Playwright: Tanya Saracho. At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn. Phone: 312-443-3800; $10-$42. Runs through: April 24
What does the word “foreclosure” call to mind? Nowadays, it’s bragging of how cheaply you bought a recently vacated house. During the Great Depression, it was a ragged and forlorn family bidding farewell to an empty shack. In The Cherry Orchard, quaintly dressed gentlefolk amuse themselves with philosophy and peccadilloes far removed from the messy business in progress.
The imminent property transfer under scrutiny in Tanya Saracho’s contemporary adaptation of Chekhov’s fin-de-siècle classic contains elements of all these images: on the one hand, the frivolous matriarch, secure in her privilege, flirts with the tradesmen and bosses the lone remaining domestic servant. On the other, her youngest daughter, at one point, asks timidly, “Will we be homeless?” What chiefly distinguishes the crisis facing the women of the Galvan clan, however, is that this is the border region of Mexico in 2011, where evictions are frequently conducted at gunpoint, when not following the untimely death of the incumbents.
So our dramatic tension is not safely rooted in obscure issues of 19th-century Russian serfdom, but whether the son of the estate’s former handyman can use his influence with the criminal drug cartels to keep his former employers from being displaced (or murdered). There is also a third alternative: that he take possession of the house himself, offering shelter—or not—to its previous residents. Capitalism sure gets more complicated when those enforcing it are unrestrained by legal niceties, doesn’t it?
That said, where should our sympathies lie? If we pity the rich their misfortune—as when la Señora frantically gathers up trinkets, like a refugee preparing for flight, from the dollhouse-sized mansion at the center of Brian Sidney Bembridge’s pastoral scenic design—are we being humane or simply reaffirming the reverence traditionally harbored by the humble toward their betters? If we cringe in horror at an ambitious housemaid’s courtship of the ambivalent new landlord, are we being disloyal to our democratic principles? A seasoned cast—led by Charin Alvarez and Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, under the direction of Cecilie D. Keenan—brings home all these provocative contradictions in their depiction of a changing world order as immediate as today’s headlines.