Magnolia

Chop down all the trees you want, but the roots remain. That’s the message of Taylor’s history-repeating new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, set in 1963 Atlanta. If only these folks had seen some Chekhov, they could have saved themselves a whole lot of heartbreak.

Taylor tells a tale of two Atlantas, with the burgeoning civil rights movement standing in for Chekhov’s rise of the serfs. Much of the play takes place in a pair of restaurants: Black Pearl’s, in the black district known as Sweet Auburn, and Kerry’s, in white Peachtree. The current point of contention is the “Peyton Wall,” a short-lived pair of roadblocks erected by mayor Ivan Allen Jr. to assuage white homeowners concerned about black families moving into their ’hood.

Taylor faithfully maps Cherry Orchard’s aristocrats and loyal servants onto the white Forrest family, owners of the foreclosure-bound Magnolia Estate, and the small network of black servants and former servants who are practically (but, crucially, not quite) family. But while the transposition is remarkably successful thematically—Thomas (Jelks), the pragmatic black Lopakhin stand-in, encourages prodigal daughter Lily (O’Toole) to develop the estate as a new suburb for the impending white flight from the city—something’s missing emotionally. Too few of Taylor’s characters seem to have lives of their own; instead, they mimic the lives of Chekhov’s. A few of the actors in Shapiro’s handsome production stand out, notably Roxanne Reese as a saucy nanny and Cliff Chamberlain as the tutor, here an idealistic white Freedom Rider. On the whole, though, these trees feel too much like a forest we’ve seen before.

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