The Swiss-born Australian director Simon Stone has earned a reputation as an innovative storyteller in both theater and film (his new feature Elsinore opens this fall). And there’s something ambitiously audacious about his unforgettable adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, a new take on Anton Chekhov’s classic that has been touring the world since its 2024 premiere in Seoul, South Korea. Stone, who’s not a native Korean speaker, has transposed a drama set in the waning days of precommunist Russia to contemporary Korea where a family-run industrial conglomerate is on the brink of bankruptcy following years of incompetent management by its well-to-do family.
It’s best not to dwell too long on the precision of the parallels between the early-20th-century feudal Russia of Chekhov’s experience and modern late-stage capitalism — or how a giant corporation could so stupidly mismanage its operations for so long without shareholders stepping in. Stone is more interested in exploring the dynamics of a privileged family at the moment of collapse, drawing on recent parallels like HBO’s Succession and especially Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.
Lopakhin, the serf’s son who becomes a wealthy merchant and the one lifeline to the floundering Ranevskaya family, is now a successful entrepreneur named Hwang Doo-sik with a fondness for the Song family from his days as the chauffeur’s son. Park Hae-soo, who gained fame in the Netflix megahit Squid Game, plays Doo-Sik with a nice blend of deference, urgency, and mounting frustration as the family elders procrastinate and scoff at his suggestions to salvage the chaebol’s fortunes and reputation.
Madame Ranevskaya is now a stubbornly proud if morally dissolute socialite Song Do-young (Jeon Do-young, The Housemaid), just back from exile in New York City with her youngest daughter (Lee Ji-hye), an NYU film student who spent a good deal of her time bailing her mom out of drunken messes. Ranevskaya’s brother Leonid is now a sweetly ineffectual jabbermouth (Son San-kyu) who has been slowly running the company into the ground and failing to heed the advice of anyone, including Ranevskaya’s ultra-competent eldest daughter (Lee Ji-Hye), an adoptee who’s long been accustomed to being ignored.
Stone’s most ingenious idea may be to transform the family’s beloved aristocratic estate, situated in a cherry orchard for which Ranevskaya holds wistful memories, into a sleek modernist A-frame with glass walls, a stylized step roof, and whitewashed interiors that make the place seem like a giant dollhouse. (Saul Kim designed the set, which is sharply lit by James Farncombe.) The set allows Stone to allow scenes to overlap and flow into each other with cinematic precision, with the action shifting from the living room to an upstairs bedroom to the roof to a downstage deck where the family and their servants flit about.
A word about the servants. They’re a hoot. There’s the strident academic (Nam Yun-Ho), the former tutor of Song’s dead youngest son who denounces modern capitalism from the safety of his perpetual PhD programs, but also the young chauffeur (Lee Se-Jun) who pines for the family maid (Park Hee-Jung) but whose self-effacement over his low status and squeaky shoes makes him almost eager to accept rejection.
It’s hard to tell how Stone’s updated text plays in the Korean language. Some of the performances, even the noncomic ones, seemed slightly too broad in moments for the emotions being conveyed. And the dialogue, by dramaturg Yi Dan-bi, is presented here in supertitles in Stone’s English-language version, often in such a rapid-fire way that it can be difficult to follow which characters are speaking and when new scenes are beginning.
Yet, there’s something fresh here, and vital, an attempt to wrestle in 21st-century terms with Chekhov’s themes about an economic system on the brink of collapse. Chekhov used an aristocratic family as his prism, and Stone had found a modern equivalent. Jeon Do-yeon’s Madame Song, like her Russian predecessor, remains a fascinatingly blinkered symbol of dissipated privilege. A Real Housewife unwilling to cede the spotlight, or the VIP section, despite the drained bank account. She’s a hedonist with no sense of boundaries, even kissing her daughter’s boyfriend on the lips at one point, and her eventual comeuppance has the air of earned inevitability. If she’s not quite the tragic figure that Chekhov envisioned, that’s perhaps a reflection of the modern moment as well. Schadenfreude offers its own comforts. ★★★★★
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
Park Avenue Armory, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through September 26 for $95 to $295