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This Natalya is fully aware of the arsenal at her disposal, and exactly the power she wields over the men who orbit her, and she's not afraid to use that information. She's tartly forthright in her dealings, approaching business and personal negotiations, and the occasional backstabbing, with exactly the same gleaming smile. Beneath it all, there's a trickle of sadness, as though she can't really believe she has to deploy such distasteful tactics merely to live her preferred life, but Schilling keeps that quality firmly hidden most of the time. But by not hiding the woman's lust for her son's new tutor Aleksey or her obligation to her husband Arkady, Schilling forces all of Natalya's devastating internal conflicts out into the open, where she—and we—must deal with them as they are. The result is part of what helps this A Month in the Country register as what must be one of the breeziest, most entertaining, and most American mountings to date, a comedy more in our sense of the word than that of 19th-century Russian dramatists. But if both Schilling and Peter Dinklage, who plays the secondary suffering-in-silence role of Rakitin, make this gambit work for director Erica Schmidt, it's not enough to make this production as a whole emotionally thrilling. In fact, it has largely the opposite effect. One can appreciate where Schmidt is coming from. Natalya yearns for Aleksey, but so does her 17-year-old ward, Vera. Rakitin loves Natalya, but so, in his way, does Arkady. And all the other adults, from the meddling doctor Shpigelsky looking for a wife for his friend Bolshintsov to the hired companion Lizaveta to the manservant and the maid, have needs of the heart and the body that they want addressed. So when they collide on Natalya and Arkady's estate over the course of several days, and eventually resolve themselves in ways that twist and lacerate in equal measure, there can be more than a vague aroma of soap-opera suds. But A Month in the Country, like many of the later Chekhov works it anticipates (it was completed in 1850, but not staged until 22 years later), derives its potency from these myriad, intricate feelings remaining unexpressed, and when that's not the principle guiding philosophy, as is the case here, the play doesn't make quite as much sense. Schmidt is undoubtedly trying to avoid falling into this play's usual trap of becoming plodding, if not outright turgid, and utilizing performers who look and act too old to capture the fragile ironies of so many young-ish people behaving as though their lives are eternally over (in the last Broadway revival, in 1995, a 49-year-old Helen Mirren played the 29-year-old Natalya). And, yes, at that she succeeds. So many people appearing and behaving as contemporaneously free, however, dissolves the bonds of tension and spiritual confusion that tie the action together. When we see a couple of the men, for example, frolicking shirtless with their associated womenfolk in the estate's hallways, we don't accept, as we need to, that some very real, very oppressive strictures are at work. As soon as we stop believing that, the power and the tragedy of these characters making the difficult, life-altering decisions that drive the final act evaporate before our eyes. All you get, then, is what you can skim from the surface, and luckily Schilling and Dinklage give you quite a bit there. Schilling (Orange Is the New Black) is a captivating cage of sunnily percolating angst, even if her Natalya has no evident deeper worries. And Dinklage (Game of Thrones) is a wonderfully energetic brooder, a quality that's just right for playing a man who must stand by and watch the only person he cares about act as the fulcrum for several other imploding relationships. Their scenes together are the closest this production gets to richness, though Schmidt seems willing to sacrifice it for temporary, observable heat—not an effective trade-off. The rest of the cast is quite good, with the better performers including Megan West as a passionately engaged Vera, Annabella Sciorra as a deliciously secretive Lizaveta, and Thomas Jay Ryan bringing a light touch to the scheming Shpigelsky. Anthony Edwards and Mike Faist skirt the obvious a shade too closely as (respectively) Arkady and Aleksey, but do the job. Like them, the set (by Mark Wendland) is highly functional: a handsomely bland playing space that can become, with the addition or subtraction of a couple of quick pieces, a drawing room or a garden. And the simple if attractive clothes (designed by Tom Broecker) similarly reinforce that this is to be no classical costume drama. A Month in the Country doesn't need to be. But like most great plays, it should show us the nuances and complexities, the accomplishments and the failings, and the heights and the depths of which we all are internally and externally capable. By avoiding all that, Schmidt has made this play reflect life only as it is, and not as it can be, a loss that it's hard to believe any of these people, as she's rendered them, would even understand.
A Month in the Country
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