Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, The Cherry Orchard, Marin Theatre; Photo by Chris Hardy
Anna Takayo, Joseph O’Malley, The Cherry Orchard" Marin Theatre; Photo by David Allen
Liz Sklar, Lance Gardner, Howard Swain, and Anthony Fusco in The Cherry Orchard (Photo: David Allen)
Reviews on The Cherry Orchard at Marin Theatre
"A spectacular, all-star production of the tragicomic classic"
–– Marin Independent Journal
"In a wonderful translation by Paul Schmidt, Marin Theatre’s production soars with a gleaming cast built from some of the best acting talents in the region. Those talents are showcased with terrific movement and sharp tableaus from Carey Perloff’s erudite direction."
–– KQED
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13986396/the-cherry-orchard-review-marin-theatre
"Watching Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, brilliantly directed by American Conservatory Theatre Artistic Director emerita Carey Perloff and starring an all-star cast of local legends, will make you jump into action."
–– Broadway World
"Put Anton Chekhov’s globally popular, much-adapted play, The Cherry Orchard, in the bold, directorial hands of the much-accomplished Carey Perloff and provide her with a Bay Area, all-star cast, and it is an easy-money bet that Marin Theater has a sure-fire hit in the making."
–– Theatre Eddy's
https://theatreeddys.com/2026/02/the-cherry-orchard.html
“He never passes judgment on his characters or tells us what to think. There are no heroes or villains or victims. People are both cruel and kind and caring and careless all in the same go.”
––Piedmont Exedra
https://piedmontexedra.com/2026/01/marin-theatre-digs-into-chekhovs-cherry-orchard
Russian Around
It took me far too long to grasp the simple truth about Chekhov, which is that he only makes sense on the stage. Encountered on the page, his world seems to be largely populated by dimwits, fabulists, and bumblers, spewing reams of disconnected non sequiturs about their past and their hapless dreams for the future. The humor isn’t really funny, just weird. None of the characters seem to have any sense of how normal people converse.
But all that changes as soon as a first-rate director — in this case Carey Perloff, whose exhilarating production of The Cherry Orchard opened Tuesday at the Marin Theatre — puts a piece onstage and, together with the cast, takes charge of shaping the proceedings. At that point we understand the characters themselves, and the words Chekhov places in their mouths. All the fools and strivers are still there — that wasn’t an illusion — but now everything they say lands like an authentic expression of their pain, their history, their (mostly dashed) hopes. The reason they talk like that, it turns out, is because that’s genuinely who they are. They’re only half-listening to what anyone else says because their private drama dominates their attention. They’re funny — the objects of humor, rarely the source of it — because from the audience we can clearly perceive how far every one of them falls short of their own self-conception. And yet we regard them with tenderness and love, all of them, because Chekhov teaches us how to do so.
Published in On a Pacific Aisle
Joshua Kosman