About the Play:

The Cherry Orchard is a full-length dramatic comedy by Anton Chekhov, translated into English verse by Tom Stoppard, from a literal translation by Helen Rappaport. Russian aristocrat Lyubov returns from Paris to her childhood estate, which is due to be sold. Anton Chekhov's masterpiece remains relevant today, with its classic theme of aging, and its characters misguidedly holding on to the past. Tom Stoppard's translation uses the natural humor of Anton Chekhov's last work to highlight the true tragedy at the core of the narrative.

Anton Chekhov was a master whose daring work revolutionized theatre. In The Cherry Orchard an impoverished landowning family is unable to face the fact that their estate is about to be auctioned off. Liubov Ranevskya, a widowed landowner returns home more or less insolvent after five years abroad. Everything appears just as she remembers, but hers is a diminishing world. Her vast and beautiful cherry orchard is soon to be sold off against her mounting debts. The insistent warnings of Lopakhin, a peasant's son turned wealthy businessman, go unheeded, and more than the family estate is sacrificed as Trofimov, the 'eternal student' who hopes to inherit the future, tells her, "The whole of Russia is our orchard". Tom Stoppard's translation of Chekhov's last play highlights the growing irrelevancy of the Russian upper classes as the former peasant class begins to gain power in the great, slow-rolling change that came to a head with the Russian revolution in 1917.

The Cherry Orchard premiered in 1904 at the Moscow Art Theatre on Chekhov's 44th birthday and only six months before his death. Despite his modern reputation for melodrama, Chekhov insisted at the time that the play should be treated as 'a light comedy'. This translation by Tom Stoppard had its first New York performance in 2009 at the Harvey Theater in Brooklyn, and its first London performance later that same year at the Old Vic Theatre. The play is regularly performed in regional repertory, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 5 female, 9 male

What people say:

"Without pressing it, this Cherry Orchard, in a nimble new version by Tom Stoppard that invites fresh comic shadings, pushes that sense of the incongruous not so much into farce as into Alice in Wonderland absurdity ... Mr. Stoppard's adaptation is full of classically Stoppardesque instances of eloquence gone awry." — The New York Times

"A sure-footed reworking by Tom Stoppard." — New York Magazine

"I can't recall another production of The Cherry Orchard in which comedy and elegey were so well balanced ... there was never a moment when I was anything other than enthralled." — The Wall Street Journal

About the Playwright:

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian physician, dramaturge and author of hundreds of short stories and several plays. He is regarded by many as both the greatest Russian storyteller and the father of modern drama. His plays, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, are performed in theatres throughout the world and he is second only to Shakespeare in the number of productions his plays receive.

Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025) was a British playwright often hailed as among the greatest of his generation. Born Tomáš Sträussler in what was then Czechoslovakia, the family fled at the onset of the Nazi invasion finally settling in England when he was eight, and Stoppard adopted the last name of his stepfather. He was catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967. He wrote prolifically for TV, radio, and stage in a career that spanned six decades and also included a parallel career as a Hollywood script doctor, much in demand to provide dialogue to others' film scripts, and shared a best-screenplay Oscar for his contribution to Shakespeare in Love. He was knighted in 1997 and became one of the most honoured dramatists in British theatre.