Lee Se-jun

What playwright and director Simon Stone does with "The Cherry Orchard" is less a conventional modernization than a cultural transplant: Anton Chekhov’s doomed Russian estate becomes a glittering Korean corporate dynasty, and the old anxieties about inheritance, class, obsolescence, and the inability to recognize that history has moved on to acquire the glossy, feverish atmosphere of a contemporary K-drama. Produced by LG Arts Center Seoul and arriving at the Park Avenue Armory after engagements in Seoul, Busan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia, Stone’s nearly three-hour reinterpretation retains the skeleton of Chekhov’s 1904 play while replacing its landed aristocracy with a Korean chaebol family whose sprawling business empire—cars, technology, hospitality, medical supplies, “and anything else from which money can be made”—is staggering toward collapse. The result is exuberantly theatrical, unexpectedly funny, and alive to the strange comedy that Chekhov always understood could coexist with catastrophe. [more]