NEW ORCHARD
Shaw Festival play follows Chekhov’s example but builds a strong legacy of its own,
The Orchard (After Chekhov)
(out of 4) Written by Sarena Parmar. Directed by Ravi Jain. Until September 1 at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake. ShawFest.com or 905-468-2172. The famous Chekhovian law of theatrical action states that a gun that appears in the first act must go off by the third — but in The Cherry Orchard, even he breaks his own rule.
In what Anton Chekhov intended to be a comedy, The Cherry Orchard lets its characters off with a touch more empathy than usual, perhaps because of the play’s connection to his own family history. His father, the son of a former serf, bankrupted the family by building a new house, and the land was bought by a friend of the family’s, and that deal reportedly forms the basis of the exchange that seals the fate of Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya’s land in Chekhov’s final play, finished in 1903, the year before his death.
In her first produced play on now at the Shaw Festival where she has been an actor for the past two seasons, Sarena Parmar follows Chekhov’s example in many ways, down to her own toying with the rule of Chekhov’s gun. Not only do her characters escape the play without gunfire, these figures from Parmar’s own legacy are written with respect, admiration and are given a more hopeful ending.
In The Orchard (After Chekhov), Parmar places the story in 1970s Okanagan Valley area, documenting the lesserknown histories of South Asian families that farmed there, including her own. After a promotional drive had moved thousands of British immigrants to the region since the late 1800s, Parmar drops us into Canada after Pierre Trudeau’s 1971 Multiculturalism Act presented a new national era of immigration and tolerance, or at least the outward appearance of one.
We follow the Punjabi-Canadian Basran family — broke and on the brink of losing their orchard — Loveleen (Pamela Sinha) and her daughter Annie (Parmar), brother Gurjit (Sanjay Talwar), niece Barminder (Krystal Kiran), father Kesur (David Adams) and friends Yash (Andrew Laurie), who enabled Loveleen’s time in India and Peter (Shawn Ahmed), a philosopher that wishes for the family to return to India.
Along with them we meet their hired staff Donna (Rong Fu) and Yebi (Kelly Wong), both with the trauma of Canada’s Japanese internment camps, and Charlie (Jani Lauzon), a hard, private but joyous member of the Syilx Nation and residential-school survivor. Two friends of the Basran’s, a neighbour farmer Paul (Neil Barclay) and wealthy real estate owner Michael (Jeff Meadows), are emblems of the era’s white privilege — they hark upon the importance of community and generosity, until they see an opportunity for financial and social gain open for themselves.
The action unfolds when Annie returns from six weeks in India, sent there to retrieve Loveleen, who has spent the last five years there without contact with the orchard — despondent with the death of her son, besotted with a man who uses her money and leaves her.
Loveleen’s arrival is meant to restore order to the orchard, which has suffered financially without her — and will hopefully avoid Michael’s solution of turning half the land into an RV park. But she returns to find her family at an assortment of crossroads between duty, faith, values and love — and in true Chekhovian spirit, crisis leads to inaction, and inaction leads to less than desirable ends.
But the brilliance of Parmar’s adaptation is that she creates full, relatable, sympathetic characters who are up against challenges that extend far beyond their personal flaws.
And in Ravi Jain’s careful, taught direction that draws out simple but impactful performances from the cast, you feel the weight of time passing on the orchard — not only as we meet the characters, but far past as well as far beyond — and the energy it takes for these people to exist, let alone to thrive. Their moments of weakness and sorrow are earned, as are the more infrequent moments of levity and slapstick comedy.
Wrangling a sprawling familial story with 13 actors, fiery speeches and the responsibility of honouring the histories of thousands of Canadian immigrant and Indigenous stories is a large task for a new playwright, and Parmar handles it capably (and its reasonable to think that for these reasons, she would stick to the blueprint in Chekhov’s source material). But viewing The Orchard (After Checkhov) will frame future viewings of the original, and that’s a strong legacy for this work on its own.