Volume 35, Number 3 · March 3, 1988
Chopping Up 'The Cherry Orchard'
By Jonathan Lieberson
The Cherry Orchard
a play by Anton Chekhov, in a translation by Elisaveta Lavrova, directed by Peter Brook
The Shifting Point, 1946–1987
by Peter Brook
Harper and Row/A Cornelia and Michael Bessie Book, 254 pp., $22.50
With the support of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the British stage director Peter Brook has restored the Majestic Theater on Fulton Street in Brooklyn for two productions, the immense Indian epic The Mahabharata, which has completed its run, and now Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The old theater has not been remade, only stripped bare: there is no stage, no backdrop or curtain or proscenium, only a large space bordered in the back by a brick wall and on each side by four doors that open onto empty small rooms whose walls are covered with crumbling plaster and irregularly painted, as are other parts of the theater, in vivid Pompeian blues and reds. The appearance of the Majestic has been modeled on that of the old unused theater the Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has used since 1974 to present experimental theatrical events in Paris. Brook believes that the spare and ruinous appearance of the theater is less likely to allow the audience to be distracted from the action of the play.
Review, 3926 words
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