Chekhov and the Chaebol: A Korean Cherry Orchard at the Armory

Around the halfway point of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Petya Trofimov — eternal grad student, moral purist, and former tutor to the once wealthy family whose diminution sits at the heart of the play — makes a speech. It’s the outburst of a frustrated idealist, a tirade delivered by someone who can sense an epochal shift at hand and who agonizes over whether his countrymen are capable of shifting for the better. The speech is also a kind of litmus test for translators and adaptors, an opportunity for a politically progressive character to let rip not simply against general human hypocrisy but against the particular sins of a moment. Last year, when Benedict Andrews’s version of the play came to St. Ann’s Warehouse, that Petya roared in the face of “so-called government efficiency,” “endless consumption,” and the “systematic inequality” of a “proto-fascist tech oligarchy” on track to “rob the rest of us blind, so they can fly off to Mars leaving us on a dead planet.” No lies detected.

Now a new Cherry Orchard, the work of another Australian auteur, Simon Stone, has put down roots in the cavernous drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory, and the angry young tutor goes even further. Perched atop the modernist swoosh of a house that dominates Saul Kim’s set — a low-slung white A-frame with a roof of sloping steps up to an apex of precarity and actorly impact — he howls in the face of “the total dissolution of democracy.” “Big Tech rules the world,” he shouts. “About five people make all the decisions about our future … We are slaves to our phones and our apps … A bit too dystopian for your liking? We are living in a dystopia. It’s already arrived.” Even as he rails, we hear the familiar staggered blaring of emergency alerts, and the rest of the characters look down at their phones.

Stone’s production as a whole can be pretty neatly summed up by this theatrical beat: It is, overall, superbly acted — Nam Yun-ho nails the blend of fire and flimsiness that Chekhov built into the awkward, aspiring teacher-student, here named Byun Dong-lim. It also errs on the tidy side, spelling out what could be left implied, doubling down on a joke when the point is already made. Stone is determined that we get it — on his watch, our connecting the dots won’t be left to chance. “I swear it’s you he’s in love with, not your daughter,” a character says to the matriarch of the play’s fading household. So much for subtext.

Still, if this Cherry Orchard tends to say the quiet part out loud, there’s a reason for it. Stone has never been a straight translator — he makes free contemporary adaptations of classic texts (his Yerma blew a lot of minds in 2018), and here he’s collaborating with a Korean ensemble to reimagine Chekhov’s play as the story of a crumbling corporate empire in modern-day Seoul. As a program note by the scholar Alisa Zhulina explains, “in place of a ruined estate is a struggling South-Korean chaebol,” one of the superconglomerates that dominate the Korean economy and government. Samsung and Hyundai are among the biggest, and so is the LG Group, which includes among its holdings, somewhere way down the list from TVs and fridges, the LG Arts Center SEOUL, where Stone and his ensemble built the production and where it opened in 2024.

In its premiere, this was a Korean Cherry Orchard performed in Korean for audiences that needed no primer on its setting, the rapidly changing globalized city where the characters’ home is threatening to disappear. Here, it’s something a little different: a prestige import, supertitled like an opera (dramaturg Yi Dan-bi did the Korean translation that the actors perform; Stone’s English text appears on those screens) and now taking place in the very metropolis that, in the world of this adaptation, signifies otherness and exile — a bittersweet blend of progress, decadence, and emptiness. In the original, for Chekhov’s matriarch Lyubov Ranevskaya, that city was Paris: The Cherry Orchard opens with her return home after five increasingly harrowing years there. It ends with her departure, back to Paris and to the feckless sponge of a lover who awaits her, after her home (and, by extension, all of an older Russia) has been lost for good.

For Stone’s Song Do-young (the elfin Jeon Do-yeon, who not only acts but really does look as if she could be her daughters’ sister), the penthouse that can never truly be home is in New York. “My God what a city…” Do-young sighs, half wistful and half appalled. “Impossible buildings, impossible feelings, impossible lovers.” Meanwhile, the family’s maid, Jung Doo-na (Park Hee-jung), dreams of the romance of “those Brooklyn lofts,” and Do-young’s daughter Hae-na (Lee Ji-hye) is a film student at NYU, spiritually adrift as she accompanies her mother back to Seoul on her summer break. “You know what I did for my first-year film…?” she says to Dong-lim. “I filmed time-lapse sequences of dead birds on the Manhattan streets slowly decaying and disappearing … It got top marks … But I have ideas without an identity. I have concepts … I have no content. I’m totally contentless. My story is privilege and isolation.” 

