Dramaturgical Dip: The Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard — 2026 Season

Chekhov writes in great sweeps of fly-on-the-wall action which unfold in real time with large gaps of time between them. His four acts of The Cherry Orchard cover four key moments, from May until October, in the downfall of the Ranevskaya family estate.

The play opens at 2 am one May morning, when Madame Ranevskaya returns from Paris as the whole estate is up for auction in August if they do not raise money to pay the interest on their mortgage. Ranevskaya left five years earlier following the deaths of her husband and young son. She has travelled abroad to France, where she has been involved with a ne’er-do-well who has drained her financially. She returns with her daughter, Anya, to her estate that is managed by her foolish older brother, Gaev, and adopted daughter, Varya. A local businessman and family friend, Lopakhin—the son of a serf and a prospective suitor to Varya—is there to meet them with a plan to save them financially: sell the land off piecemeal to developers who will build holiday cottages for the rising middle-class. This plan would involve demolishing the house and chopping down their beloved Cherry Orchard, so large it has its own entry in the Russian encyclopedia. This plan is scoffed at by Ranevskaya and Gaev, and thus sets in motion months of uncertainty for Lopakhin and the family.

About Late 19th Century Russia

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860. The four mature plays on which Anton Chekhov’s fame as a playwright rests are: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901), and The Cherry Orchard (1903). Chekhov died in 1904. These final two decades of Chekhov’s life and art, during which he wrote his principal works, were ones of extreme governmental oppression in Russia. 

In 1861, Czar Alexander II freed the serfs, an act comparable to our own Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, ushering in a brief period of freedom of expression, even as the Russian Empire continued its expansion into the Caucasus, Turkistan, and East Asia. In 1866, there was an attempt on Czar Alexander II’s life, and he became increasingly conservative, with the state becoming more oppressive. This led in the 1870s to a movement of young intellectuals who went out into the countryside to “infiltrate among the people”, share their lives, educate them, and attempt to activate discontent along revolutionary lines. Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 spawned a period of reaction under Alexander III and Nicholas II, the last Russian Czar, during which they both tried to root out terrorism in their midst.

Meanwhile, the Emancipation of the Serfs meant the land-owning class went into rapid decline as new industrialists rose to power, and both peasants and former serfs flocked to the cities for work in the factories. Dangerous working conditions and appalling living conditions fomented labor unrest that a government, still operating as if over a semi-feudal economy, was ill-equipped to handle, and in which the Russian aristocracy tried to maintain its position in a world where it was increasingly irrelevant. This is the background of Chekhov’s major works: a world of changing values, of great social and spiritual stress.