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Reviewed by:
  • Gravity
  • Ryan Rogers
Gravity. By Steven Pearson and Robyn Hunt. Directed by Steven Pearson. Pacific Performance Project/east, Connelly Theatre, New York City. 7 December 2007.

Gravity, an original production conceived by Pacific Performance Project/east (P3 east), a physical acting company based in Columbia, South Carolina, reunited the audience with Chekhov’s Lyubovh Ranevskaya, alone in her Paris flat, five years after the sale of her cherry orchard. It was neither a deconstruction of Chekhov’s work nor a reinvention of his classic text, but rather a physical exploration of the psyche of Ranevskaya after she has returned to Paris at the end of the play, broken, impoverished, and emotionally defeated. This well-known character provided the jumping-off point from which the company created an entirely new piece, one that imagines how she might have been affected by the artistic and scientific breakthroughs that defined Paris in the early twentieth century as she struggled to exorcise the demons of her past.

The creators—Steven Pearson, who conceived and directed, and Robyn Hunt, who wrote the text and also played Ranevskaya—combined the strengths of the company’s innovative physical actors with [End Page 475]


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Robin Hunt (Ranevskaya) in Gravity. Photo: Gerry Goodstein.

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Gravity. Photo: Gerry Goodstein.

powerful and inventive text, and in so doing found a new means to a Chekhovian end: the exploration of the psychology of a character. By grounding their physical choices in the reality of what Mme. Ranevskaya would be facing—the historical 1910 flooding of the Seine that traps her in her flat, leaving her alone with her thoughts and regrets at the end of her life—they were able to manifest physically her inner psyche and achieve something far greater than a simple narrative sequel or a postmodern exercise. We were left with images, both haunting and revelatory, rooted in historical context and the laws of the physical world while being set free by gravity-defying set, staging, and dance.

The play takes place in the mind and memory of Ranevskaya, and it is here that we see many of Chekhov’s characters: Anya, Lopakhin, Gaev, Varya, Dunyasha, and Firs. Through both recalled and imagined conversations with these characters, Ranevskaya reflects on the major cultural awakenings and scientific revelations happening in the world at the time. Of particular interest to her is Einstein’s recently published relativity theory, which denounces the previously accepted ideas of time, space, and gravity, and she desperately tries to comprehend it in an attempt to understand and perhaps reverse the events of her past. Pearson directed the piece with the gleam of an impassioned physics professor in his eye, laying out large-scale experiments before us. From the effect of gravity on objects falling from the sky as playfully rendered by a group of large red balls that poured onto the platform and bounced in every direction, to the predictable motion of the swinging pendulum as exhibited through the carpenter’s plumb, to a platform that transformed from a stationary playing space into a lever-and-fulcrum apparatus upon which Ranevskaya and others tenuously balanced, we watched as students of this physical world.

The set, designed by Pearson, was necessarily minimal, considering the intense physicality of the production. The aforementioned square platform sat two feet off the ground, supported by wooden posts at all four corners, within the bare and exposed space of the empty theatre. A bench and gramophone perched upon the platform, and suspended above it were a window frame and a carpenter’s plumb hung from a line. It was from this platform that Ranevskaya spent the entirety of the play while the company of actors moved around and above her. The platform served not only as her apartment but also her physical mind, and, trapped in both, she attempted to control those around her like a puppeteer. Also visible was the alpine rigging that the company used to ascend and descend vertically in the space, as well as two low-flying trapezes. [End Page 477]

The actors brought an impressive amount of emotional depth...

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