in the texture of the play, to justify so rigid and inexorable a duel. Ranevskaya is simply not a tragic figure. She has no purpose, no intention, no passion to make her one. It is the very purposelessness of her life, her ingratiating ability to circumvent decisions, that defines her. The business of turning her into Brunnhilde, or into a kind of dowager Prometheus, does not work. We look at her displaying so much keenness of mind and force of character and decide that she would not only have accepted the peasant Lopakhin's offer for the estate; she would have sat at the table with him and bargained until she had forced the price higher. If the present interpretation of the role is in the Stanislavski tradition, then this is the point at which Stanislavski overreached himself and outraged his playwright.

But there is a further consequence that interests me more. As the lady of the orchard becomes increasingly hard-headed, strong-willed, tragic, we feel less and less for her. At the center of the Moscow Art's Cherry Orchard there is little pity. The axes are closing in and we feel no sorrow. Ranevskaya will be dispossessed; but her plight will not move us.

It may be one of the distinguishing marks of Chekhov's work that tears come only when they are not asked for, only, in fact, when there is a sustained—if unrealistic—surface gaiety. The Ranevskaya who touches us will most likely always be the woman who puts the brightest, most impossible face on things, who dances and mothers and cajoles when she should be taking stock, who flies into a tantrum with a talkative student because she is temperamentally incapable of listening to anyone. A charmer, an optimist, inadvertently a fool.

When we see that her silken, impulsive, endearing evasions are funny because they are hopelessly out of kilter with the facts, when we laugh because she is helplessly prisoner of a grace that is now irrelevant but still a grace, when we cannot help smiling that she should mismanage things so adroitly, then we will feel sorry for her, too. Pathos cannot be bought with long faces; it is a reflex from having noticed something absurd that cannot change itself. At least I think it is in Chekhov.

Why, then, was Stanislavski's Cherry Orchard so successful, so successful that its mood has been imposed upon most productions of Chekhov for sixty years? The Moscow Art Theater production seems to give us an answer to that, also. It is filled—even now—with a superb sense of continuing life, of dancers who go on dancing even after the ballroom doors are closed, of old servants who must surely be in the kitchen when they are not actually before our eyes, of restless footsteps going up and down stairs we never see and no doubt pacing the floor above us though we never hear a sound above. The people of the production are busy with themselves. They leave the scene with something in mind; when they return, their eyes have changed as eyes do when something that needed doing has been done. Nothing is ever forgotten. The probabilities of the day behind and the night ahead are constantly in mind; they fill the personalities we learn to recognize with a twenty-four-hour history. No actor seems to reflect on anything that is not in the play. The play fully occupies its residents. They are never going to be anywhere but in it.

The physical, visual, aural, tactile echoes are overwhelmingly dimensional. You could walk with Varya, in her black dress and with the keys at her belt, throughout the house and never see her work finished. The stage is composed of planes, receding infinitely. There is no corner you could look around and see only scenery. I don't think I have ever attended a production in which the naturalistic flow of event was so matter-of-fact that there was no event at all, only the indisputable comings and goings of the of-course people, the people who of course live there, always have. Where else should they be? How else should they dispose themselves?

Chekhov ought to have complained. And the production ought to have been as successful as it was.

The theater plays tricks like that.

Walter Kerr, "Chekhov and Others," in his Thirty Plays Hath November: Pain and Pleasure in the Contemporary Theater, Simon and Schuster, 1969, pp. 146-83.