Apart from a few New York softballs, it’s not exactly that this stuff is facile — it’s smarter than that and, as dialogue, very playable. But there’s no mystery to it, no blurred edges or murky, resonant spaces of uncertainty. Stone’s characters are a little too good at dramaturging their own emotions, which leaves their story’s greater emotional impact muted. The play becomes an intellectual exercise — often a technically compelling one, and one that thankfully observes the comedy of Chekhov’s struggling souls as much as their tragedy. Yet there remains a sense of remove in the production’s perpetual excitement at demonstrating just how well its own analog works. I kept imagining Stone as a kid with a complex toy who had figured out how to slot it perfectly into its accompanying puzzle box, or as a scientist who had made some striking discovery — look at the parallels between these two species! — and was thrilled to publish his findings. “Present-day South Korea is an uncannily appropriate location for an adaptation of Chekhov’s comedy…” Zhulina writes in her program note. “Family and tradition persist even as they clash with modern corporate culture. And, as Simon Stone notes, you can still find in South Korea the equivalent of economic power that the Russian landed gentry enjoyed, wealth that includes ‘drivers, housekeepers, gardeners.’”

They’re right — the parallels are numerous and fascinating. What they aren’t always is fully heartbreaking. This is an issue that, to my mind, keeps nipping at the heels of the current crop of directorial It Boys. Stone and Robert Icke, for example, have both built careers on transplanting old stories into slick contemporary containers, and, in varying degrees, those containers can come packed with power. What they tend to lack is the feeling — always present in the material these directors are reshaping — that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. Politics is covered, check; psychology, check — often, as in this Cherry Orchard, leaving little to the imagination. Do-young is explicitly an alcoholic: “Then I drank for two years, or was it three?” she says, remembering her response to the accident that killed her young son. “I drank and drank … A black void. Nightmares and demons. Screams of recrimination. More alcohol. More alcohol.” Compare Chekhov’s Ranevskaya, who, in the corresponding speech, talks more about her ex-lover than her dead child and finally trails off, distracted by the sound of music that she and her brother can hear and that the rich industrialist Lopakhin — their friend-nemesis, the peasant’s son who will end up buying the cherry orchard — can’t.

Stone tends to eschew such gestures toward the mystical. Here, when the hapless, possibly-but-probably-not-violent chauffeur Shin Ye-bin (Lee Se-jun) plays guitar between acts, he sings an on-the-nose, if morbidly funny, cover of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt.” There is no noise of a breaking string echoing in the distance — the stage direction that pushed Chekhov’s final dramatic landscape toward Beckettian absurdism before Beckett was born. Perhaps most telling of all, Stone cuts the character of Carlotta, a governess born to circus performers who wanders through the play like a lost clown, origin-less, amused, and sad. “Where I’m from… who I am… no idea…” she ruminates in Paul Schmidt’s translation. “And I feel like talking all the time, but there’s no one to talk to. No one.”

These are the glimmers of something in the fringes that keep The Cherry Orchard, even in our age of jonesing to burn it all down, so miraculously delicate and devastating. In a sense, every production must attempt a tricky balancing act between the play’s symbolic forces, its saints of past and future, of not knowing and knowing too surely: Ranevskaya and Lopakhin — here, Do-young and Hwang Doo-sik. As Doo-sik, Squid Game’s Park Hae-soo is delivering the show’s defining performance with such vigor and charisma that Stone’s hand is, whether intentionally or not, tipped. In an interview in the program, the director admits to feeling “closest to the energy” of the servant’s-son-turned-bulldozing-property-magnate, identifying with the character’s “unceasing longing and restlessness.” You can feel as much when — during the show’s final transition, once the fate of Do-young’s chaebol has been sealed — he arms his actors with leaf blowers and has them attack the huge drifts of papery black snow that have fluttered down across the set’s pristine surfaces all through the third act. The unsentimental roar is, of course, a translation of Chekhov’s saws, and a good one at that. What it’s missing is its spiritual foil, another note sounding within the din: something to turn the confident period of Stone’s adaptation into an ellipsis.

The Cherry Orchard (벚 꽃 동 산) is at the Park Avenue Armory through September 26.